191–200 of 542 posts
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?
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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. T…
Android phones show up as MTP devices, which are basically file-level storage instead of block-level storage. Most OS's (besides MacOS) will display this with the same interface as a USB mass storage device.
As a possible explanation for this issue, I think that if you use the internet to share data, it's more likely that Google makes money from some of the interactions (either via ads in the app or via play store tax or idk because the service is hosted in GCP or whatever) than if you used an internet-free method, so Google doesn't prioritize bugfixes that would hurt their revenue. Edit: would love to be proven wrong though!
Does Firefox Send work on browsers besides Firefox for sending and receiving files? It's blocked at my office, so I can't test it.
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.
Does the link expire after a successful transfer? Curious what happens if the transfer fails mid transfer and needs a retry.
But to answer your question, I uploaded a 100mb+ file to FireFox Send, copied the link, RDPd into another computer, kicked off the download, and then cancelled it midway through download. The link did expire after that.
So I guess they don't have an easy way of telling whether the download is successful or not. Maybe Mozilla's engineers can figure something out if the issue is raised.
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> allowing a computer to mount a filesystem directly requires that the phone unmount it I don't think that's true. My S8 storage is mounted and accessible from my computer right now while at the same time playing music from the same storage. I can still take pictures/write to the storage.
As mass storage, or MTP? The distinction is why I qualified with "mount a filesystem directly". MTP doesn't do that.
Pointing out that the protocol used is leaky or bad in some technical way doesn't change that Android phones do in fact show up as removable storage devices when connected to (at least Windows) PC's. Your original assertion was incorrect.
samcday even said they just wanted to copy some files around. You don't need to be able to modify files in-place from the PC to accomplish this.
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What about https://syncthing.net/ ? EDIT: I know you said without going through the internet. Syncthing can be configured to only transfer over specific networks (e.g. home LAN/WI-FI)
I've been using it for (almost) everything and it has always work perfectly: I keep my phone's picture in sync with my personal computers ("send only" so I can remove old photos when my SD card is getting full). I sync a "media" folder where I dump all the music and video I download with the youtube-dl CLI (a "yt" alias makes sure the files are stored in the right directory with some custom parameters). I sync my Kee…
Here is the related issue: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/29
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The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Google simply wants to maximize the use of their servers here (independent of what users want/need): 1. P2P doesn’t give Google all that juicy mineable data that they get when everything you do makes round trips through their servers. 2. This would also implicitly encourage Android users to rely more on services like Google Drive/Docs for all files, which is good for them. Edi…
In addition to NUMEROUS 3rd party tools, Google already provides a tool exactly like AirDrop for Android. It's a feature of the Files app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... which has over 100M installs. Look at the 3rd screenshot. ENCRYPTED FILE SHARING Files’s offline file sharing is secured with WPA2 encryption, providing a more secure file transfer. Files app uses Bluetooth to set up e…
I really don't understand why they didn't share a link to the repository in the article. For anyone who's interested - here it is: https://github.com/mozilla/send
Why not "Mozilla Send"? If Firefox the browser isn't a requirement, the name is confusing.
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?