Sharing and Receiving Files Anonymously With OnionShare
Whether you are a spy or a computer geek, there are many ways to share and receive files with others without revealing anyone’s identity. Whatever your reasons for wanting this privacy, be it the host or the sender, it’s easy to create a virtual dump for your data – top-secret or otherwise mundane.
A brand new version of the popular OnionShare app came out the other day, and I recommend giving it a try if you want to establish secret connections with friends or strangers on the Internet. The open source application takes advantage of Tor’s translation management capabilities, mainly ensuring people are anonymous – if you know it and, say, don’t use your real Facebook account to share a link to your OnionShare. dropbox on the base.
To get started, download and install the free OnionShare app (for Windows / macOS / Linux). Launch it and you will automatically start connecting to the Tor network. Once this is done, you can choose from several options on the main OnionShare screen:
One of the funniest updates to OnionShare 2.3 is that each of these features now runs in a separate tab. In previous versions of the app, you couldn’t choose to receive files and send files to someone at the same time. Now you can do everything at the same time – share files, host websites and chat anonymously.
If you want to create a dump for incoming files, just click on the “Start receiving” link in the ” Receive files” section . You will be asked where you want these files to be stored on your system:
Click Start Receive Mode and you will receive a dedicated web address. Copy and paste it into people – ideally individual people you know, not like a web forum – and they can use the Tor browser to send files to you.
Those who send files to you through their Tor browsers will see a simple screen that looks like this:
And it’s all. Sending files from one system to another is easy, but it takes a little time. At least I felt like the 86 MB I transferred over Tor took a lot longer than normal uploading / downloading files from the Internet (as you would expect, given how Tor works ).
Click on the little down arrow icon in the upper right corner of OnionShare to see what people have sent you and when. You can also quickly navigate to the location of the file on your system by clicking the icon to the right of the specified size:
While you have the receiving line running, you can also open a new tab using the + icon in the upper left corner of the OnionShare window and do something else — for example, share the file with someone else. Launch the Share Files feature from the main OnionShare menu and drag and drop something into the window:
To do this, you will need to click on the large ” Start Sharing” box. When you do this, you will receive another OnionShare url that you will need to send to others. They will launch a URL in the Tor browser to grab your file.
I have not tried the Host a Website or Chat Anonymously features on OnionShare as I am not interested in either, especially the latter. Also, you use your own bandwidth to host a website that anyone can visit as long as it has a dedicated URL (and of course the Tor browser) and your ISP might not approve this if you become incredibly popular. To be honest, the chat feature sounds ominous than it actually is; it actually launches a chat server to which others connect through the Tor browser. You too, since you can’t just chat with people connected to your server through OnionShare itself; you will need to launch your Tor browser to participate. And all you can do is talk – not share files or images, for example.