Dropship — successor to torrents? [ENG]

Alternative for torrents? Millions of users, ready to share with their files? Fast, anonymous, cipher way to download files? Always accessible seed? Everything you need to do that is Dropship — connection of Dropbox and application created by Wladimir van der Laan.

Dropship — is written in Python. It allow us to download to our Dropbox any file, which description we got in JSON format (similar as description propagated in .torrent files).

EDIT: After my article about Dropbox’s public folder scaner, my theory about file exchanging in Dropbox cloud and Wladimir’s Dropship extending Dropbox with similar idea to my theory, I’m going to write third article about some innovating, theoretical idea of dangerous in Dropbox. Follow me on RSS, FB or Twitter @herbatnic. I will share it after my holidays (after 9th of May).

Dropship – configuration

Download Dropship from git repository or directly here removed on CTO Dropbox request. After extract make copy of config.py.example, and then change attributes of config.py.

$ cp config.py.example config.py
$ chmod 600 config.py


Retrieve some needed data from data base host_id i root_ns.

$ ./sqlite_dump ~/.dropbox/config.db | grep host_id
INSERT INTO "config" VALUES('host_id','00000000000000000000000000000000');
$ ./sqlite_dump ~/.dropbox/config.db | grep root_ns
INSERT INTO "config" VALUES('root_ns',12345);


Put retrieved data into config.py

host_id='00000000000000000000000000000000'
root_ns=12345


Dropship – execution

To download file described by some JSON, we have to run Dropship with JSON file as argument. In this case we want to download trailer of Sintel movie to our Dropbox folder.

$ ./dropship examples/sintel_trailer-1080p.mp4.json
File /sintel_trailer-1080p.mp4 dropshipped successfully.


Dropship – creating JSON file

If you want to share with some file on your Dropbox with other users, you have to create your own JSON description file. To do that, you can use hash_blocks. After that, you can publicize your JSON file for society, and everyone who use Dropship will be able to download specified file using only JSON description.
How to do that?

$ ./hash_blocks ~/filmy/film.avi > ~/Pulpit/film.avi.json


In detailed technical description of Dropship you can find additional information, and in my article Dropbox as platform to quick exchange files you can read about method which allow to understand how Dropship works.

And here my own JSON Dropship file. Check if you can retrieve original content.

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