OneSwarm was created because current popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading.
v0.7 [Sep 24, 2010]
- Recognizing identical files in distinct swarms for faster downloads
- Optional search keyword filtering
- Support for queuing chat messages to offline friends, chat bugfixes and UI improvements (window resizing, persistent position)
- Merged osf2f and gwtui plugins into the core jar -- eliminates the need for restarting twice during updates.
- Rewritten group management -- significantly improves responsiveness for users with large shares
- Swarms without permissions will be shown in the Web UI in an error state with an option to repair
- Reduced the size of the Web UI Javascript -- reduces load times
- Compression for remote access
- Fixed typos in several strings, improved internationalization support
- Fixed a bug that prevented default previews from being uploaded when publishing
- Fixed incorrect progress estimation when skipping some files in swarms
- Fixed potential hang on startup (DHT initialization)
- Improved UI support for internationalization
