StealthNet a new client for RShare network
What is RShare?
RShare is a young and ambitious software project with a fast growing community and active supports. Compared with other anonymous filesharing programs like MUTE or ANts P2P RShare is under active and continuous development. The active community supports RShare with best efforts and Lars Regensburger (the author of RShare) tries to implement useful suggestions from the community as fast as possible.
RShare strives to provide users from conventional direct connection networks like eMule or so a secure, anonymous and comfortable alternative. Although RShare is a newbie compared with other programs like eDonkey if offers a lot of interesting features which other anonymous programs lack of. Independant of this fact RShare can download files secure and anonymous by now.
Conventional P2P filesharing networks are in no way anonymous. Each participant can be identified with ease due to his unique IP address while he is performing actions like downloading or uploading.
Companies, organizations and authorities use this weakness of traditional P2P filesharing networks to track down people who download or offer particular files within a filesharing network. RShare protects his users from this kind of surveillance and gives them back a part of their freedom when they use the Internet.
What is RShare good for?
Regular filesharing networks like eDonkey are in no way anonymous. Each network participiant can be tracked down with ease because his IP address is visible to all other network participiants. Moreover, all his actions (downloading and uploading for instance) can be monitored and recorded. It is a well-known fact that heavily modified versions of open source P2P clients are used by organisations like IFPI, MPAA or RIAA to track down filesharers.
Companies, organisations and authorities all over the world use the weakness of traditional networks like visible IP addresses to locate people sharing copyrighted stuff, for instance. RShare protects the privacy of each user who participates on the RShare network and provides several countermeasures to deal with Internet/network surveillance.
RShare is a Peer-to-Peer Filesharing program for file exchange over the Internet. The difference between regular P2P networks like eDonkey or so and RShare is that upload and download of files is completely anonymous as well as the user is.
RShare anonymity workings
Compared with server-based filesharing systems like eDonkey2000 there are no central or dedicated servers within the RShare network so correlation of IP addresses to files is nearly impossible.
Conventional serverless filesharing networks maintain direct connections between participating clients (FastTrack/Kazaa, Kademlia, Gnutella or BitTorrent). In contrast RShare clients use never direct connections, the network traffic is rather routed trough several other RShare nodes/clients.
IP addresses of senders and recipients in the RShare network are hidden. Instead of IP addresses so-called RShare IDs are used which canīt be correlated with IP addresses. In addition all data routed between RShare nodes is encrypted so even ISPs canīt analyze transmitted data to check if you are doing some kind of filesharing.
The RShare “Who is Who”
All users of RShare filesharing software (RShare Client) are participiants in the RShare network which is completely independent and shielded from the rest of the Internet. To create connections to other participiants Webcaches are needed.
Webcaches are intended to store IP addresses and ports of other network participiants until they disconnect from the RShare network. This data is not stored in a log file for longer periods. Each time a new participiant joins the RShare network he receives connection informations from the Webcaches to successfully attend the RShare network.
The Webcaches does neither store informations about the files shared by network users nor do they record concrete activities. Webcaches doesnīt play the same role as regular servers in non-anonymous networks. Connections to Webaches have a temporary character and are only needed when users join the network or when they disconnect from it.
Each RShare client who is connected to the RShare network acts automatically as a network node through which a part of the network/data traffic is routed. That way indirect connections between file hosters and file recipients are feasible. A node is called a peer when he becomes active, for instance when he search for files or has active downloads and/or uploads.
Encrypted connections persist between all RShare recipients like nodes and peers. Each client has only a few direct connections to other nodes or peers.
It is a great pleasure for us to present you the first release of StealthNet, a client for the anonymous RShare network.
1. Kudos
First off I will start with the kudos. They fly out to
- Lars, because without this guy neither the RShare network nor the StealthNet client would exist. He created the RShare client as well as the protocol for the RShare network and deserves our full respect Cool
- without a highly engaged developer team StealthNet would never have been born and for this reason a huge "thanks!" goes out to this guys. I am glad to be part of such a great team and want and want to let you know that it is a great pleasure for me to be involved in the StealthNet development process
- the Beta team. Without these guys a lot of bugs would never have been found and fixed and I can assure that they are great bug hunters Smiley
- our design department who created the new StealthNet splash screen and the StealthNet icon
2. New features
StealthNet 0.8 has a lot of new and funky features in comparison with RShare Chamäleon 0.7.1.5:
- Download Resuming (allows resuming of interrupted downloads)
- Optimized bandwidth allocation when upload/download limit is activated
- Shared files and directories are now added or removed in real time
- Redundant downloads from multiple sources have been removed
- Multilanguage support (as of now Englisch and German is supported, French and Spanish will follow)
- Search filter for file types
- Pre-defined search for file extensions
The most important feature in particular is download resuming. From now on interrupted downloads can be resumed once a file source is available in the RShare network.
3. Future prospects
There are already a lot of further enhancements in the pipeline which I canīt talk about at the moment. However, I can assure that the RShare network is growing day by day and with language support for French and Spanish we expect even more new users.
4. Feedback
Due to the first release of StealthNet 0.8 it is very likely that this version contains some bugs. To give us some feedback you can use this thread. Do not hesitate to post error reports or suggestions there.
5. Download
Aware of the Planet Peer download section (for registered users only!) there are some other mirrors which provides free downloads of StealthNet without any registration.
http://www.stealthnet.de/download/stealthnet_setup.exe
http://www.stealthnet.de/download/St....7.1_Linux.zip
http://home.arcor.de/eroli/StealthNe...hnet_setup.exe
http://home.arcor.de/eroli/StealthNe....7.1_Linux.zip
http://www.screamingfist.de/download...hnet_setup.exe
http://www.screamingfist.de/download....7.1_Linux.zip
Important: If you got StealthNet from a source other then the ones above I highly recommend to compare the SHA-1 hashes for the StealthNet setup program and the archive with StealthNet for Linux!
SHA1 Hash: 55BF97D293A2BF57DF9295DDC5BFF70C55C4499D stealthnet_setup.exe
SHA1 Hash: 52EEB27227CCF072D89F41392D998E88B937B87B stealthnet2007.6.7.1_linux.zip
http://www.planetpeer.de/wiki/index...._%28English%29
http://www.stealthnet.de/
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Originally Posted by anon-sbi
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