Cloud Technology seems to be everywhere nowadays, given that its primary motive was the same. The ability to sync and access files anywhere has given us an unprecedented versatility in managing our files and documents. The days of USB drives and compact discs for storing and transferring files are soon fading away into memory.

Had it not been for Dropbox and its little box cleaning up the mess in consumer’s desktops that people began to realise the importance and value of Cloud Technology over the conventional silicon-based storage technologies. Internet Mammoths joined the bandwagon with their own versions of Cloud offerings, like the Google Drive from search engine giant Google, SkyDrive from Microsoft and a host of others like Sugar Sync, ADrive and Mediafire.

All seems to be pretty well, but when the point comes the amount of Storage available, everyone among the cloud service providers seem to compete to burn a hole in your pocket. A paltry storage of 2GB or 5GB is no good at all, considering the immense benefits of Cloud, but unfortunately, it is all that you get while using these services. They have offers and plans to increase the free space but frankly speaking, a limit is a limit, nevertheless.

So is there any alternative? Is there any service that truly provides unlimited amount free storage? And at this point, Captain Jack Sparrow seems to have an answer.

Bittorent Sync

The Pirate’s home has come out with a new alternative called Bittorrent Sync, which seems to answer a few problems that people with the otherwise popular cloud services usually have to put up with on a regular basis . This new service from BitTorrent harnesses the power of the distributed file-sharing network to keep your own private files in sync. The process isn’t exactly what you call “torrenting” but rather uses Secretive keys for syncing files and documents.  BitTorrent Sync works with secret keys that let you selectively choose what to share with whom, and even supports expiring, temporary keys. In a way, it’s a little bit similar to DC (Direct Connect), where files are indexed and hashed for access by everyone in the system.

Bittorrent Sync was launched on April 23, and is still in Alpha mode, but it already amassed an incredible Petabyte of Storage, which puts it among the bigwigs in file-sharing technology.

Installation and Use

It’s a very simple affair, hardly about two steps. You have to first download the installer package from here.

One great feature of Bittorrent Sync is that it carries no ads at all. BitTorrent Sync is utterly clean of any ads or any other dubious content (and it does not come with a BitTorrent client), and the only sort of special treatment it asks for is making a hole in the Windows firewall.

Once installed, run BitTorrent sync to begin the configuration process.

You can see two options here. You can start with the Standard Setup because I will talk about the Secret part later. Just click the Next button and you will asked to select a folder to sync.

The selected folder will now be synchronised and a secret will be produced for it. The Secret is a long string of characters that denotes the address for your file. You can use this Secret key anywhere to access your files at any other place. It’s worth noting that you can use BitTorrent Sync to synchronize any folder, not just its own special folder.

This is a key difference between BitTorrent Sync and other file-sync solutions: There are no user accounts, and you won’t be asked to create a password for yourself at any point in the process. Rather, each folder has one or more secrets, and that’s what you use to connect to it.

Using Bittorrent Sync

After syncing your first folder, you will be taken around a tour involving 3 steps.

Step 1 :

Step 2 :

Step 3 :
In the first step, you will be shown around the control panel, and in the second step, the method to sync unlimited number of files will be shown. In the final step, BitTorrent Sync shows how you can quickly copy the secret for any shared folder, to share it with family or friends.

One amazing feature of Bittorent Sync is that you can add folders to it, practically from anywhere in your computer. You can add them via the Add button in the Shared Folders tab. Once you add a folder that already contains files, BitTorrent Sync will take a few moments to index its contents. You will already be able to copy its secret and share it with other BitTorrent Sync users. Once I entered the secret for this folder on another computer running BitTorrent Sync, the other computer’s name showed up in the BitTorrent Sync window, and files started going through instantly (they were on the same LAN, but this should work over the Internet as well, assuming you’ve let the installer configure your Windows firewall).

Managing the Secret Key

The key provided to you while synchronising your first file is your private secret access key and is absolutely not meant for sharing with anyone else. Once your keys get leaked, then you can well, be prepared to face some hostility. So, keeping your Secret key safe will be the safest bet.

Awesome Secret tactics

What if you want to share a folder with your friends but do not want them to delete or modify your file? Do you want to provide access to your files only for a limited period of time? Bittorrent lets you have it all. Just double-click the folder, switch to the Advanced tab, and you’ll get the following:

Here, you can see three kinds of Secrets, one which gives anyone full-access to your files. Second, which gives read-only access which means one can see the files but cannot replace or delete your files. The third type of secret key is the most awesome offering from Bittorrent, which can be generated, to be used only once. The key doesn’t allow users to access yours files more than once.

That’s freaking awesome, isn’t it? Ability to sync extensively and also manage them completely with various sharing options is just too good to ignore.

WebUI

In case of Linux, WebUI is the control panel sort of thing that can be reached at YourLocalIP:8888/gui. Both General and folder preferences can be controlled from here. It acts the same way like a desktop application.

The Technology behind the scenes

It practically uses the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology, which is usually used in torrents. This protocol is very effective for transferring large files across multiple devices, and is very similar to the powerful protocol used by applications like µTorrent and BitTorrent. The data is transferred in pieces from each of the syncing devices, and BitTorrent Sync chooses the optimal algorithm to make sure you have a maximum download and upload speed during the process.

