WebProNews

Tag: peer to peer

  • Samsung Working on Quick Share: AirDrop For Android

    Samsung Working on Quick Share: AirDrop For Android

    XDA Developers is reporting that Samsung is working on Quick Share, an Android alternative to Apple’s AirDrop feature.

    AirDrop is a peer-to-peer service on Apple devices that allow them to share files without the need to email, upload to the cloud or even be connected to the same WiFi network. Instead, AirDrop uses Bluetooth and WiFi to create a peer-to-peer WiFi connection between two devices. This allows for extremely convenient and fast file transfers.

    Unfortunately, up until now, most Android users have not had a similar feature. That appears to be on the verge of changing, according to XDA Developers, at least for Samsung Galaxy customers.

    “This will basically work like most of these other nearby sharing services. If you are near another user with a supported device, they will show up and you can share the picture, video, or file. You will have two options for sharing: contacts only or with everyone. ‘Contacts-only’ will only allow you to share files with other Samsung Social users who you have in your contacts. ‘Everyone’ will let you send or receive files from anyone with a supported device in your area.

    “Unlike other services like AirDrop, Quick Share will have a cloud aspect to it. Quick Share will let you temporarily upload files to Samsung Cloud. These files will then be streamed to Samsung Smart Things devices and downloaded locally. These files can be up to 1GB with a total of 2GBs being sent per day.”

    As XDA Developers points out, Google is also working on its own version of the feature. It remains to be seen if the different services will be able to communicate with one another or if this will lead to further fragmentation in the Android ecosystem.

  • A Google Alternative? YaCy May Offer a Challenge

    Google has long held near-undisputed hegemony in the lucrative arena of web search. Repeated challenges from Yahoo!, Bing, and others have met with limited success at best. So successful has Google been, in fact, that they have broadened the scope of their product far beyond search, creating or buying a variety of products ranging from email to phone services to smart phone and notebook operating systems. Google has grown immensely over the last few years.

    That rapid growth, however, has some people worried. The company has been dogged by an array of controversies relating to its manipulation and censorship of search results, its access to users’ private data, and its willingness to provide search terms to government authorities. As recently as yesterday, one tech blog noted that Google’s censorship seems to be on the rise.

    YaCy (pronounced “ya see”) hopes to change all that. The German-based company, which has the support of the Free Software Foundation of Europe, released version 1.0 of their peer-to-peer search client today. YaCy is not a search engine in the traditional sense. It has no true web portal like Google’s or Bing’s or Yahoo’s. Though there is a demo web portal available for testing, the developer is careful to stress that it is only a demonstration, and does not provide the full experience. Instead users download a free open-source client to their computers. These clients crawl the internet independently, as well as indexing sites visited by their users, and share the results with other peers on the network. The result is that YaCy has no centralized servers. This means that users’ search terms are not accessible to any government entity, and that search results cannot be censored.

    According to the YaCy website, the network currently has 1.4 billion documents indexed and over 600 peers. Each new peer expands the network and improves the speed at which websites are indexed. In addition to avoiding centralized servers and the concerns about censorship and privacy that go with them, YaCy aims to provide better, more personally relevant results to its users.

    A request for comment sent to Michael Christen, YaCy’s developer, has not yet received a response. A screen shot of a typical YaCy search results page can be seen below.

    A typical search results page from the YaCy client

    The general reaction on Twitter seems to be one of cautious optimism. Most laud the freedom from centralized “big brother” type access:

    @filhocf
    Claudio Filho    finally! A search engine out of “big bhrothers”. It is called YaCy – http://t.co/yOkC3bEi #yacy 19 minutes ago via identica · powered by @socialditto

    Others see YaCy as a major breakthrough in search technology.

    @robstewartUK
    Rob Stewart    Open source YaCy project will change the way we think about de-centralized search. I’m running 2 YaCy peers, the visualizations are v neat! 18 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    While others are uncertain whether the concept of peer-to-peer search has traction, given that it requires users to put their own machines on the network.

    @stuartpt
    Stuart P Turner    Interesting idea but I don’t think the proposition of ‘Make your pc a search engine’ is going to score with the ‘norms’ http://t.co/usgykM28 5 hours ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

    And others worry about the user-friendliness of the software’s design.

    @undefined
    Adam    I feel like YaCy is a tool designed and developed by developers. It’s simple to them but not to average users. http://t.co/HtqEiFfi 2 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    What do you think? Is YaCy a credible rival to Google? Will you be installing it? Sound off in the comments.