Webware

GigaTribe, a Web 2.0 file-sharing service, announced Monday that it has launched its product to the U.S. market. The company's software will allow users to share photos, videos, music, and documents with other users over a private peer-to-peer network.

At its core, GigaTribe is much like other file-sharing sites on the Web that are being monitored by the RIAA and MPAA, but it creates a private network to keep them out. The service allows users to share any file for free and create a group that can send files back and forth.

Due to the inherent security risk that goes along with its business model, GigaTribe's executives pointed out that the company does its best to keep files secure. To do that, it allows users to assign friends into groups and allow them access to certain files. The company also encrypts all files to add an extra layer of security.

"Security is our top priority," Alexis Leseigneur, GigaTribe's CTO said in a statement. "When it comes to sharing your personal photos and videos, you need to be absolutely sure they will only be available to the appropriate contacts."

Although GigaTribe tries to make its free application sound compelling, it's the $29.95-per-year "Ultimate" product that packs most of the benefits. Aside from faster downloading and multidownloading capability, the Ultimate service provides remote access to the files, password protection on all files, and most importantly, group access management.

According to the company, the free version allows anyone to view files, while the Ultimate version gives users the ability to decide which groups can access certain files.

GigaTribe's service is available now on the company's site.

Got a big file you need to send to a friend or family member? You can either spend time uploading it to a hosting service, or start a one-time transfer that will be deleted from the cloud within 24 hours. Streamfile is a service that does just that and with a high level of simplicity, making it pretty close to perfect for sending large files to non-tech savvy individuals.

Just pick what file you want to transfer to your friend (up to 2GB in size) and the service will spit out two URLs for you to send either on your own or via e-mail. One is a generic URL, while the other is secured with AES 256-bit SSL encryption, the same level of security you'd find on most banking sites. Whomever clicks that link will begin downloading the file in their browser's download manager as the uploader on your site seeds the file onto a temporary spot on its servers. Even before you've managed to finish uploading your recipient can begin their download. Pretty cool.

One HUGE potential danger of the service is that you can spoof other people's identities and send executables--something that's been banned on most Web mail services both on the sending and receiving end. It lets you to pick both the name and e-mail of the sender which comes through as an e-mail from them instead of the service itself. If you're targeting someone and know they'll click on what you're sending them, you could easily rename malicious files and get them to open them unless they've got capable antivirus software installed.

Huge security fraud potential aside, it's blissfully simple to use and a huge asset for passing big files to friends. If you've been wary of installing a software solution and paying for premium services that let you break that 500MB to 1GB barrier found on most services, Streamfile makes a highly desirable solution.

[via SimpleSpark]

Streamfile lets you send as many files as you want, up to 2GB, either in total or per single file.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In the 1960s, Lawrence Roberts invented computer networking via data packets, which led directly to the development of ARPANet and the Internet . And now Roberts is trying to fix one of the Internet's biggest problems: network overload caused by peer-to-peer file transfers.

Not Al Gore.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

At Structure 08, he laid out the problem: 5 percent of the Net's users are running P2P transfers taking up 80 percent of its capacity, which is dramatically limiting the available bandwidth available to everyone else. Roberts' company, Anagran, is able to detect which "flows" are P2P traffic, and reduce the bandwidth available to these communications when other users' systems want it. Roberts says that Anagran's technology even functions when P2P transfers are encrypted. I'm not going to pretend I understand exactly how this works, but it has something to do with keeping information about the flow of data between all computers connected through an ISP in memory in the Anagram appliance, and then leveling off traffic of P2P communications as needed--and throughput only, not latency. Judging by the reaction of the audience of infrastructure geeks sitting around me, Roberts is on to something. "He's the real deal right there," the guy next to me said at one point, pretty much gazing up at the stage in awe.

Roberts claims that the Anagran devices also ensure that high-priority traffic, like VOIP and video streams, can be guaranteed better performance.

Roberts was clear that he has no desire to punish P2P users, but rather he wants to make sure that they--and everyone else--get their fair share of bandwidth. That share, he believes, cannot be 80 percent of the Net's capacity, especially if the other 20 percent has to be allocated to the 95 percent of the Net's users who aren't using P2P.

