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How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

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Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#251

Post by aspyct »

NanoYohaneTSU wrote: post #237
aspyct wrote: post #136

I regularly have to send files to customers, from a few megabytes to a few gigs. It's incredibly hard. Mail? Goes to spam. WeTransfer? Mail clients break URL. Download from my website? Some stupid browser will display the zip data onscreen. Send the link through messenger? Messenger breaks the link. SaaS gallery? Some file managers can't open the zip file. I've been doing that for two years now. Still don't have a 10…

This is frankly bizarre. How are they unable to access Dropbox? How are you unable to share via GOOGLE? Are you simply unaware these solutions exist?

If I'm using WeTransfer, you can bet I tried Google drive and dropbox...

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#252

Post by fransje26 »

Goto80 wrote: post #203
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Writing code is fun, but I can't find much of a downside with Bluetooth here. "You can accidentally turn it on" (fair, I guess?) "and it drains battery like crazy" (it shouldn't unless you have a very buggy device) don't seem like that bad compared to Yet Another File Sharing App. I remember way back in the Android 4 era, my phone and my tablet both supported some "standard" form of WiFi Direct. It worked intuitively…

> Writing code is fun, but I can't find much of a downside with Bluetooth here. Yesterday my son needed to transfer a video file from his Android phone to his school iPad. We tried Bluetooth, but it simply kept failing, no matter what we tried. The devices saw each other and could be paired, but file transfer didn't work at all. We tried sending the same video file to another Android phone, and it just worked on firs…

Give those options a try:

- https://www.sharedrop.io/

- https://webwormhole.io/

- https://snapdrop.net/

- https://perguth.de/peertransfer/

- https://pairdrop.net/

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#253

Post by ndr »

tptacek wrote: post #223
rkangel wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a good asynchronous solution, but if you can do it while on the phone/Teams with them, then Web Wormhole ( https://webwormhole.io/ ) is absolutely fantastic. You both open a web page, you drag a file onto yours and it starts appearing in their download folder. It's WebRTC based so peer-to-peer, E2E encrypted, with servers only used for serving the client, and for NAT punching.

What you really want is the native iOS or Android version of this (or of any Magic Wormhole derivative), which the wormhole-william people are working on (I think the Android version already works).

How is an iOS version of this going to be any better than web? It seems iOS imposes a lot of storage restrictions on apps.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#254

Post by NotPractical »

jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Writing code is fun, but I can't find much of a downside with Bluetooth here. "You can accidentally turn it on" (fair, I guess?) "and it drains battery like crazy" (it shouldn't unless you have a very buggy device) don't seem like that bad compared to Yet Another File Sharing App. I remember way back in the Android 4 era, my phone and my tablet both supported some "standard" form of WiFi Direct. It worked intuitively…

Bluetooth is really slow, that's the main drawback.

WiFi Direct is a really great technology but unfortunately it is as simple as its name implies: it's a peer-to-peer version of WiFi. It establishes a connection between two devices, but you need to do everything else (like figuring out how to send files over the socket) yourself.

There are plenty of cross-platform apps that implement WiFi Direct file sharing though.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#256

Post by PeterisP »

enriquto wrote: post #209
PeterisP wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume that both devices are behind a different NAT with no inbound ports publicly accessible, which is a very common scenario - e.g. a phone behind a cell provider's carrier-grade NAT and a computer on a firewalled corporate network. The median user controls 0 public IPv4 addresses.

What would a canonical hacker do here?

The median hacker would likely have something available with proper internet connectivity, they are substantially different from the median user.

But many of the solutions mentioned in the article and comments will effectively use some "third place" to link the two devices, e.g. how magic wormhole does that.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#257

Post by geophile »

mkotowski wrote: post #77
DaSHacka wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we had something like AirDrop that reliably worked cross-platform. Proximity-based sharing just makes significantly more sense than uploading files to some server miles away, then immediately redownloading them back when the computer was two feet away from you the whole time.

Maybe LocalSend? https://localsend.org/ Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and macOS. Seems quite cross-platform. Can confirm it works smoothly for Linux and Android at the very least.

Never heard of it. Just tried it. Easy to install and run, copied one file in each direction (Linux/iOS).

Seems to good to be true. Are we sure this isn't malware?

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#258

Post by NotPractical »

enriquto wrote: post #101

Any hackers left here? Why no one mentions netcat? # send cat file | nc -l -p 8888 # receive nc IP-OF-SENDER 8888 > file this works as long as both computers are connected to the same network, for example the internet

I would also wrap it in a WireGuard tunnel, especially if doing it over the Internet, unless you want your fellow hackers intercepting everything you're transferring.

P.S. I love WireGuard, it's easy to set up and allows you to use protocols with no encryption (or bad proprietary encryption) securely.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#259

Post by marcosdumay »

aspyct wrote: post #206
mjevans wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most webservers have a way of adding a header# Content-disposition "attachment; filename=$1"; that forces downloads. Nginx at least guesses based on file extension / mime type. # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9054354/how-to-force-fil... # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37131398/how-to-configur... FYI - I've also recently run across end users who are likely victims of overzealous IT departments that disable…

I have that header. Yet some personal iOS device decided to ignore it on safari. Don't know how, don't know why. Computers being computers.

Firefox used to have a settings screen where you could go file type by file type overriding the browser behavior and setting it to ignore Content-Disposition.

Maybe Safari has something similar.

Re: How to copy a file between devices? (2022)

#260

Post by stcg »

phh wrote: post #205
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Writing code is fun, but I can't find much of a downside with Bluetooth here. "You can accidentally turn it on" (fair, I guess?) "and it drains battery like crazy" (it shouldn't unless you have a very buggy device) don't seem like that bad compared to Yet Another File Sharing App. I remember way back in the Android 4 era, my phone and my tablet both supported some "standard" form of WiFi Direct. It worked intuitively…

Yes, this is killing me. I have a colleague that told me "on iPhones I can super easily share files to someone else", and I'm like "20 years ago sharing files across devices was a non-issue, because we had STANDARDS (ok maybe 17-18 years ago rather). Sharing files wasn't considered a feature worth mentioning because every phone supported this out of the box (well not exactly, so the feature was having Bluetooth). Tec…

Is bluetooth not usable anymore?
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