4 ms·

I find it funny, how sending files securely still isn't a solved problem. Record your neice blowing off the candles at her birthday party, and the next day, he

I find it funny, how sending files securely still isn't a solved problem. Record your neice blowing off the candles at her birthday party, and the next day, her mom asks you for the original (high quality) video file, so she can create a party-video... the file is shot on a phone in 4K and uses 300MB of space. Mail? Nope, too big. Chat platforms? Too big. Cloud upload? You have to share a link, and some services (ahem, skype) actually open those links when you send them... who knows, they might even save the files there. Also, do you really wan't personal videos in the cloud? HTTP/(S)FTP servers too much of a pain to set up for a one time need. We atleast had DCC on irc, now not even that. So a USB flash drive it is... and a car ride.

reidjs 4y ago
Google drive or Dropbox link shared to their email address isn’t secure enough for a video of your nieces birthday party??
Tarq0n 4y ago
A passworded zip file would probably be my choice, easy enough to open at the other end even for technologically illiterate people, and doesn't take anything fancy to make.
- yaomtc 4y ago
  The video is already compressed, a ZIP will not save any significant amount of space in that case.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Pretty sure they're zipping for the encryption, not the compression. edit: the way I'd solve the rest is just by using a torrent magnet link. The problem with that is that you might have to teach someone how to open a port for UDP traffic, but after they've done it, sending files of any size to them becomes trivial.
freeAgent 4y ago
I use a personal NAS which solves that problem nicely. The other option that’s much closer to sneaker net would be use of a direct file transfer protocol like Airdrop. There’s also stuff like file.pizza, but that’s not always reliable IME.
- tetris11 4y ago
  NAS with a DynDNS you have to pay for because ipv4 addresses are scarce I take it? I remember when I could fire up a http.server in python to host some local file, and it would be accessible across the world for as long as I wanted it
  - freeAgent 4y ago
    I point my own custom domain at it, so that part isn’t free. I have my NAS configured to automatically update the DNS record when/if it changes.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
The problem is receiving files, not sending files. You can mail someone an SD card and they will receive it at their house's mailbox. But if their mailbox fills up, the letter will be returned to you. And there is a maximum size for mail that fits in a mailbox. Similarly, people need a digital mailbox you can send files to, but they need to extract their mail from it and empty it out or it will fill up. We actually made a great solution for this in the 90s: mailservs, inspired by Usenet. We made AOL bots that would take a file, chunk it into 1.5MB sections, and send each via email attachment. Then a client side program would download all the attachments and reassemble them. We downloaded entire movies this way. After download, the mailbox was emptied; if it wasn't, the next transfer would fail. So people just need mailserv programs to send files, and download their mail regularly.
- digikata 4y ago
  For a while now I think we have been lacking an enabling shareable storage and auth abstraction to build cloud apps on. From this standpoint email is a little bit of shared storage: owner read, public write (with email specific secure acceptance algos), group chat: account read, account write; note app: owner read, write.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    I'm sure you can come up with abstractions, but without first doing a whole system design (FRs & NFRs, mapping dependencies, customer requirements, etc) you'll have to scrap those abstractions when they don't match up with how the system ends up needing to operate. So I would recommend not even thinking about technical abstractions until you have a very large multi-layered system visualization. For example: what is storage? A router stores packets temporarily; is that storage? A DNS resolver caches records; is that storage? A browser stores cookies; is that storage? A chat or email server & client may both store messages in different states for different purposes. What storage should be shared and shouldn't be, in what specific circumstances? Who is allowed to read and write to which thing at which time in which circumstance? All of that will affect your abstraction.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
https://webwormhole.io/ https://webwormhole.io/
- myself248 4y ago
  There seems to be a never-ending stream of these services, each very similar to the last, but none seem to survive more than a few months, a few years at the outside. I think GP's point is that this churn indicates that it's not a "solved problem". It's clearly solvable, but whoever runs these services doesn't find a revenue stream. It should probably be provided by your ISP just like email and usenet once were, but the cultural expectation isn't there. Maybe they get shut down because people use them for bad things? I don't know.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    This has been around for years. There's 'churn' because there's almost nothing to hosting this service. None of the data is sent or goes through a cloud service, it's all P2P connections. There only needs to exist a central server for brokering initial connections and handshake between clients. Anyone can setup and run a service like this with just a few dollar domain name and a couple bucks a month of VPS hosting. I think you're really just wanting some big name or trustworthy player like Dropbox to come out with a similar service. It's not going to happen--like I said by design wormhole and similar tech doesn't send or store data on any central service. There's no value for some big company to give people this service, they're literaly just burning bandwidth to shuttle invisible (to them) bits and data. They can't extract anything like advertising targeting, revenue, etc. from the service. It will always exist as some weird self-hosted thing.
IAmLiterallyAB 4y ago
If P2P wasn't so awful we could just download from computer to computer. But alas, NAT and IPv4 make that difficult
- mindslight 4y ago
  The difficulty created by NAT and IPv4 is drastically overstated. Even if users' devices generally had public IPs, users still wouldn't want to install server software nor leave their computer on. There is no money to be made pushing solutions that cut out the middlemen, so no advertising continually telling people "Try FooTransfer", and thus no network effects. Instead, one user goes "I can send you this using FooTransfer" and the second user goes "that sounds scary and hard". And doesn't Dropbox work for the given example? That's the mass-market productized/paid/marketed/surveilled solution.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I also opt for P2P whenever I can, but it does have drawbacks as well, besides NAT. First, both have to be online at the same time. Second, seems many connections are still not symmetric, so sending files are limited by the upload speed of the sender, and together with the first problem, makes the downloaders experience suffer because of the uploader. With that said, better infrastructure (IPv6 + better connections) can make P2P very feasible in the future, hopefully. Or software that defaults to local connections if it's possible (so if we can find the device via a private IP, use that connection instead).
- brnt 4y ago
  Is P2P awful? I've been using Resilio Sync (neé Bittorrent Sync) for a decade now; if there is a reliable piece of software in my stack, this is it! Sharing files is a matter of passing someone a code. It works so well I really don't think about this as a problem.
jandrese 4y ago
The difficulty in sending files isn't a technical problem, it's a political problem. In particular any efficient file transfer system will immediately be used by people to make copies of copywritten materials. This will ultimately get them in trouble with the law and shut down. So we can only have file transfer systems with obnoxious limitations.
cookiengineer 4y ago
Isn't this the exact use cases of all WebRTC based file sharing tools?
megaperplex 4y ago
What is your take on this: encrypt your large file and send it over via some common transfer service?

