This text is intended as a short introduction to StealthNet, a new client for the anonymous RShare network.

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.

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 also have been renamed to RShare/StealthNet.

Both clients are open source and source code is available. They are released under the GPL.

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 through 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

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 can´t 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

Why should one use StealthNet instead of eDonkey & co.?

That´s 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 what´s going on between the nodes.