New friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing application allows users complete control over how data is shared, with the public, with friends, with some friends but not others, and so forth.
Some of the same researchers at the University of Washington that brought us BitTyrant have now developed a new privacy preserving file-sharing client called OneSwarm. It’s based on BitTorrent (and backwards compatible), but includes some new features like search, friend to friend data sharing (F2F), permissions, and a web UI with real time audio/video transcoding and remote access to name a few.
“Although widely used, currently popular P2P networks expose the sharing behavior of their users to monitoring by third parties,” reads OneSwarm’s technical report. “To curb the indiscriminate sharing that enables this, we have built OneSwarm, a friend-to-friend file sharing client that restricts direct data sharing to trusted friends with verifiable persistent identities. Associating persistent names with peers gives users explicit control over their privacy by defining sharing permissions at the granularity of data objects and friends.”
What OneSwarm does in a nutshell is basically allow users to establish networks of friends or contacts with which to share data. It allows users to then specifically fine-tune which data is shared with whom.
Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth.
OneSwarm even goes a step further by using source address rewriting to protect user privacy. Instead of always transmitting data directly from sender to receiver (immediately identifying both), OneSwarm may forward data through multiple intermediaries, obscuring the identity of both sender and receiver.
To note, OneSwarm DOES NOT protect user privacy when part of a BitTorrent swarm outside your friend-to-friend network.
Its interface is web browser based and supports real-time playback of many audio and video formats for in-browser playback, eliminating the need for casual users to master a new application’s interface or search for custom media codecs.
Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
jared@zeropaid.com
Related
- OneSwarm v0.6 Released
- OneSwarm Adds Community Server Support
- TribalWeb lets you set up a private P2P network
- Morpheus 4.0.4 Released
Another Darknet app. To my knowledge Darknet apps always sound great in theory but due to addoption rates they don’t become addopted by users beyond the domain of p2p obscurity. This is just what I have witnessed myself. Part of what makes p2p popular is the fact that it has a large open network that exposes large quantities of files for the taking. Darknets tend to break that into tiny pockets of p2p pools with a much smaller filebase to pick from (why some users tend to look elsewhere)
@ DrewWilson
Exactly. If I have friends with what I need I can always just ask them to burn me a DVD with the content on it. The big draw of P2P IMO is that its a huge library of stuff that’s hard to get any other way.
I do see how this might be useful on College campuses where you would want a local decentralized darknet for P2P. But most any other situation would not have enough participants and media to make it practical.
LimeWire already did it:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/lime-wire-adds.html
http://lifehacker.com/5107474/limewire-5-alpha-adds-private-peer+to+peer-file-sharing-integrates-with-gmail
..and did it better too!
LimeWire added the friend to friend business. I don’t see any mention of onion style routing of traffic.
Drew to answer your last question, I would venture and guess that some people feel more secure in a smaller p2p pools. Reminds me of the days when if you peed in a large pool, nobody would actually know; but if you peed in a 3-foot pool swimming with your brother, you knew you were getting a warning from your brother or even better from your DAD.
been wondering how worthy this is
Is is not about making friend-to-friend communication possible, the software uses friends to relay traffic and to create a huge network where participants have direct connection only to friends and indirect connection to anywhere else. The point is to make it hard to track you down. OneSwarm is viable and spreading fast in Sweden after the PirateBay verdict.
Comparing this to limewire’s private sharing clearly shows the lack of understanding the purpose and functionality of OneSwarm.