reidjs 4y ago

Google drive or Dropbox link shared to their email address isn’t secure enough for a video of your nieces birthday party??

Tarq0n 4y ago

A passworded zip file would probably be my choice, easy enough to open at the other end even for technologically illiterate people, and doesn't take anything fancy to make.

yaomtc 4y ago
The video is already compressed, a ZIP will not save any significant amount of space in that case.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Pretty sure they're zipping for the encryption, not the compression. edit: the way I'd solve the rest is just by using a torrent magnet link. The problem with that is that you might have to teach someone how to open a port for UDP traffic, but after they've done it, sending files of any size to them becomes trivial.

freeAgent 4y ago

I use a personal NAS which solves that problem nicely. The other option that’s much closer to sneaker net would be use of a direct file transfer protocol like Airdrop. There’s also stuff like file.pizza, but that’s not always reliable IME.

tetris11 4y ago
NAS with a DynDNS you have to pay for because ipv4 addresses are scarce I take it? I remember when I could fire up a http.server in python to host some local file, and it would be accessible across the world for as long as I wanted it
- freeAgent 4y ago
  I point my own custom domain at it, so that part isn’t free. I have my NAS configured to automatically update the DNS record when/if it changes.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

The problem is receiving files, not sending files. You can mail someone an SD card and they will receive it at their house's mailbox. But if their mailbox fills up, the letter will be returned to you. And there is a maximum size for mail that fits in a mailbox. Similarly, people need a digital mailbox you can send files to, but they need to extract their mail from it and empty it out or it will fill up. We actually made a great solution for this in the 90s: mailservs, inspired by Usenet. We made AOL bots that would take a file, chunk it into 1.5MB sections, and send each via email attachment. Then a client side program would download all the attachments and reassemble them. We downloaded entire movies this way. After download, the mailbox was emptied; if it wasn't, the next transfer would fail. So people just need mailserv programs to send files, and download their mail regularly.

