Darknet BitTorrent-based P2P application adds features like secure, point-to-point encrypted chat and more.
Back in February I mentioned how some of the same researchers at the University of Washington that brought us BitTyrant had developed a new privacy preserving file-sharing client called OneSwarm. Today those same researchers have announced the release of version 0.6.
New features in version 0.6:
- Secure point-to-point chat
- Virtual directory hierarchies (i.e., tags)
- Set non-default save location during downloads
- Multi-key import
- Limit remote access based on IP ranges
- Change remote access password method from crypt -> SHA1+MD5 (for long password support)
- Option to not stream media files (improves performance when there are few sources)
- Fix ‘waiting for handshake’ bug that inhibits downloading if the client has been active for a while
- Fix parallel connections being closed too aggressively (causes friends to be disconnected)
- Fix rate limit not honored when there is a lot of downloading and forwarding going on
- Many miscellaneous bugfixes
Based on BitTorrent, and backwards compatible, OneSwarm is one of the many emerging new Darknet file-sharing applications that offers users concerned with privacy the ability to share data away from prying eyes.
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 and with whom.
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.
“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.”
The only drawback to Darknet apps like OneSwarm will always be the finite amount of data shared and as well as the difficulty in maintaining a large swarm of trusted peers. That said, some will find it useful, especially in countries with overzealous copyright holders.
It’s available for MAC, PC, and Linux.
DOWNLOAD ONESWARM v0.6
jared@zeropaid.com
Related Posts
- OneSwarm Turns P2P into F2F
- OneSwarm Adds Community Server Support
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- LimeWire 3.2.3 Released
- ICQ-IM-Fileshare 1.5 released
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I like this. I have not used this program yet but I have been wanting something like this that is easy to use. Its time for a downloading party!
The settings could be set up better, but other than that it seems like a good program. Like the fact that you can preview files within the program before downloading them.
It is great if you are in a country like China and wrorried about privacy. If you want the lastest movie, unless one of your “friends” on the network has it then this is useless.
“That said, some will find it useful, especially in countries with overzealous copyright holders.”
This may help in places where the new anti p2p laws are being implemented.
any reviews based on use??
setting/preferences can all be changed in later releases but the underlying end user experience ie:
average peers gained on popular torrent?
average download speed?
also do i need to add friends in order to share or will this function similar to a normal torrent client
So far it seems like a proposing little program, the only issues i have so far is the way it handles adding directories with lots of files and folders. Instead of displaying files in their folders it just shows all files jumbled together in the main view. It has folder names as tags on the side but its a bit annoying when you want add a large directory of files at once. the other thing is it seems a bit resource heavy but not to bad. The last thing i noticed is it seems to slow down my computer quite a bit when its adding files for share, but that could just be me. Overall I think with a little redesigning and updates it could be a well rounded handy program if enough people get behind it.
@t0m5k1
~ its not really like your normal bittorrent client its more geared for sharing files that you add, with friends not downloading public torrent files.
~there is the option to share files publicly but i haven’t tried it yet
~the average speed is usually dependent on who your connected to so far speeds Ive seen up and down are around 150kb or so