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posted by takyon on Monday April 20 2015, @01:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the next-level-of-utorrent-bloat dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Ryuugami on Monday April 20 2015, @06:38PM

    by Ryuugami (2925) on Monday April 20 2015, @06:38PM (#173225)

    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
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