digikata 4y ago
For a while now I think we have been lacking an enabling shareable storage and auth abstraction to build cloud apps on. From this standpoint email is a little bit of shared storage: owner read, public write (with email specific secure acceptance algos), group chat: account read, account write; note app: owner read, write.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  I'm sure you can come up with abstractions, but without first doing a whole system design (FRs & NFRs, mapping dependencies, customer requirements, etc) you'll have to scrap those abstractions when they don't match up with how the system ends up needing to operate. So I would recommend not even thinking about technical abstractions until you have a very large multi-layered system visualization. For example: what is storage? A router stores packets temporarily; is that storage? A DNS resolver caches records; is that storage? A browser stores cookies; is that storage? A chat or email server & client may both store messages in different states for different purposes. What storage should be shared and shouldn't be, in what specific circumstances? Who is allowed to read and write to which thing at which time in which circumstance? All of that will affect your abstraction.

qbasic_forever 4y ago

https://webwormhole.io/ https://webwormhole.io/

myself248 4y ago
There seems to be a never-ending stream of these services, each very similar to the last, but none seem to survive more than a few months, a few years at the outside. I think GP's point is that this churn indicates that it's not a "solved problem". It's clearly solvable, but whoever runs these services doesn't find a revenue stream. It should probably be provided by your ISP just like email and usenet once were, but the cultural expectation isn't there. Maybe they get shut down because people use them for bad things? I don't know.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  This has been around for years. There's 'churn' because there's almost nothing to hosting this service. None of the data is sent or goes through a cloud service, it's all P2P connections. There only needs to exist a central server for brokering initial connections and handshake between clients. Anyone can setup and run a service like this with just a few dollar domain name and a couple bucks a month of VPS hosting. I think you're really just wanting some big name or trustworthy player like Dropbox to come out with a similar service. It's not going to happen--like I said by design wormhole and similar tech doesn't send or store data on any central service. There's no value for some big company to give people this service, they're literaly just burning bandwidth to shuttle invisible (to them) bits and data. They can't extract anything like advertising targeting, revenue, etc. from the service. It will always exist as some weird self-hosted thing.

IAmLiterallyAB 4y ago

If P2P wasn't so awful we could just download from computer to computer. But alas, NAT and IPv4 make that difficult

mindslight 4y ago
The difficulty created by NAT and IPv4 is drastically overstated. Even if users' devices generally had public IPs, users still wouldn't want to install server software nor leave their computer on. There is no money to be made pushing solutions that cut out the middlemen, so no advertising continually telling people "Try FooTransfer", and thus no network effects. Instead, one user goes "I can send you this using FooTransfer" and the second user goes "that sounds scary and hard". And doesn't Dropbox work for the given example? That's the mass-market productized/paid/marketed/surveilled solution.
capableweb 4y ago
I also opt for P2P whenever I can, but it does have drawbacks as well, besides NAT. First, both have to be online at the same time. Second, seems many connections are still not symmetric, so sending files are limited by the upload speed of the sender, and together with the first problem, makes the downloaders experience suffer because of the uploader. With that said, better infrastructure (IPv6 + better connections) can make P2P very feasible in the future, hopefully. Or software that defaults to local connections if it's possible (so if we can find the device via a private IP, use that connection instead).
brnt 4y ago
Is P2P awful? I've been using Resilio Sync (neé Bittorrent Sync) for a decade now; if there is a reliable piece of software in my stack, this is it! Sharing files is a matter of passing someone a code. It works so well I really don't think about this as a problem.

jandrese 4y ago

The difficulty in sending files isn't a technical problem, it's a political problem. In particular any efficient file transfer system will immediately be used by people to make copies of copywritten materials. This will ultimately get them in trouble with the law and shut down. So we can only have file transfer systems with obnoxious limitations.

cookiengineer 4y ago

Isn't this the exact use cases of all WebRTC based file sharing tools?

megaperplex 4y ago

What is your take on this: encrypt your large file and send it over via some common transfer service?