Tips and Tricks

onionshare 2.1 releases: Securely and anonymously share file

do son May 7, 2019 No Comments onionshareprivacy

OnionShare

OnionShare lets you securely and anonymously share files of any size. It works by starting a web server, making it accessible as a Tor onion service, and generating an unguessable URL to access and download the files. It doesn’t require setting up a server on the internet somewhere or using a third party file-sharing service. You host the file on your own computer and use a Tor onion service to make it temporarily accessible over the internet. The other user just needs to use Tor Browser to download the file from you.

Features:

  • A user-friendly drag-and-drop graphical user interface that works in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
  • Ability to share multiple files and folders at once
  • Support for multiple people downloading files at once
  • Automatically copies the unguessable URL to your clipboard
  • Shows you the progress of file transfers
  • When file is done transferring, automatically closes OnionShare to reduce the attack surface
  • Localized into several languages, and supports international Unicode filenames

Changelog v2.1

  • New feature: Auto-start timer, which allows scheduling when the server starts
  • Renamed CLI argument –debug to –verbose
  • Make Tor connection timeout configurable as a CLI argument
  • Updated various dependencies, including to fix third-party security issues in urllib3, jinja2, and jQuery
  • Update Tor to 0.3.5.8
  • New translations:
    • Traditional Chinese (正體中文 (繁體)),
    • Simplified Chinese (中文 (简体))
    • Finnish (Suomi)
    • German (Deutsch)
    • Icelandic (Íslenska)
    • Irish (Gaeilge)
    • Norwegian Bokmål (Norsk Bokmål)
    • Polish (Polski)
    • Portuguese Portugal (Português (Portugal))
    • Telugu (తెలుగు)
    • Turkish (Türkçe)
    • Ukrainian (Українська)
  • Removed translations because less than 90% of the strings were translated:
    • Bengali (বাংলা)
    • Persian (فارسی),

Download

How to Use

Before you can share files, you need to open Tor Browser in the background (or install and run a system Tor service). This will provide the Tor service that OnionShare uses to start the onion service.

Open OnionShare and drag and drop files and folders you wish to share, and click Start Sharing. It will show you a .onion URL such as http://asxmi4q6i7pajg2b.onion/egg-cain and copy it to your clipboard. This is the secret URL that can be used to download the file you’re sharing. If you’d like multiple people to be able to download this file, uncheck the “close automatically” checkbox.

Send this URL to the person you’re trying to send the files to. If the files you’re sending aren’t secret, you can use normal means of sending the URL: emailing it, posting it to Facebook or Twitter, etc. If you’re trying to send secret files then it’s important to send this URL securely.

The person who is receiving the files doesn’t need OnionShare. All they need is to open the URL you send them in Tor Browser to be able to download the file.

You can download OnionShare for Windows and macOS from https://onionshare.org/. It should be available in your package manager for Linux, and it’s included by default in Tails.

Copyright © 2014-2018 Micah Lee <micah@micahflee.com>

Source: https://github.com/micahflee/

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