A private swarm

A recent study shows that illegal file sharing is on the decrease. At the same time, there is an increasing trend towards legal files sharing, but in a more private setting, away from Facebook and YouTube. One company benefiting from this trend is OneSwarm, a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared.

October 29, 2009

If you want to share your photos and videos with your friends and family, the easiest way to avoid clogging someone’s system or hard drive is to post it onto a blog, Facebook or YouTube. But what if you want to be more private?  OneSwarm, a research project out of Washington University, allows you to decide who to share your content with but without the hassle of sharing it.

Tomas Isdal, one of the developers behind OneSwarm, says that by installing it onto your computer you can easily share your content with family and friends – and the rest of the world too, if you so wish.

“There is no file limit,” he says. “So, if you want to transfer a one-hour film of yourself snowboarding to your mom, for instance, it shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to download. Another benefit of OneSwarm is that you will be able to view the video in the same quality as it was recorded. You will not experience bad quality video clips as you sometimes do on YouTube.”

Share your content with everyone

Tomas Isdal says that OneSwarm also lets you share your content with everyone on the internet.  “Let’s say you have a podcast you want to distribute but you might not want anyone to see who your listeners are because they want to be private,” he says. “With OneSwarm you are able to share content without third parties monitoring who’s downloading what.”

Although OneSwarm makes third party monitoring impossible, it does not stop companies from distributing their own content. “If you have something you wish to share with a large number of people, OneSwarm is a good way to do that,” Tomas Isdal says. “All you need to do is send it to a handful of people and they will forward it to their group of people, and so on. And suddenly, you’ve reached thousands of people.”

Tomas Isdal says that since OneSwarm is built on the idea of being a social network created by friends, it has the potential of solving some of the big problems people are experiencing using the internet today, such as hacking.

“Since OneSwarm has the social structure, you are more likely to know whether a file is from a trusted source or not,” he says. “This is very useful in defending it from all kinds of internet attacks, which was previously hard to do in a peer-to-peer setting.”

Deter users from illegal activity

Tomas Isdal also believes OneSwarm deters users from illegal activity. “OneSwarm doesn’t help you do anything illegal,” he says. “In fact, you probably don’t want your friends seeing you doing anything illegal and, hopefully, that is enough to deter  you from doing it.

“Today, there are technologies out there that allow you to be completely anonymous and do anything you want. OneSwarm is not such a technology. The police or law enforcement can still trace whoever posts illegal content if they really want to.”

Although OneSwarm doesn’t support illegal activity, Tomas Isdal believes piracy push technology forward. “It seems to be the case that ‘pirates’ are the first people to pick up a new technology and then, after a few years, the industry will catch on and adopt it themselves,” he says. “For instance, BitTorrent (peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data) was only used for pirates’ stuff about five years ago and is now increasingly used for legitimate content for big companies. One example is Blizzard Entertainment that uses it to distribute its game updates to millions of users.”

Tomas Isdal says interest in OneSwarm has grown, with companies trying to find ways of incorporating the program’s features into their own products. But equally as exciting in Tomas Isdal eyes is the feedback his team is getting from people in general.

“On one day, just a few weeks after going online, we had 300,000 visitors to our homepage,” he says. “It’s great when you receive feedback for something you’ve worked on for so long.”


Torunn Hansen-Tangen