As far as security is concerned, All the traffic between devices is encrypted with AES cypher and a 256-bit key created on the base of the secret—a random string (20 bytes or more) that is unique for every folder.

Overall, Bittorrent has done some amazing work in bringing out such technology. The notoriety of helping piracy with their torrents technology is just a statement. The technology carries a lot of potential, which just came out in the form of Bittorent Sync.

Initially not much usage was expected because of the extreme popularity of the conventional cloud technologies, but astounding amounts of support has been pouring out since its launch. It’s not even a month before launch and it has completed a collective storage of over One Petabyte at the time of writing this article.

The day isn’t very far, when it will be accepted by the mainstream audience.

The post BitTorrent Sync : free P2P based Cloud Storage offered by BitTorrent appeared first on Knolzone.

In my last article, I discussed about Xiaomi, The Chinese Smartphone company which is well, hitting Apple Inc. at its core business, The Smartphones. But, is it the only one? No. Chinese Government has banned almost all popular websites, operating from USA. The recent highlight being the ban on entire Google networks, during the transition of power a the Presidential level.

In this article, we see some Chinese Alternates to most popular American internet giants.

 Most popular sites like Facebook, twitter, youtube, blogspot, google plus etc are all banned in china. Accessing them via VPN is also considered a crime. Any site which can possibly leak Chinese atrocities activities in Tibet are usually banned.

But, Chinese people aren’t subdued by these legislation’s and have created their own alternate services which are quite robust, and are challenging the American behemoths. We have listed some of these most popular services here :

Baidu | Chinese Google

Ranked 5th overall in the Alexa Rankings, its the search alternative for chinese people, and is the largest internet-search companies in China. It provides a suite of services, which are almost completely similar to Google, like image search,video search, patent search, news, social network, IPTV etc. The content you search on Baidu is usually Govt. friendly, and always comes heavily censored. Baidu had also released a low-cost smartphone of its own, imitating the Nexus mobile strategy of Google. Whats staggering here is the amazing number of people using it, The website and search is 100% Chinese, and it gets its traffic only from China, yet it managed over 4 billion queries in Q4 in 2010. It is also listed in NASDAQ -100 Index (BIDU). It thrives on pay-per-click advertising model, again similar to Google, and has its own advertising platform in P4P model. (Pay-for-Placement). It had recently released its own Baidu Browser, China-compliant and offers 100% censored browsing. It’s a neat copy of Chrome browser and its logo is a rip-off of the Internet Explorer logo.

Renren | Chinese Facebook

Renren is the most popular Chinese Social Network, with more than 160 million registered users. In April 2011, they had it corrected to 31 million active monthly users. Its a complete copy of Facebook in both style and layout, only under 100% scrutiny of Chinese Government. It allows people to sign up, share photo’s, put up status updates and “like” or comment on the same.

Well, your “likes” may not be sometimes liked by the government and it will be removed instantly. A 700-strong team is always on the hunt for any matter being published which could harm its iron-grip rule.

Renren caters greatly to academic population and has a network of 32,000 universities under its wings. No doubt, it’s heavily censored but still, its a social website and it all explains its rising popularity.

Sina Weibo | Chinese Twitter

Weibo literally means Microblog and Sina Weibo is the twitter-clone operated by Sina Corporation, a Media house in China. Its a 100% Chinese Micro-blogging platform. It has over 365 million registered accounts, which is almost the entire Chinese internet population, which makes it automatically, the most popular Chinese Social Website.

Sina Weibo is a exact twitter clone with 140 character based tweets, has support for @username, #hashtags, and also has the RT retweet features. Though its a highly popular website, it did not carry a single mention about the victory of Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel peace prize victory in 2010, nor it had a hint of the revolts going on in Arab world or Wukan. Tibet’s plight isn’t given a slightest chance to appear on the website, and that explains the efficiency of the invisible firewall installed in China.

Sina Weibo isn’t the only microblogging site, but it faces a stiff competition from Tencent Weibo, a website operated from Hong Kong. whatever may be the growth, it’s all a fight for the domestic pie only, with international expansion always out of question.

Youku | Chinese Youtube

Its easily guessable. The Youtube clone in China. All video’s are 100% censored to be govt. friendly. Its the World’s second biggest video-sharing portal after Youtube.

Users can upload content irrespective of its length, and allows people to watch and share video’s easily. Mostly Chinese entertainment industry makes the best use of this service, because politics and news videos generally have nothing to offer.

One interesting feature of Youku is that majority of Western TV shows and movies are available to watch for free on Youku and since its based in China, Hollywood can never file lawsuits against them, since copyright laws are almost non-existent in China, which drives its heavy craze. Many American TV shows are available usually with chinese subtitles.

Lack of Copyright laws allows Chinese websites to heavily indulge in piracy and it all goes unchecked from international attention due to fear of rebuke from Chinese government.

Well, this was about some major successful clones, operating in China. They openly challenge the western sites and have the support of a bulging Chinese netizens to do so.

The post Some more Chinese alternates to American internet behemoths appeared first on Knolzone.