Darknet BitTorrent-based P2P application introduces trusted source capability so you can add a feed of new friends and thus create “private trackers on steroids.”
OneSwarm, the darknet BitTorrent-based application that was released this past February by researchers at the University of Washington, has now released version 0.6.2 that adds several new features, most important among them being support for community servers.
Community servers are a new and improved method for importing friends into your private OneSwarm community. Each community server publishes a feed of new friends, which after subscribing to OneSwarm will notify you when new friends are available or old friends have expired. Unlike individually added friends, friends imported from a community server are marked as limited (so they can’t see your file list) and have chat disabled (so they can’t send you spam).
“Community servers address a longstanding challenge in web-of-trust style P2P sharing: key distribution,” reads a press release. “Instead of needing to manually exchange public keys, community servers allow users to outsource key management by subscribing to a ‘feed’ of keys from a trusted source. Think private trackers on steroids.”
One of the drawbacks to darknet applications has always been the limited size of the community. You can only add so many friends manually and so the type and amount of content shared within the community suffers as a result. Community server support and friend feeds help to address that problem and make for a healthy swarm of peers.
New features in version 0.6.2:
- Support for community servers
- A friends table that enables multi-friend operations, sorting by ratio, last date connected, etc.
- Rebuilt web UI with GWT 1.6
- Friend groups
- Remote access now permits saving files to the local machine
I had a chance to catch up with Michael Piatek, one of the reserachers behind OneSwarm, and who was kind enough to answer a few questions.
How has OneSwarm been received by your peers and members of the file-sharing community?
We’ve received a fairly positive response to OneSwarm. In roughly 5 months since our initial release, we’ve observed hundreds of thousands of downloads and tens of thousands of active weekly users. Our forum is fairly active, and a few intrepid users have set up community sites for different localities (e.g., Sweden: http://oneswarm.co.cc/ and France: https://forum.oneswarm-fr.net )
One of the most popular uses of all of these message boards is for key exchange. To maintain secure connections, both endpoints of a OneSwarm connection need to know the cryptographic keys of one another. In OneSwarm 0.6.2, we’ve introduced software support to make key exchange easier. Users can subscribe to a feed of public keys from a community server, making the maintenance of a set of friends automatic for members of private sharing communities, or users who simply want the privacy associated with a mixnet composed of a large set of random users.
Already, in the few days that the community server has been publicly available, several public servers have already emerged (and we’re aware of at least a few private ones in operation as well).
What kind of other features are you currently working on that you can mention?
Since the majority of our users are outside of english-speaking countries, one of the things we’re planning in the short term is better support for translation and localization. Aside from that, we’re planning improvements that will make OneSwarm easier to integrate into existing websites. One of the benefits of our web-based interface is that we can make it pretty straightforward for website operators to integrate OneSwarm into their sites. Just like operators can write a snippet of Javascript that embeds a YouTube video in a page, we’d like to provide similar support to detect if a client is running OneSwarm, but can fall back on other distribution mechanisms otherwise.
Anything else you’d like to mention?
We’re always interested in engaging with the broader community. If you, your readers, or anyone else has any ideas about how to improve the software, what features we should be working on, etc. do let us know (via email, twitter, or our forum). Thanks!
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Stay tuned.
jared@zeropaid.com
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