Jesús Leganés Combarro "Piranna" - [[email protected]]

Based on code from Rich Jones - rich@gun.io

ShareIt! is a "Peer to Peer" filesharing system written in pure Javascript and based on the DirtyShare proof-of-concept by Rich Jones.

If you will fork the project (and more if you want to do modifications) please send me an email to let me know :-)

File transfers in ShareIt! happen from a host client to a peer client, in chunks which go through the webserver over WebSockets provided by Socket.IO like a proxy, and in the future directly thanks to WebRTC PeerConnection DataChannels. The web server only holds onto the data while it is being received and transmitted through it, so there is no data ever permanently stored on the web server. This makes it perfect for anonymity.

Ideally, the WebSockets will only be used to establish the P2P connections which will go over the HTML5 PeerConnection object, however, no modern browsers support this feature yet. Hopefully, it will become available within the last quarter of 2012 or so, and we will be ready for it from the start.

Let's make a purely browser based, ad-free, Free and Open Source private and anonymous filesharing system!

• Adapt protocol to connection + function, more in the way DataChannel will work
• Integrate Javascript from 'html' and 'html_advance' folders to create a new WebP2P framework

If you'd like to discuss P2P web applications further, send an email to

[email protected]

and you'll be part of the discussion mailing list! (Archives here.)

Currently, the web app static files on the 'html' folder can be served by a regular web server. For example, if you have Python installed they can be served directly from the folder using

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

so the web server will be available on http://localhost:8000.

The peer connections are managed by a socket.io proxy build on Node.js, so you'll need to have installed Node.js and the module 'socket.io' (you can install it with the Node.js 'npm' tool). Later, you can be able to launch it just writting on a terminal

node connect_websockets.js

and the socket.io proxy will be running on http://localhost:8001.

Regarding to the browser, you will need Firefox v14 or Internet Explorer 10 (Chrome/Chromium will be available when is fixed a bug related to storing File object references on IndexedDB, luckily on September - pun intended ;-) ). Because the IndexedDB is common accesed by all the browser tabs, to test it locally on the same machine instead of with two computers/browsers/virtual machines you can do it with Firefox launching two instances each one with it's own profile. You can be able to do it with 'firefox -P -no-remote' to show the Firefox ProfileManager and force to create a new full instance instead of open a new browser on the current running up.

• Work on doing proper PeerConnection based transfers when builds are available.
• Clean it up. It's a little dirty.
• Send as little data as possible.
• Find the optimal size for chunking. Currently set at 64Kb - this is arbitrary.
• Security, of any kind.
• Drag and drop of files, so my roommate shuts up about it.

For now, consider this code to be under the Affero GNU General Public License. I am willing to relicense it under the BSD/MIT/Apache license, I simply ask that you email me and tell me why. I'll almost certainly agree.

Patches graciously accepted!