Bunsen is a front-end for dat using Apache Cordova to render an Angular 4 app that performs dat functions for sharing and consuming network resources. This project current creates Android APK's, but could support IOS someday. This repo also contains bunsen-server, which you may install on your Android device to listen for incoming dat uri's.
You could say that dat is a distributed data sharing tool that uses p2p peers like bittorrent, except it's live, so you can update the content easily. Kudos to aldebrn and mafintosh for that description.
Kudos to https://www.becompany.ch/en/blog/2016/10/19/creating-apache-cordova-app-with-angular2 for the primer on running an Angular app inside Cordova.
Modify scripts/prepareAngular2App.js if path to your Angular app changes.
To deploy to a connected android device, run installapp.sh. Modify installapp.js to suit your paths.
The Angular webapp is inside bunsen-ang directory. To develop, cd to that dir and ng serve
In development, launch the bunsen-server using npm start. It listens on port 8080.
Bunsen-server will run on an Android device that has installed Termux.
Setup your Android device according to the instructions here
To deploy, copy to your termux directory and run npm start.
I added a skeleton Cordova plugin
cordova plugin add --link ../cordova-plugin-node
Much of this app was created using the Angular CLI. Some sample commands:
ng g m discovery --routing
ng g c discovery -m discovery.module
ng g m discovery -m app.module --routing
The discovery component is currently unused; it was an experiment in bootstrapping a node.js app. Not yet ready (if ever!)
In the following explanation we talk about Bunsen Browser. Bunsen Browser runs on Android and Beaker Browser runs on Linux and macOS. They both use the same underlying technology known as Dat which makes this all possible.
Millions of people living under repressive regimes are blocked from the Internet and depend on outside access to digital content by way of smuggled USB Flash Drives. There are 6 billion people offline who have are offline and not able to verify content they receive while offline causing issues around misinformation, land rights, forged medical data, and many others.
Bunsen shines a light on the offline web by solving two problems.
- How to easily update and merge content between two devices while offline.
- How to verify content came from the source it claims to come from.
To understand how that works, a quick analogy about cryptographic keys.
In "Cryptoland", anyone can generate two unique magic key pairs. One key can lock anything it touches, another unlocks anything it touches. These are referred to as "private" and "public" keys. If you want someone to verify a package you send them, you give them a copy of the public key that unlocks things. Before you send your package you lock it with your private key. Now when people receive a package from you, they unlock it with the public key you gave them and they know it definitely came from you because you are the only person in the world that could have locked that package.
This is one feature of SSL/HTTPS in browsers online. When you go to https://nytimes.com, your browser uses NY Times public key to verify that the web page came from the New York Times and was not intercepted and modified somewhere along the way by some misguided government or criminal.
But there's no SSL in the offline world. We distribute applications and files over USB drives and when a person opens them up, they have no user-friendly way of verifying that content came from who they hope it came from. Bunsen makes this user friendly because it can sync and open Dat archives.
When you are online, you access Dat archives online using their dat address (dat://....). The same address is the public key. That Dat public key is then used to verify that all of the contents are locked by the person with the magic locking key, similar to SSL/HTTPS. Unlike most websites, a user can chose to save that website into their Bunsen Browser for use offline. When they are offline, using their Bunsen browsers they can send that same Dat archive to other devices running Bunsen. This allows offline verification that content came from where it claims to have come from.
To illustrate this point, here's an example:
Jane and Sally are online separately at some point and download a Dat archive of the New York Times website. Then Sally goes out into the field where there is not Internet access. Meanwhile Jane is home the next day in the city where there is Internet access and her Bunsen browser gets the day's updates of the NY Times Dat Archive. Now Jane goes out into the field to join Sally where there is no Internet. Their Bunsen browsers connect to each other wirelessly without Internet and Sally's Bunsen browser sees there is an update of the NY Times Dat Archive on Jane's device. Sally's Bunsen browser transfers the update and Bunsen Browser using Dat automatically verifies all updates came from the NY Times using the public key. In order to get verified content, they spend less money going online as the same content does not need to be downloaded from the Internet on every device, it's easily synced and verified using Bunsen.
In that example, perhaps Jane and Sally don't even know each other. They can still trust that when they receive updates for their Dat archives, it came from the actual source.
- Chris Kelley https://github.com/chrisekelley
- R.J. Steinert https://github.com/rjsteinert
- Thanks to Ben Davis for providing the original Bunsen image for the logo. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=bunsen&i=490710
- And thank you to all the wonderful people who have worked so hard to make Dat (https://datproject.org/) and Beaker Browser (beakerbrowser.com) what is today!