A little like a private tracker, you either have to be invited to an Alliance network – or help the hydra and make your own. It’s very easy to setup and scale your own decentralized network with BitTorrent-like ‘swarming’ capabilities using Alliance, and as the software just reached V1.0 we thought it would be a good time to catch up with the creator for the lowdown.

TF: Tell us about the birth of AllianceP2P and why you decided to conceive it.

Maciek: I remember writing the first lines of code for Alliance back in 2005. It was cold and dark outside. In Sweden, where I live, it tends to be dark and cold during the end of the year. So I’m guessing it was around November 2005.

I was discussing the different p2p networks out there with a work colleague. There was nothing really good that guaranteed high security, was easy to use and had high download speeds (all truly secure p2p networks I know are really slow, to the point where they’re useless). We talked about many, many different solutions to the problem – I remember talking about DHTs and network coding.

Finally I got totally hooked on the idea of a network where you connect to people that you trust. You’d use encrypted connections and only connect to friends , this way safety would be guaranteed. You’d be able to connect to friends of your friends , if you knew you trust them. This way the network would grow. I’d use a BitTorrent-like download mechanism and direct connections (no tunneling). This way I could guarantee high download speeds. I’d make sure it was user friendly and easy to use. This way networks would grow fast.

Now, almost three years later, I’ve just released version 1.0! I’m really happy with this because I feel I have implemented my entire vision. I have a full time job so I coded Alliance during my spare time. At times it was pretty intense… Other times I didn’t code on Alliance for months.

TF: Who else is involved in the project?

Maciek: This being an open source project I’ve had help from others along the way:pontusm, mrund and deathfired on sourceforce.net to mention a few.

TF: What size is the AllianceP2P userbase and who are they?

Maciek: Since Alliance is free and open source there is no real target market. I simply developed a piece of software that I knew I’d love to use. And since it’s decentralized I don’t keep track on any user statistics (a part from the automatic error reports I get). I just released version 1.0. Before 1.0 the alpha/beta versions where downloaded over 50,000 times.

TF: How does the software work?

Maciek: Alliance is written in Java and runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It has file-swarming capabilities like BitTorrent. Unlike BitTorrent it has an extensive built-in search, is completely decentralized and designed to be secure. Alliance is actually a friend-2-friend network. Within each network of friends is a community where users can download files from each other, chat and post new files in the chat.

TF: What are the most important aspects of Alliance?

As you only connect to people you know and all connections are encrypted, Alliance is very secure. Since there is no central server or single point of failure, the network gets strength by decentralization.

Alliance has great scalability , it has been tested to work with share sizes where each client shares one terabyte of data in approximately 50,000 files and it is very easy to use. Additionally, Alliance is, and will always remain, free and open source.

Alliance uses tiger hashes to identify files. All files that a user shares are automatically hashed and indexed in the background. This way Alliance can automatically identify a file that several users have and download from all those users simultaneously.

TF: Tell us about this latest version 1.0. Why should people install it?

Maciek: I actually took two weeks off of my normal job in order to complete version 1.0. I knew that I would not be able to finish it otherwise. I had over 3000 detailed automatic error reports sent to me during the last year. I sorted all error reports in order of “popularity” and started fixing them. One after another. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it =). Alliance 1.0 is the first stable release of a new kind of p2p software. A network that is fast AND secure.

TF: Thanks for speaking with us.

So, if you’d like to quickly create a secure, decentralized filesharing network with BitTorrent-like swarming, and a DirectConnect-style community to compliment your communications and sharing arsenal, Alliance could be your solution. Even when your favorite tracker goes down, Alliance will still be there, with all the peers intact. You can get it here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A post by brokep on the Pirate Bay blog reveals that the site has had some unwanted visitors and not very pleasant ones at that. These people, whose identities have already been discovered by TPB crew, exploited a vulnerability in the site’s blogging software to take a copy of the site’s user database, “That is, your username and passwords” says brokep.

But the site’s members have nothing to fear, brokep continues;

“the passwords are stored encrypted, so it’s not a big deal, but it’s still very sad that it’s out there. All e-mails are for instance encrypted as well, they will most likely not be able to decrypt them either (they are _very_ encrypted).”

The advice for Pirate Bay members is to change their passwords as soon as they can and if they use the same passwords on other sites, they should change those too.

“Sorry for the mess, but we are all human and we miss something sometimes.”

True, we all miss things. Personally, i’m hoping to miss something tommorow evening but i’m worried I may be forced to catch up at a later date. Thanks a lot.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Update: SecureIX shut down but BTGuard is a great alternative.

What SecureIX offers is a whole package of ‘secure services’. An IMAP/POP SSL-enabled e-mail account with PGP encryption and 1 GB storage, Usenet newsgroup access, and an encrypted VPN service. All of this free for personal use.

Instructions to set up VPN access are sent to the e-mail address you get when you sign up with SecureIX. That way, there’s definitely no chance of anyone intercepting e-mails from the site to you.

A passage on the site talks about how SecureIX provides added piracy:

As soon as you connect to our VPN server your computer is assigned a new IP address, an IP address that is owned by us, not your ISP. Unless you are using one of our static IP packages there are no records that link a single user to the IP address. The IP address is shared by many users. Remote servers on the Internet that try to identify you by your IP address will fail.

What I don’t understand is why a company would give away a service like this for free. Although, the site reserves the right to change their policy in the future, their “current plans are to always provide a free service.”

But how safe is this free service? After all, they also offer Business VPN for a price, so it is a commercial service. And even if your ISP doesn’t have your data, it’s almost assured that SecureIX does, as you’re using their servers to tunnel. In this way, they’re taking over from your ISP. Great idea, but who knows if we can trust SecureIX any more than our ISPs?

Where SecureIX could really come in handy is if your ISP is blocking encrypted BitTorrent transfers. In Canada, Rogers is throttling all BitTorrent connections, encrypted or otherwise. BroadbandReports.com writes, “Rogers has updated Cisco traffic-shaping hardware to perform more sophisticated deep packet inspection to again limit BitTorrent bandwidth consumption. Some users are using VPN software SecureIX to get around the new traffic shaping efforts, with mixed results.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.