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TorrentFreak reports on the April 10th public release of BitTorrent Inc's torrent-powered browser Maelstrom:
In short, Maelstrom takes Google's Chromium framework and stuffs a powerful BitTorrent engine under the hood, meaning that torrents can be played directly from the browser. More excitingly, however, Maelstrom also supports torrent-powered websites that no longer have to rely on central servers.
By simply publishing a website in a torrent format the website will be accessible if others are sharing it. This can be assisted by web-seeds but also completely peer-to-peer.
Project Maelstrom's stated primary goal is to keep the Internet open and neutral:
If we are successful, we believe this project has the potential to help address some of the most vexing problems facing the Internet today. How can we keep the Internet open? How can we keep access to the Internet neutral? How can we better ensure our private data is not misused by large companies? How can we help the Internet scale efficiently for content?
TorrentFreak notes that it's not an all-in-one solution, though:
While Maelstrom can bypass Internet censors, it's good to keep in mind that all shared files are visible to the public. Maelstrom is caching accessed content to keep it seeded, so using a VPN might not be a bad idea. After all, users leave a trail of their browsing history behind.
Unfortunately, it seems that the project is closed-source, and the beta is currently Windows-only, with a Mac version announced. The devs have stated that a Linux version is planned, but is a low priority.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gravis on Monday April 20 2015, @01:49PM
what's the point in keeping it closed source? it certainly won't help security. seems more likely that like utorrent, you are going to end up with advertisements.
it's closed source garbage, dont even bother with it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by BTRE on Monday April 20 2015, @02:00PM
Yeah being closed defeats the point. If it's not peer-reviewed there's no reason to trust some unknown group not to spy on you. My bet is that they'll eventually commercialize the project or just outright sell it off to one of the big corps looking for a way to decrease loads on their servers.
(Score: 2) by Ryuugami on Monday April 20 2015, @03:00PM
Yeah.
I like the idea, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired :/
If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
(Score: 4, Informative) by JNCF on Monday April 20 2015, @03:39PM
Closed source, and from a company with curious bedfellows. [torrentfreak.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @02:30PM
And Windows only at the moment. Closed source and Secured by Windows®. What could possibly go wrong?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @04:16AM
Sounds better than OpenSSL at least.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @03:53PM
I don't mind them keeping it closed, especially during a beta. There are both logistical reasons to do that and possibly profitability reasons too.
But what they absolutely must do is publish the specs - ideally they would voluntarily set up a community organization to manage the development of the protocol. Its fine if they are the 800lb gorilla in the community but there is simply no way something like this catches on if the protocol is not publicly defined and the only implementation is proprietary. They own utorrent which is the most popular bittorrent client and that's closed source, but bittorrent works because the spec is public and there are plenty of cooperating implementations.
That said, maybe they have done all the above for the maelstrom specs, I'm too lazy to research it.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday April 20 2015, @04:09PM
Not all of it appears to be closed source. The tool to actually package up the website is here: https://github.com/bittorrent/torrent-web-tools [github.com]
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday April 20 2015, @04:30PM
See my post below. The Maelstrom approach at first glance looks like it could be really easy to replicate for an open source browser. Especially if the browser already includes a torrent client.
bittorrent://3b1c91f8e95d8ce22558abc398f4a8e62c16bea5/index.html
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nofish on Monday April 20 2015, @08:50PM
OpenSource alternative: https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet [github.com]
With support of real-time updated dynamic content, decentralized dns, tor network and works with any browser/os.