remove the labels – Gadgets and Life

We did a brief write-up on BitTorrent Sync yesterday, which only really touched on some of its potential. After pondering things a little longer, I came up with a couple of usage scenarios that might be both useful and fun to put into place.

Within 30 minutes of finding BitTorrent Sync yesterday, I realized that I had a permanent solution to my DropBox space problems. Given that I work in an academic institution, I am not really confident in putting anything with BitTorrent branding on my work desktop – at least until the tech becomes a little more mainstream and torrents become associated with more than piracy. For the time being, I’ll continue to allow DropBox to handle that part of the syncing. As the folder fills up, I will shuffle stuff across – it isn’t really a big deal. At any rate, keeping one’s personal files is the tip of the iceberg as far as Sync functionality goes.

Perhaps the biggest potential application, in my line of work at least, is for collaboration. I live in rural Japan but I collaborate on different projects with people elsewhere in Japan and as far afield as Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. My method of issuing editing assignments has always been to email a copy with a carefully formatted subject heading so that I can pull up relevant details when I need them via a search of my work-related Gmail account. This has a lot of advantages – but then the type of editing work that I do does not require a lot of back-and-forth collaboration. For that sort of thing, people tend to use Microsoft SharePoint – which is pricey and complicated. How much better would it be to have a well-organized folder for each of my editors? Set the due date as the folder name in a YYYYMMDD format load the files on and ping the relevant editor with an IM about the job details. No more losing attachments in long conversation threads. With an always-on computer and some remote access voodoo such a system could be managed easily from a smartphone.

That led me to think about secure communications. Let’s say you are a dissident who is stuck behind a ridiculous national firewall – at best Gmail and Twitter are blocked, at worst they are being monitored so that your communications can be used against you in a court of “law.” In such situations Sync, or a system like it, would provide a discreet way to communicate with the outside world – especially when coupled with something like Tor. Rather than send an email, you could save an encrypted document in a shared folder – way more discreet than a webmail account. I can’t help but think that if this had been around a couple of years ago then David Petraeus might not be looking for a job. Granted, this is all stuff you would be able to do if you had your own mail server, but ISPs have a nasty habit of blocking port 25, which makes mail server setup a more complicated affair.

BitTorrent Sync might still be in Alpha, but it already offers quite a few interesting possibilities. It will take a while to iron out some of the kinks and improve the functionality, but we are talking about truly private sharing, without expensive storage space or shady, obnoxious middlemen. When it all comes together it will be truly awesome.

Link to the original article…