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Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

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Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

#111

Post by sdaslo »

_petronius wrote: post #35
mFixman wrote: post #12

I can't believe that there isn't a simple service to transfer data between my cellphone and my computer without going through the internet. iTunes is terribly bloated, MTP is a mess, and Bluetooth is slow and frustrating. Back in my hacker day I used to have an SSH server open on my cellphone and use it to transfer files back and forth with my computer. Why isn't there a mainstream service like that?

I recently switched back to iOS after years on Android, and on this point I've been very impressed with Airdrop. Dead simple UI, very quick transfer speeds, uses WiFi or Bluetooth as available. It's just a shame that it's limited to Apple devices.

Isn’t it because it’s limited to apple devices that it works so nicely? Even some times before recent updates they’ve made, ive had airdrop work improperly where my old MacBook Air wouldnt show up, etc etc. it would be a nightmare to get that working across android and pc devices

Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

#112

Post by dTal »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #37
samcday wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially related - I've always thought it's dumb that I can't just plug my iPhone in to any PC and have it show up as a removable storage device. I'm sure people who know more than me will give me a list of great reasons why it's not straightforward to implement... But it doesn't change the fact that I have this incredible device (iPhone X) with 256gb of blindingly fast NAND flash storage, of which I am only util…

> I'm sure people who know more than me will give me a list of great reasons why it's not straightforward to implement... Nah, Android phones have done this forever, it's not technical difficulties stopping it from working. It's The Apple Way . They don't want you using your phone that way, or something.

Android phones don't do this anymore, for the technical reason that allowing a computer to mount a filesystem directly requires that the phone unmount it. Mass storage expects a block device, so there's no wrapper that one could provide that would make this work with the native filesystems of the phone.

What could be done is to dedicate a file on the phone as block storage, and expose that as a mass storage device. This would suffer from the same problem (of the phone not being able to access it at the same time), but if it's dedicated "flash drive emulation" space then perhaps this behavior won't be as surprising to the user.

Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

#113

Post by mikro2nd »

smoser wrote: post #81
mFixman wrote: post #12

I can't believe that there isn't a simple service to transfer data between my cellphone and my computer without going through the internet. iTunes is terribly bloated, MTP is a mess, and Bluetooth is slow and frustrating. Back in my hacker day I used to have an SSH server open on my cellphone and use it to transfer files back and forth with my computer. Why isn't there a mainstream service like that?

Besides AirDrop there is "Copy and Paste across devices" https://support.apple.com/kb/ph25168?locale=en_US

> copy text, images, photos, and videos on one Apple device and then paste the content on another Apple device

So not so much for my Linux box or my Android phone, then. As usual with Apple's shiny crap it "all just works" as long as you're only playing inside the walled tarpit.

Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

#114

Post by Vinnl »

EwanToo wrote: post #70
seveneightn9ne wrote: post #61

How is this using end-to-end encryption? It seems like the recipient just clicks a link to download. How can it have been encrypted for that person? end-to-end encryption normally means that there's no way for the intermediary to unencrypt the data but I can't see how that's possible in this case.

The url effectively contains the decryption key, so the web server could be set to capture the urls and decrypt files. If you want, you can also set a passphrase on the file to share via another channel

That's why the key is in the hash part of the URL; the server can't access that (unless it also sends client Javascript that parses it and sends it back to the server, but that could be detected).

Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

#115

Post by untog »

_petronius wrote: post #35
mFixman wrote: post #12

I can't believe that there isn't a simple service to transfer data between my cellphone and my computer without going through the internet. iTunes is terribly bloated, MTP is a mess, and Bluetooth is slow and frustrating. Back in my hacker day I used to have an SSH server open on my cellphone and use it to transfer files back and forth with my computer. Why isn't there a mainstream service like that?

I recently switched back to iOS after years on Android, and on this point I've been very impressed with Airdrop. Dead simple UI, very quick transfer speeds, uses WiFi or Bluetooth as available. It's just a shame that it's limited to Apple devices.

Agreed. And app hand-off (for the small number of apps that use it, basically only Safari for me) is fantastic as a "task transfer" tool as well.

Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

#116

Post by tyingq »

_bxg1 wrote: post #100

Ah man, I literally came up with (and prototyped) this exact thing in 2013. Minus the end to end encryption. I dropped it mostly because I wasn't sure how to prevent illegal use and didn't want to be liable. Edit: mine was actually (partially) better because it assigned a short PIN instead of a full link, which meant you could just look at it and remember it for typing-in, instead of requiring a separate channel to "…

The end to end encryption necessitates a hard to remember uri anyway, so I don't think you can have both "secure" and "memorable".

Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

#118

Post by navaati »

gsich wrote: post #38
navaati wrote: post #23

I must say I am disapointed. I thought this would be some cool realtime system to send from browser to browser, using WebRTC or something. Something that doesn't involve them paying for file servers, by the way. I believed in Mozilla ! But no, here we are and I just don't see the difference between this and Mega. EDIT: except for the auto-deletion trick that addresses the piracy problem. But still...

But that would require more brain and effort. Since many users are usually behind a NAT, some NAT-traversal is neccessary. Combined with a robust detection (for shitty networks) and fallback to "normal" servers ... you get the idea.

WebRTC does all that already !

Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service

#120

Post by drewg123 »

timvisee wrote: post #50

I've been building a fully featured CLI tool for Firefox Send, supporting this new release. For anyone that is interested: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend

FWIW, I built and successfully ran it on FreeBSD-current. The only hiccup I ran into was that it puked building due to not having /usr/local/lib in its lib search path & not being able to find libxcb. I had to manually add -L/usr/local/lib to the cc args and manually link it. Not sure if that is a FreeBSD issue w/Rust, or something in your package.

At any rate, the tool works! Thanks so much.

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