My contribution to XKCD’s #949

Looks quite neat :).

I'd say UPnP but that's a whole new can of worms (a much bigger one at that).

Didn't Dropbox's share links more or less solve this problem? Maybe not for 100% of the population, but I've managed to walk my mom through the process, and isn't that generally the success metric for things like this?

On Windows, I run a local torrent tracker (built into uTorrent: bt.enable_tracker true) and share the magnet links.

The disadvantages are that I need to create a torrent file with my ip in announce field for each file I want to share and that the recipient must have torrent software (all of my friends incidentally do).

Perhaps I could simplify the torrent creation using the correct announce field with a nifty right click - 'Send to' script. edit: Looks like it would be possible with a combination of https://github.com/bittorrent/btc , http://www.robertnitsch.de/projects/py3createtorrent and a batch file.

The advantages are built-in checksumming, no intermediate upload server, interoperability with various torrent software, ability to stop and resume the transfer at any time and very good transfer rates (for some reason I've had terrible performance with those browser-to-browser services like e.g. sharefest)

Even worse since more and more ISPs switch to carrier grade NAT without also switching to dual stack IPv6.