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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: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday April 20 2015, @04:06PM
Wait, they torrent ... web pages? Not sure how that works. I hate torrents because they're almost always abandoned after a short time. You find what you want - er, someone finds what someone wants - and it's the perfect 1080p DVD rip - er, Linux ISO image - but there are no seeders. I even see - er, someone told me he saw - new torrents with 0 seeders that no one can ever download. And they want to use this technology to serve web pages? Maybe I'm missing something.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Monday April 20 2015, @04:16PM
Right in the summary: "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."
So if the website is popular, it should be completely peer-to-peer. If the website isn't visited that frequently, then the web owner can keep a web-seed up and running so that it's still available. Which in theory, works out fine. Your bandwidth costs won't shoot through the roof if you suddenly get slashdotted... er, soyled?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ryuugami on Monday April 20 2015, @06:38PM
I look at it this way: if there are no visitors, it's functionally the same as hosting a web page on your own server. But as soon as someone visits your page, they become another host for it (at least until the cache gets overwritten; they recommend 5~10 GB, so it should be a while).
So really, at it's worst, it's as good as serving static web pages from your home server. But if suddenly a million people try to access your page, instead of getting soyled... er, DDoSed, you get a million servers helping you host - the more people access your page, the more effective bandwidth you have.
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @04:26PM
One application for this would be to run a webserver on your phone.
Instead of using facebook or instagram, you could just keep your photos and wall updates on your phone. Since social networks are basically swarms, as long as you have enough active 'friends' your data would be available, cached on their phones and laptops so if you were off-line or just away from wifi chances are some of your friends would still be available to take up the slack. Or you could hire a VPS for less than $5/month [lowendbox.com] to cover you when offline.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Monday April 20 2015, @04:29PM
I read a little bit. It seems like you package your files as a torrent as usual, but add an index.html into the root of the torrent that would be rendered as a Web page by the Maelstrom browser (and the HTML could link to other files in the torrent). The decentralized nature comes from using DHT/PEX to get seeds, like any torrent client these days. The Register [theregister.co.uk] has links to 4 Maelstrom sites:
bittorrent://5d2b81e49095b0ae19e55a635861d72bde7bcbbc/index.html
bittorrent://e88b2511043f4b32d09393ab92dedb4bd7ae00d9/index.html
bittorrent://d23e60e28e6c1de9a52ad60fd5d86b30b3e27171/index.html
bittorrent://3b1c91f8e95d8ce22558abc398f4a8e62c16bea5/index.html
The protocol handler is intended to launch/use Maelstrom, the hex in the middle appears to be a 160-bit SHA-1 hash to identify the torrent in the DHT/PEX cloud, and then the /index.html opens a page inside the torrent. Presumably you can link to any file within the torrent, and don't necessarily need an index.html file.
Your concern that nobody will seed niche content is not unfounded. But you have to build it before they can come. There will obviously be certain torrents that get a lot more reliable seed counts, like link 4 above, a copy of The Internet's Own Boy with a splash page AFAICT. What we might see is all major release groups putting index.html in their torrents, especially ones that already included a screenshot or a txt file before. Downloaders that don't have Maelstrom will just download a couple KB of extra HTML along with their file. If it catches on. I also don't see how this concept is very complicated or couldn't be replicated by open source browsers. Maelstrom put a torrent client and browser in one package... it's not hard to put a simple torrent client in an existing web browser and include a few lines of code to check for an index.html file in to any torrent processed by the browser.
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(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday April 20 2015, @06:24PM
Since you actually read the specs, let me ask you this. How does the torrent handle dynamic content, like what's generated here? Also, given the distributed nature, is there a prevision in the spec to maintain control and authorship of your site?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday April 20 2015, @06:42PM
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. You'd have to create a new torrent for a single change. That's not so terrible for Game of Thrones, but pretty bad for any decentralized collaborative or ongoing effort. So this is focused on static content (which could include AJAX or link to files on the open Web, with obvious privacy implications). It's a weakness common to all torrents.
http://www.cio.com/article/2859377/internet/project-maelstrom-detailed-more-info-about-bittorrents-vision-for-a-peer-to-peer-web.html [cio.com]
Maybe they could combine this with a modified protocol like BitTorrent Sync [wikipedia.org] but then the whole idea might fall apart. About control and authorship, you cache the site (torrent contents) when you download them, seed it to other users looking for those contents, and the Maelstrom browser has a user-settable limit on the amount of cache space used. All you would have to do is save what you downloaded and you could republish it in the form of your choice. Of course that is the same as any static content found on the Web.
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(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday April 20 2015, @07:07PM
I have a website or two that is static in nature, but I occasionally update or fix a typo. It sounds like a torrent-based browser would not be good with the occasional update. It requires that it be very static. Which implies that one would still have to go to a regular http / https site for most things. The best thing about a torrent-based browser that I've seen so far is the sudden-spike high volume scenario. I really like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @11:22PM
On the contrary, the occasional change is nearly perfect for a torrent distribution. If you are making changes every hour, then no. But an update like once a week? Perfect.