OneSwarm v0.6 is Now Available
Users in countries where anti-piracy policies are sometimes to extreme and copyright owners hunt for every suing opportunity, may find this app a good addition to their p2p software
The research team at the University of Washington have released the version 0.6 of the new privacy preserving file-sharing client called OneSwarm they had launched more than a month ago, Zeropaid reports.
The app is based on BitTorrent and is rapidly gaining ground among the increasing new Darknet file-sharing programs offering users who care about their online privacy the comfort of sharing files anonymously. OneSwarm makes easier for users to create networks of people they want to share stuff with.
The program is even a bit of an avant-garde – it uses source address rewriting to keep user’s privacy safe from intruding eyes. Rather than transmitting data always directly from sender to recipient, whom it identifies instantly, OneSwarm is able to send data using several agents thus hiding the identity of both sender and receiver.
This new version adds more features such as:
- 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
Here’s an excerpt from OneSwarm’s technical report:
“Although widely used, currently popular P2P networks expose the sharing behavior of their users to monitoring by third parties.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.”
However, there is a downsize to using OneSwarm just as with any similar Darknet apps – the limited amount of data shared and also the great effort in trying to keep a large swarm of reliable peers.
It’s available for MAC, PC, and Linux.
