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Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

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Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#51

Cool project but it's not remotely a clone of AirDrop. AirDrop is one of those things that can only be done by Apple, at least on iOS. I have many apps that have "documents" on iOS. I can select them in the app, pick "Share" and then pick "AirDrop" and send them to my Mac. AFAIK I can't do that through this. I go into those apps, select some files and pick send to Safari and I get an error, Safari doesn't support the…

Seems like it would be a cool side project to create a minimal iOS app that simply acts as a share target for this. Similarly for android and Windows. That would make it much easier to send. You’d still have to either visit the site or scan the QR code to receive, but making sending smoother would be a dramatic improvement. AirDrop is one of those things that is truly wonderful in how easily and simply it works, but…

There is a very new web standard for registering your site as a sharing target. It only works on Chrome and I assume Apple won't be rushing to implement it.

https://web.dev/web-share-target/

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#53

Cool project but it's not remotely a clone of AirDrop. AirDrop is one of those things that can only be done by Apple, at least on iOS. I have many apps that have "documents" on iOS. I can select them in the app, pick "Share" and then pick "AirDrop" and send them to my Mac. AFAIK I can't do that through this. I go into those apps, select some files and pick send to Safari and I get an error, Safari doesn't support the…

Seems like it would be a cool side project to create a minimal iOS app that simply acts as a share target for this. Similarly for android and Windows. That would make it much easier to send. You’d still have to either visit the site or scan the QR code to receive, but making sending smoother would be a dramatic improvement. AirDrop is one of those things that is truly wonderful in how easily and simply it works, but…

I want an app in the Share menu of macOS that enables me to send content to any executable (e.g. shell script). Services menu isn't the same and too many steps to set up.

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#54
post #34
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, couldn't you have used a torrent for that?

Great question! I considered it, but I wasn't able to find a clear answer whether it was secure or not. If somebody had access to the tracker backend or were inspecting the DHT traffic, would they be able to download the files without the original .torrent file? (Most of the BitTorrent docs assume you're intending to distribute the files publicly.) Not that the data was really worth protecting — it was just GoPro vid…

Did you consider encryption? Issue is that it adds one step at the start and at the end, which probably isn't negligible on 80gb of data.

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#55
post #19
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using Firefox Send recently, I have been really impressed with the simplicity and easy of use. I haven’t tried it, but it is open source and possible to self-host if you so chose. But for the time being it remains free, and you can share up to a generous 2.5 GB if you log in with a Firefox account so I see no reason to put in the effort yet. That being said, Sharedrop seems to be a different use case, only…

Meanwhile, I found the 2.5 GB limit on Firefox Send really frustrating this weekend when I was trying to send 80 GB of raw video files to a friend. :) Turns out there's very few options available for really large P2P file transfers, short of hosting an FTP server.

Actually, torrents are still kinda a go-to for p2p transfers.

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#56
post #34
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, couldn't you have used a torrent for that?

Great question! I considered it, but I wasn't able to find a clear answer whether it was secure or not. If somebody had access to the tracker backend or were inspecting the DHT traffic, would they be able to download the files without the original .torrent file? (Most of the BitTorrent docs assume you're intending to distribute the files publicly.) Not that the data was really worth protecting — it was just GoPro vid…

Well, you could use a private tracker/one that doesn't dump it's torrent-list publicly, and mark the torrent file itself as private, so your client won't share it on the DHT. Also, encrypting is orthogonal.

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#57
post #19
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using Firefox Send recently, I have been really impressed with the simplicity and easy of use. I haven’t tried it, but it is open source and possible to self-host if you so chose. But for the time being it remains free, and you can share up to a generous 2.5 GB if you log in with a Firefox account so I see no reason to put in the effort yet. That being said, Sharedrop seems to be a different use case, only…

Meanwhile, I found the 2.5 GB limit on Firefox Send really frustrating this weekend when I was trying to send 80 GB of raw video files to a friend. :) Turns out there's very few options available for really large P2P file transfers, short of hosting an FTP server.

There is a new tool around which can be used to send large files p2p with end to end encryption (I'm the developer behind it).

No mobile app yet but it already works on macOS, Windows and Linux.

cryo file manager

https://cryonet.io

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#58
post #21

Firebase is a really attractive service to quickly and easily bring powerful features to any app, but I can't help it.. I feel like I'd be including yet another way for Google to track people. Therefore I avoid any app with Firebase in them, no matter how cool they are. Am I overly suspicious here?

yes, you are. Google has no incentive to spy on Firebase projects because any project using firebase could contain sensitive data and any company that believed Google would spy on the data would not use them so Google would lose market. The same is true for AWS and Azure

Wait, are market incentives really the basis for hoping that Google doesn't spy on Firebase data?

I would have guessed because they'd be liable for breach of contract or GDPR or whatever.

What does Google say about its analytics applied to its Firebase customers?

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#59

https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole is another great one. * Native Client (in Go so you use pretty much everywhere) * Uses PAKE for E2E security. Even if the server is hostile they can't get anything.

Chiming in with yet another alternative, I had success with https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william which is also Go, but is compatible with the original python wormhole.

I think the main difference is that webwormhole tries to use STUN/firewall hole punching to connect two nodes, while the original implementation will use a TCP-TCP relay as fallback.

I recently needed to transfer a 30 GiB file within a restricted network but the firewall blocked webwormhole, so I ended up with -williams instead.

Hopefully at some point all these project can converge into something that supports ALL the solutions :-)

Re: Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC

#60
post #7

I use Firefox Send (works on all browsers), it's end to end encrypted and has automatic expiry: https://send.firefox.com/

For the tech savvy people, checkout ffsend as fully featured CLI tool for Send (shameless plug): https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend
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