You'll find Anagran bandwidth fairness boxes (also called FR-1000s) in university settings now, where the P2P file transfer problem is most acute. Anagran doesn't currently have any commercial ISP customers, but I'll bet that they're all looking at them.

Roberts has no position on the legality of content being transferred over P2P links. "Illegal or legal is not the issue at all." It's about fairness, he says: equal capacity for equal pay. What do you think?

See also: Baggage and bits: Overage fees have unintended consequences.

Anagran FR-1000: The shape of bandwidth to come.

(Credit: Anagran)

Not to be confused with UStream, a new technology put together by the folks at BitLet (coverage) called Westream lets you listen to music files that are being distributed via Bittorrent. Up until now there hasn't been an easy way to listen to Bittorrent files without downloading the entire file, or group of files. In the case of Bitlet's system, all you have to do is drop in the URL link to a Bittorrent file, and the system will pull up the tracks, complete with a player that lets you pause, skip songs, and increase and decrease the volume. The one caveat is that the tracks must be in the MP3 or the somewhat less mainstream Ogg Vorbis format; in other words AAC and WMV files need not apply.

One of Bittorrent's strengths is that it goes out and collects pieces of a file as well as it can, while giving some of the smaller, less available chunks the limelight in order to ensure as much of the file is available to seeders as possible. It's a built-in system of self-preservation to make sure the file can continue to be shared even if the amount of people available to share it begin to drop off.

To that end, Westream strikes somewhere in the middle of Bittorrent's file-sharing etiquette, and traditional streaming, simply seeking out the pieces it needs to play the song immediately, while not taking what it doesn't need. While most would consider this a glorified form of leeching, the folks at Bitlet claim otherwise, noting that it "should behave as most torrent clients." The client also uploads whatever it's downloaded into its cache for others, as long as you've got the browser window open.

Dropping a download link to a torrent file gets Bitlet's music player going as long as it's a MP3 or Ogg file.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I managed to get the service to work just fine on several test torrent files, and the music started playing pretty quickly even on torrent files with just a handful of seeders. Your mileage on a home cable or DSL modem may vary, though (we're on a pretty speedy line here at CNET). There were a few hiccups here and there, but it's impressively easy, and requires absolutely no software besides your browser and a recent version of Java.

What really gets me excited about this, beyond the music player is the potential for video. If you're a Web publisher with a video that's got an exceptional amount of people sharing it, this technology takes Bittorrent from being something limited to the tech savvy to anyone who can click a link.

To give the service a spin, check out this (legal) sample torrent running through Bitlet.

[via ReadWriteWeb and TorrentFreak]

Peer-to-peer company BitTorrent is set to announce on Tuesday morning the availability of a new enterprise content delivery product, BitTorrent DNA. Designed for companies that use streaming video, large downloads or games over the Web, the launch of BitTorrent DNA marks yet another conscious move by the San Francisco-based software brand to move beyond its roots as the creator of file-sharing protocol that became nearly synonymous with digital piracy over the past few years.

BitTorrent described the new BitTorrent DNA product in a statement as "the ideal solution for publishers seeking ways to overcome the obstacles associated with centralized content delivery, such as slow downloads, choppy video streams, and inefficient use of network infrastructure." The inaugural client for the new content delivery network (CDN) is online video start-up Brightcove, which powers a number of large companies' broadband media operations.

BitTorrent DNA will be used to "accelerate" the delivery of the video hosted on Brightcove's platform.

With the rise of online video and large-scale media downloads, content delivery has become a crowded niche in the market. BitTorrent DNA will square off with industry leaders like Akamai Technologies--the force behind CBS' video distribution network as well as a host of others. BitTorrent is hoping, however, that its massive following (150 million downloads of its client, according to the company) will help give it an edge.

In addition, the peer-to-peer format has become increasingly popular in the streaming video space, with recent entries like Joost and Babelgum touting P2P technology as the backbone for their professional-quality video content.

In February, BitTorrent announced that it was creating a digital download store that would use that robust user base as a way to legally transfer large movies, games and other files. The company has also forged alliances with major movie studios for legal film downloads.

Meanwhile, the exhaustive battle over online piracy wages on.

