OneSwarm
Encyclopedia
OneSwarm is a privacy-preserving P2P
client developed at the University of Washington
. Although backward compatible with traditional BitTorrent clients, OneSwarm also includes new features designed to protect user privacy when sharing data among friends through creating a distributed
darknet, so-called friend-to-friend
sharing.
OneSwarm is based upon the Azureus (Vuze
) BitTorrent client.
Feature development and debugging has been slow in spite of its open source nature, but by 2010 the codebase was stable enough to support a nearly constant swarm of 200,000+ users.
A separate Friends server codebase was developed in early 2009 to allow users to keep track of each other. So far very few Friends servers have been deployed by those involved with the technology.
To provide privacy, OneSwarm uses source-address rewriting with multi-path and multi-source downloading.
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
client developed at the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
. Although backward compatible with traditional BitTorrent clients, OneSwarm also includes new features designed to protect user privacy when sharing data among friends through creating a distributed
Distributed computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
darknet, so-called friend-to-friend
Friend-to-friend
A friend-to-friend computer network is a type of peer-to-peer network in which users only make direct connections with people they know. Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication....
sharing.
OneSwarm is based upon the Azureus (Vuze
Vuze
Vuze is a BitTorrent client used to transfer files via the BitTorrent protocol. Vuze is written in Java, and uses the Azureus Engine. In addition to downloading data linked to by .torrent files, Azureus allows users to view, publish and share original DVD and HD quality video content...
) BitTorrent client.
History
Oneswarm is still very much in Beta testing, but its development started as far back as 2007 as a branch of the Azureus codebase.Feature development and debugging has been slow in spite of its open source nature, but by 2010 the codebase was stable enough to support a nearly constant swarm of 200,000+ users.
A separate Friends server codebase was developed in early 2009 to allow users to keep track of each other. So far very few Friends servers have been deployed by those involved with the technology.
Features
Features of OneSwarm beyond the privacy aspects of the product: file search, sharing permissions, web UI with streaming, real-time transcoding, and remote access.To provide privacy, OneSwarm uses source-address rewriting with multi-path and multi-source downloading.