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Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#271

Post by nikisweeting »

ekianjo wrote: post #224
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just encrypt your stuff beforehand. This is such a facepalm moment. "This service is awesome, it does everything you need, it's reliable, it's safe, it's practical, and all you have to do is encrypt your files, share encryption keys, validate identities, and establish trust with the person you're sharing with. Also if you screw it up in any way, your file is public forever. It's so rad!"

> Also if you screw it up in any way, your file is public forever. You can literally say that for ANYTHING out there. Not sure what point you are trying to make. Let me guess, "Encryption is hard?". Well there's no free lunch.

Well there was free lunch when Mozilla's Send thing was running. Sharing the password in the URL hash was brilliant. But then it ran into all the same Mega.nz problems where people immediately use it to host malware.

Encryption is hard, which is why it's sad to see that when someone gets it right and nails the UX, it still gets ruined by the real world somehow.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#272

Post by emit_time »

kvn_95 wrote: post #2

Magic Wormhole ( https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ ) if it's between OSes. Between OSX, AirDrop works very well. I have sent >10GB files between Macs, quite quick as well. I have never send a 10TB file so I wouldn't know. None of my drives are that large yet :)

Just had a 41GB set of files sent to me in one transfer using magic-wormhole. Worked first try without a hitch. Pretty awesome from the receiving end.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#274

Post by toastal »

immigrantsheep wrote: post #160
StavrosK wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happens in Greece with buses. It's a very popular way for moms to send home-made food to their single/university student sons.

In Croatia as well :)

In Laos the (mini)buses were the most reliable way to ship anything. We had 3 motorbikes strapped to the top and a sat cattycorner to a caged chicken on my trek through the north in a 15-seater minibus.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#275

Post by cgb223 »

arsome wrote: post #179
livueta wrote: post #86

Bittorrent. No, really. Lots of nice behaviors when transferring large amounts of data between arbitrary endpoints. Transferring the torrent metadata is pretty trivial and can be done via a wide range of methods, and having that flexibility can be nice. Unlike HTTP, you get reasonable retry behavior on network hiccups. Also, more robust data integrity guarantees, though a manual hash test is probably a good idea eith…

Just be careful - unless you mark that torrent private it'll get posted to the DHT and crawlers like BtDig will pick it up and list it publicly. For this reason I prefer using something like Syncthing which is designed more with this purpose in mind.

Technically speaking, what occurs when you mark a torrent private?

Does it actually block trackers from picking it up or just like tell them not to if they want to obey it?

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#276

Post by arsome »

cgb223 wrote: post #275
arsome wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just be careful - unless you mark that torrent private it'll get posted to the DHT and crawlers like BtDig will pick it up and list it publicly. For this reason I prefer using something like Syncthing which is designed more with this purpose in mind.

Technically speaking, what occurs when you mark a torrent private? Does it actually block trackers from picking it up or just like tell them not to if they want to obey it?

I'm not an expert on this, but as far as I'm aware, the main difference is that your client won't go out and announce the infohash to the DHT (used for trackerless torrents, magnet links, that kind of thing) and won't provide it to other clients for download. It'll only ever send requests relating to it to the trackers specifically listed within the torrent itself. This means that anyone who wants to download it basically needs to posses the torrent file. Trackers don't really crawl in this way, however, some searching sites like the one I mentioned there do, they'll go out and look at the entire DHT, trying to find entries that they don't know yet and when they find one - go download the torrent and post it to their index.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#277

Post by bscphil »

ta95846893 wrote: post #259
parliament32 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With PAKE the keys used to exchange the data are ephemeral, and so this isn't even a possibility. AFAIK this isn't really true. If the adversary captures the initial key exchange plus all the data (ie the full transaction), then later discovers your PSK, they'll be able to decrypt. The only case where this helps you is if they capture some packets out of the middle without the initial handshake. >authenticated encry…

> AFAIK this isn't really true. If the adversary captures the initial key exchange plus all the data (ie the full transaction), then later discovers your PSK, they'll be able to decrypt. The only case where this helps you is if they capture some packets out of the middle without the initial handshake. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the idea behind a PAKE is that the password only authenticates the…

> Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the idea behind a PAKE is that the password only authenticates the key exchange and doesn't contribute to it.

That's right. From memory, the passwords are just used to do a DH key exchange. The key is entirely ephemeral. Even if the entire ciphertext is captured, and even if the adversary then gets your password, they can't decrypt. To decrypt you'd have to MITM the key exchange, which would require knowing the password before the file is exchanged.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#278

Post by Thlom »

libertine wrote: post #96
livueta wrote: post #86

Bittorrent. No, really. Lots of nice behaviors when transferring large amounts of data between arbitrary endpoints. Transferring the torrent metadata is pretty trivial and can be done via a wide range of methods, and having that flexibility can be nice. Unlike HTTP, you get reasonable retry behavior on network hiccups. Also, more robust data integrity guarantees, though a manual hash test is probably a good idea eith…

Sometimes I wonder if the bad connotation due to piracy made this protocol not standard (in a sense, that's not widely adopted, and people need dedicated clients, instead of it working for example in browsers). I don't know enough, maybe it has security issues, or some limits... but the fact is that it's still widely used, by tech literate people, so it still stands the test of time and it must be doing something rig…

In my previous job we used BitTorrent to distribute movies to cinemas. :-)

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite method of sending large files?

#280

Post by tbronchain »

StavrosK wrote: post #184
tbronchain wrote: post #181

It doesn't have to be large files, file sharing sucks. Even copy/past across devices, even your own devices, is a pain. How many times did I email myself some links to share them across devices. And I'm not even speaking about sharing pictures with people not very accustomed to technology (in other words, don't try to get them install a cloud storage app). I gave that question a few tries but I feel part of the probl…

You're gonna love magic-wormhole.

It's great, but we're very far from the os-agnostic seemless integrated files sharing.

You see, we have protocols like HTTP and the web relies on it, everyone agrees this is how the web works and all OSes have one or several browser able to access it. Something similar works with emails. Yet, we don't have anything to share files between computers, imagine something like bittorrent directly integrated to all OSes, letting you right click > send to.

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