In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other's fins for dominance, there's at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark. The tagline? "Everybody gets paid."

As content distribution has mutated from analog to digital, the companies that came into existence to control the distribution have panicked and floundered. Decentralized peer-to-peer sharing made this all possible, but it's also thrown nearly a century of copyright law beyond the deep end and into rough waters.

... Read more

AllPeers, the social file-swapping and file-sharing Firefox extension is adding a built-in BitTorrent client early next month. Users will be able to download torrent files right in their browser without the need for a BitTorrent software client. Similar functionality was introduced to Opera's browser in mid-2005, however the team behind AllPeers is giving users an added bonus to download torrents through their extension. If two or more AllPeers friends are downloading the same torrent, they'll get the benefit of faster sharing. The AllPeers team claims it's double the speed they'd be able to get through regular peer-to-peer BitTorrent connections. AllPeers users will also be able to share the file in whole once the BitTorrent download has finished

AllPeers is one of the winners of the Webware 100 Awards and currently has more than 370,000 installations. The team estimates that about 53,000 of those users are active, and that the service gets a new user every two minutes. The new build with the built-in BitTorrent client will be available July 10.

See also: FireTorrent and FoxTorrent.

Users will be able to download BitTorrent files right in their browser without the need for a separate client.

(Credit: bugzilla.allpeers.com)

It's been a while since we covered a file transfer product like Izimi, Tubes, YouSendIt, or Zapr. But there are still new solutions popping up to solve the problem of sending big files. The latest--that we know of--is Quickeo.

This product's special sauce is that it will bundle up several multimedia files into an attractive e-mail "album". When a recipient clicks on link in the e-mail, it will fire up a Web page that he or she can use to play your files directly.

Quickeo does a great job creating e-mail packages of multimedia assets.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

To create a Quickeo album and send these e-mails, you need to download and install Quickeo's Windows-only software, but the recipients of your albums don't need the software (compared to Tubes). However, since Quickeo is partly a peer-to-peer system, you may have to leave your PC on if you want your recipients to be able to actually play the files your e-mails link to. This is because the free version is peer-to-peer only: your computer needs to be on and connected to the Net when recipients of your Quickeo e-mails click your media files, otherwise they won't see them. The paid version of Quickeo--as well as the free version, for 30 days--automatically synchronizes your Quickeo albums to a central service and will stream media from there when your PC is not available. Quickeo Premium costs $29.95 a year.

The app, which is required to send Quickeo messages, has some nice features. It transcodes all video into Flash, which makes viewing files easy for recipients. In addition to transferring videos already on your PC, it will also record directly from a Webcam, which makes it a decent video-mail app (although not nearly as simple as EyeJot or GabMail). Quickeo also makes nice photo slide shows. And if you send audio tracks in a message, those will play in the background during a slide show. Unfortunately, audio, video, and pictures can't easily be downloaded by recipients, although other file types can be.

The e-mail composer software is easy to use--but not easy to set up.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The snags: While Quickeo itself is a small (2MB) application, it requires the enormous .Net 2.0 framework, which it installs automatically (and slowly) if necessary. During setup, you also have to tell the software what your SMTP gateway is. That's archaic--every Web service should be able to send its own e-mail. Also, the service (paid as well as free) limits you to 1GB of bandwidth per month and 1GB of storage on Quickeo servers (more storage and bandwidth are available for an additional fee).

Quickeo does make nice e-mailable packages of multimedia files, but it's a single-purpose tool with important installation and setup issues. That's enough for me to warn people off the service.

Box.net, the online storage service, has updated their embeddable widget with a new group sharing feature for members with premium and professional accounts. Users can password protect a shared folder, which can then be accessed privately by others with the code. Storage owners can opt-in to allow user uploading, which lets anyone with access add files. The company is gearing it at businesses, whereas its previous widget incarnation was aimed at users with social networking profiles.

For group users to keep track of updates to shared folders, each share gets its own RSS feed. Once subscribed, the name and direct download link will be broadcast to any subscribers. Neat.

Note: I have the anonymous uploading turned off on the widget below. Read previous Box.net widget coverage here.

[via Mashable]