I currently have two technical topics that interest me a lot. One is SQLite, of which I am always surprised by its functionality and ease, and the other is Tor, which I find quite interesting because of its encryption and because I recently listened to Edward Snowden’s book “Permanent Record” as an audio book.

Today I came across OnionShare through an article on golem.de. I think I only heard about this program once quite a long time ago. What does it do? It allows to share files, provide web pages or chat anonymously via Tor.

Especially the anonymous file sharing feature is interesting. Instead of uploading the files to a cloud (which is actually just someone else’s computer), an Onion service is started locally on the computer, from which the recipient can retrieve the files. By default, this is also password protected.

As I mentioned the other day, the great thing about Onion services is that it doesn’t need port forwarding like if you want to provide a website directly on the Internet, but the service can also be provided behind a NAT.

To receive the files it needs the Tor browser or another browser that can access Tor pages, but you can also use it for other things and even for smartphones there is a Tor browser version.