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Ihtesham Ali (@ihteshamali) on X
This is how you share a file when you do not trust Google, Dropbox, or the government.
A free tool called OnionShare sends it directly through Tor...
This is how you share a file when you do not trust Google, Dropbox, or the government.
A free tool called OnionShare sends it directly through Tor.
Nothing needs to sit permanently on someone else's server.
Here's what actually happens when you use it.
You drag a file into the app. Your own computer turns into the server. Tor wraps it, and you get a long address ending in .onion that you send to whoever needs the file. They open it in Tor Browser and pull the file straight off your machine.
You close the app, the address dies.
Compare that to how everyone else moves files.
You drop it in Drive, Google keeps a copy. You use WeTransfer, that link lives on their infrastructure for a week, logged and tied to your IP. Every one of those services is a promise that a company will behave well, forever, under any amount of legal pressure.
OnionShare removes the company from the sentence.
Micah Lee built it in 2014. He'd worked with the journalists handling the Snowden documents and watched how many ways a source could get burned just trying to hand over a file. So he built the thing that removes the middle.
It does three things.
Send files with no size limit and no account.
Chat with someone and keep zero record of it.
Host an entire website off your laptop that disappears from the internet the moment you shut the lid.
The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Intercept all point sources at this. Those are newsrooms betting other people's freedom on a free download.
The interface looks like a file picker from 2011.
Someone spent years making the hardest privacy problem in computing feel like using WinZip, and that's the actual achievement here. A scared person at 2am is not going to configure a server. They can drag a file into a window.
It is completely open source.
Most people will never need this.
The ones who do don't get a second try if they picked the wrong app.
What do you think about this?
18.07.26
#onionshare