OneSwarm: Free/open Bittorrent client that hides your IP and facilitates private Bittorrent swarms

TorrentFreak reviews OneSwarm, a "privacy-aware Bittorrent client," that was produced by researchers at U Washington, who've published the sourcecode on Github. OneSwarm makes it easy to create private Bittorrent swarms and also allows you to download from traditional Bittorrent swarms while obscuring your IP address by passing it through a series of proxies.

Perhaps not coincidentally the same research group is also behind the "privacy preserving" BitTorrent client OneSwarm, currently developed by Tomas Isdal and Michael Piatek, two PhD students at the University of Washington.

Unlike other regular BitTorrent clients, OneSwarm allows users to share files only with a selected group of friends. While regular and public BitTorrent downloads are also supported, the privacy settings allow users to obscure the source of a transfer by sending it through multiple intermediaries.

"Virtually everyone on the Internet is a content producer, but today we only have one model for sharing: sign over the rights to your work to a website, with the hope that it will respect your privacy," researcher Michael Piatek told TorrentFreak commenting on the importance of privacy on BitTorrent.

"OneSwarm is an attempt to provide an alternative. Our view is that private data sharing is an essential service in free and open societies," he added.

OneSwarm: The Privacy Aware BitTorrent Client

OneSwarm