Q: Isn’t P2P software just for piracy?
Don’t you have better things to do?
Our interest is in building a system for users to share data efficiently
and securely while preserving their privacy. 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. Our work is to show that there is a
better way.
Q: Does OneSwarm offer strong anonymity? Who can
track my behavior?
No. Strong anonymity requires that an adversary with the ability to
eavesdrop on every network packet be unable to recover information about
data transmitted. In the case of OneSwarm, such an adversary would be
able to correlate the increase in traffic between sender and receiver
along an overlay path. Of course, monitoring the entire Internet is
beyond the capabilities of most monitoring agents, and OneSwarm is
intended only to improve privacy relative to existing P2P networks that
unambiguously broadcast user behavior. OneSwarm users should trust their
directly connected friends and can expect privacy relative to the
wholesale monitoring of P2P networks that is common today, but a capable
monitoring agent (e.g., law enforcement or government) may be able to
infer behavior. For more details, check out our papers.
Q: Does OneSwarm preserve my privacy when
downloading BitTorrent swarms?
No. Although OneSwarm is backwards compatible with existing BitTorrent
clients, it cannot anonymize transfers with them. OneSwarm only
preserves user privacy when sharing files using the friend-to-friend
network. For more information on configuring sharing settings, check out
the sharing
configuration tutorial on the wiki.
Q: OneSwarm
doesn’t seem to render properly in Internet Explorer. Why not?
Internet Explorer doesn’t support many of the browser features that
OneSwarm requires. OneSwarm works well with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. We recommend using one of
these. If you’d like to help add support for more browsers, let
us know.
Q: Where can I get troubleshooting help?
Visit the troubleshooting
page on the wiki or the forum.