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: 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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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.