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?
With macOS and iOS, Airdrop, as others have stated. For other platform combinations, there is NitroShare[1] which works in almost the same way.
Very clean and nice, but how is this financed? That is, who's paying for the server storage and the bandwidth?
First off, Mozilla believes in the service. Mozilla itself gets funding from donations and corporate backing (I think). The cost of bandwidth is small compared to other file share sites in that the files stored are temporary. The transient nature of the files means that the max storage space needed is relative to the concurrent number of users. Bandwidth also. That means sans a very clever DDoS their expenses should be manageable compared to say Google Drive, Dropbox, or MS One Drive.
I remember sending a signed PDF via Firefox Send and was at first horrified when I realized I couldn't get the file back after 24 hours but then relieved knowing that the recipient got it and then it disappeared from the internet. Very cool!
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?
SimpleSSHD is a simple ad-free open-source SSH server for your Android phone (available on Google Play). It's very useful. It only supports public-key based authentication, so you can't use a password, however.
> It only supports public-key based authentication, so you can't use a password, however.
If there's any chance of this thing being exposed to a public network (like, say, a cell network), I'd say that's a very good thing!
Is the source available for this? A self-hosted version of this would be nice... (Update: Yep, just found it: https://github.com/mozilla/send , just before the comment below was posted :))
Anybody have a nice docker version to run this at home?
I've used Firefox Send for several months while it was still a test pilot program. It's been very useful for quickly sending files to family. The fact that the link expires as soon as the other party downloads it means I don't have to worry about clean up.
Do you ever run into a problem when an overzealous email service or virus scanner pre-fetches the link and invalidates it before an actual person clicks on it? This used to happen with all sorts of links in emails, though I haven't heard about it in a while.
To my knowledge, the link is only invalidated if the person actually downloads the file. Simply viewing the link does not invalidate it. I can recall a couple of times emailing a Send link to my brother, then checking it in the morning to see if he had grabbed him or not. It was still viewable, so I deduced that he hadn't grabbed it yet, sent him a follow-up e-mail ("Hey you lazy bastard, grab the damn file before it automatically expires!"), and checked again a few hours later to find it gone.
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
Python cli version at https://github.com/ehuggett/send-cli disclaimer: I haven't used either cli version.
Cool. Sadly, I don't think the client supports the current Firefox Send version though. Method of encryption has been changed during the last few months.
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.
Thanks for sharing your solution! Not sure what is causing it (maybe it's OpenSSL binding related), and am currently not really targeting FreeBSD yet. I wasn't fully ready with this tool for the Firefox Send release to be honest, would have loved to be able to provide better binaries and packages for more platforms, which are a work in progress. If you believe you can improve the README with your solution, be sure to…
It's a BSD world thing :). Local (i.e. non-system) executables and libraries go under /usr/local around here (i.e. libraries under /usr/local/lib, binaries under /usr/local/bin and so on, the hierarchy under /usr/local has the same structure as that under /usr).
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...
https://file.pizza/
This is the tool I wanted to write! This is honestly the best solution I can imagine. It's FAXing for the 21st century