Over the last few years, the popularity of peer-to-peer filesharing has exploded, leaving widespread filesharing lawsuits and traffic management policies in its wake. But the same features that allow P2P applications to provide lots of bandwidth also make these clients less-than-ideal for maintaining a degree of anonymity and limiting the sharing of documents to a specific set of users. Some computer scientists at the University of Washington think they’ve overcome that in their new software, called OneSwarm, but they may have opened up a can of worms in the process.
The basics of OneSwarm are pretty simple. The software consists of a server app that appears to be written in Java, allowing it to run on Linux, the Mac, and Windows. All interactions with the OneSwarm system beyond that, however, take place in a browser—the app’s authors say all the major players other than IE are capable of handling the system. The software is back-compatible with BitTorrent, meaning it functions fine as a generic P2P client.
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