BitTorrent Sync Apps Offer Escape from Big Brother

BitTorrent Sync. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Big app-makers are grabbing all the personal data they can these days. But a small cadre of developers is building decentralized, privacy-conscious apps on the fast-growing BitTorrent Sync platform, creating everything from a more resilient version of the web to a peer-to-peer version of Facebook. They’re betting people are tired of seeing private information Hoovered up by the likes of the National Security Agency, online advertisers, or rogue hackers.

These developers are riding the same wave that carried BitTorrent Sync, a file-syncing system similar to Dropbox but heavily encrypted and without a central server. Sync now counts more than 2 million users only 16 months after launching.

The growth of Sync apps is in the early, fragile stages. None of the software is even at the so-called “beta” stage of development, where wider testing can begin. And all of the apps could be scuttled by one false move at BitTorrent Inc., the file-sharing company that developed Sync and controls the platform interfaces on which Sync developers build. But the emerging Sync ecosystem offers an intriguing example of how corporate prerogatives can help promote, rather than undermine, pro-privacy practices like encryption and decentralization. It also offers evidence that some developers want to avoid or escape the Apple and Google app stores, which tend to reward apps with invasive ads and tricks to sell digital goods within the apps. If one or two Sync apps take off, it could bolster the entire business of selling privacy-friendly software.

“Can the internet be structured in such a way that you don’t risk sharing your information with the government or an intruder?” asks Jon Seymour, one of the two people behind Peers, a rudimentary social network built on top of Sync. “With BitTorrent technology… you could reset people’s worries and take some of the edge off sharing personal information.”

Sync Gets ‘Tons of Resources’

BitTorrent says it is just getting started building out the crucial infrastructure for an app ecosystem around Sync. It has yet to release a formal software developer kit, or SDK, which would provide code libraries and documentation to help programmers quickly and more easily communicate with Sync from within their apps. It has only begun to formally describe Sync’s application-programming interface, or API, which provides a rougher way of working with Sync.

But the company, which until now has made much of its money installing spammy search toolbars alongside BitTorrent file-sharing software, clearly sees a big future in the Sync platform. It has hired a VP, a developer evangelist, and a PR manager focused entirely on Sync; it is preparing a big software update; and it is developing a plan to monetize Sync—though the company is keeping mum on specifics. Still, BitTorrent claims that Sync is more about promoting a decentralized vision of the internet than making money. That’s the pitch it’s started making at security- and privacy-oriented conferences like DefCon and Chaos Communication Congress.

BitTorrent

“We have many developers and engineers working on this, we have tons of resources and brand marketing,” says Aaron Liao, BitTorrent’s developer evangelist for Sync. “Sync is a large team… How often do you get to work on something like that without money as the main driver?”

Sync does have critics, who note it’s impossible to fully verify the security and privacy of the system without access to the source code. Runa Sandvik, a security researcher and longtime developer of the private web surfing tool Tor, says users likely will be better off with “open-source clones.” But Sync’s big strength is that it has some of the polish of other commercial software, including rival Dropbox, a centralized system with full access to the data it syncs on behalf of users. That should win it wider adoption.

Small Beginnings for Sync Apps

A wide audience is precisely what the first batch of Sync apps is missing. But they offer intriguing glimmers of what’s to come.

Seymour’s app Peers—developed with co-founder Paul Daly—allows people to connect socially with one another by sharing 32-character keys. Once you follow someone, you get access to their contact information, work history, education, other interests, and media files, like images. It’s sort of Facebook meets LinkedIn meets a shared address book like Plaxo. You also get the same information for all people they follow. But, crucially, all this information is downloaded to your own Windows or Mac computer, so you have a local copy, available even if you later decide to leave the network. (A mobile version is coming.)

The software, now at version 0.2.3 after eight months, is at a pre-release stage, and the lack of polish shows. But the software already is far more durable than the centralized social network, which makes it hard to get data out of the system and can cut off access or lop off features without notice. Peers is more like a physical Rolodex—simple and powerful.

“This is how contact info used to spread,” Seymour says of Peers. “You gave someone your info and inherently gave them the power to pass it along and pass it along.”

Another early Sync app, known as SyncNet, a version of the World Wide Web in which the content of the sites is distributed among the readers of the sites. So when you visit a site on SyncNet, a copy of the whole site is downloaded to your computer. The next user to visit the site will download part of the site from you, and part of the site from the original location. As the site gets more popular, the burden of serving its content is spread among more computers, a feature that comes from the underlying BitTorrent protocol.

The end result is a system that is much more resilient against traffic spikes and censorious governments and web hosts.

Jack Minardi, who does 3-D printing research at Harvard Medical School, put together SyncNet as part of a crusade to make it easier to publish a website. Minardi remembers wanting to make a website as a child and having to first learn about to configure a Linux server and establish an FTP connection before he could put any content online.

“It shouldn’t be that hard, and with SyncNet, if you can put files in a folder, you can have a web page,” Minardi says. “Anybody can do that. That was the main motivation for me.”

Right now, SyncNet is just a pile of python code sitting on GitHub, albeit one that’s been getting lots of programmer attention.

Whether it and Peers and Sync itself can find maintream adoptions remains to be seen. Maybe, in the end, people want decentralized systems like BitTorrent just so they can flout copyright law from time to time and download new episodes of Downton Abbey. But maybe, just maybe, they are tired of having their personal information brokered and stored and sifted by large companies and government agencies, and ready for the fresh start developers are trying to give them.