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 ;-)
- 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 (look at the bottom of this page for clickable links).
http://www.stealthnet.de/download/stealthnet_setup.exe
http://www.stealthnet.de/download/StealthNet2007.6.7.1_Linux.zip
http://home.arcor.de/eroli/StealthNet/stealthnet_setup.exe
http://home.arcor.de/eroli/StealthNet/StealthNet2007.6.7.1_Linux.zip
http://www.screamingfist.de/download/stealthnet_setup.exe
http://www.screamingfist.de/download/StealthNet2007.6.7.1_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
1. What is StealthNet?
======================
StealthNet is based on the original RShare client and has been enhanced by a developer team who consists of Planet Peer community members. In comparison with the current RShare client StealthNet offers a lot of new features like download resuming (interrupted downloads can be resumed), multilanguage support, a search filter for several file types and much more.
2. What are the differences between StealthNet and RShare?
============================================================
StealthNet 0.8 offers a bunch of new features which RShare lacks of:
- 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
In the early stages StealthNet was known as RShare Community Edition (RShare CE). However, due to several reasons we had to rename this project to its new name StealthNet. This is the reason why the RShare forums on the Planet Peer Board (http://board.planetpeer.de) also have been renamed to RShare / StealthNet.
Both clients are open source and source code is available. They are released under the GPL.
3. How does it work?
=================
The RShare network as well as the network protocol were developed by Lars Regensburger with strong anonymity/security and acceptable download rates in mind. All traffic in the RShare network is routed trough other nodes in the network. Furthermore, traffic is encrypted with point-to-point encryption. In combination this two techniques provide a very high level of anonymity.
If you want to learn more about RShare/StealthNet and his tech specs the Planet Peer Wiki is highly recommended:
a) RShare: http://www.planetpeer.de/wiki/index.php/RShare_%28English%29
b) StealthNet: http://www.planetpeer.de/wiki/index.php/StealthNet_%28English%29
4. Advantages over other anonymous P2P networks
=====================================================
As a matter of course StealthNet is not the only client for anonymous file sharing. There are a lot of others available, like ANts or MUTE. However, StealthNet has one important advantage: In comparison with its competitors it is under _active_ development by a developer team and feature requests from the community are incorporated.
Some more advantages are:
- Straightforward handling, even for beginners: Install, enable port forwarding and you are good to go! Anonymous P2P canīt be easier
- Modern and user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI): Due to a GUI similar to eMule users are able to work in no time with StealthNet
- Fast file transfers: As measured by the fact that StealthNet is an anonymous P2P client it has great download rates, especially when it comes to small files (depends on several factors)
- Has anti-flood-measure in place to avoid network sabotage like flooding the network with useless data packets or so
- Command line client for systems with Mono support like Linux, OSX and so on is available
5. Why should one use StealthNet instead of eDonkey & co.?
==============================================
Thatīs pretty simple. StealthNet was primarily developed with strong anonymity and security in mind. It offers a great level of protection which other networks lacks of. In comparion with regular P2P networks like eDonkey it is nearly impossible to locate users who provide content within the RShare network. The complete traffic within the network is encrypted by approved and popular encryption techniques and downloads are routed through several other nodes so nobody can correlate whatīs going on between the nodes.
6. Downloads
============
If you are now interested in StealthNet and want to give it a try you can use the following download locations:
Main download page: Planet Peer download section (downloads are only available for registered users!)
Mirrors (free downloads without registration):
Mirror 1, Windows
Mirror 1, Linux
Mirror 2, Windows
Mirror 2, Linux
Mirror 3, Windows
Mirror 3, Linux
7. Support
========
The RShare network is currently growing rapidly day by day and with the advent of StealthNet the RShare network gets another boost. For this reason there is a huge and helpful community which offers technical support and much more:
Wiki with detailed documentation
Direct link to StealthNet documentation
Direct link to RShare documentation
StealthNet Subversion server: svn://www.rs71.net/rshare
Official RShare web site (is sometimes offline)