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Comment by aj3 | Hacker News Reader

We still have Magic Wormhole though and it's awesome! (at least for techies) https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html

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"We" as in "the people who knows how to use the command line". Unfortunately very few of the people I send files to knows that.

There's https://webwormhole.io/ and https://file.pizza/ , but can I know what they really do behind the scenes? Native open-source software for this would be a dream come true. It's 2020 and I still wrestle with sending files between devices. And no, don't take this as a wish for creating just another service. :)

webwormhole does everything on the client via RTC IIRC? https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole

Looks neat. I guess one could send an SHA-512 or something through a different channel like email or sms to at least mitigate partially MITM attacks. Obviously encrypting the files before hand. Seems like it needs another layer on top :) . NAT transversal is sweet though via webrtc

File.pizza is great! It uses WebTorrent[1] to seed files right in the browser. The downside to this is, you have to have your browser open the whole time you're sending the file, as it's direct peer-to-peer. Firefox Send was an "upload it, get the link, and they can download later" kind of service.

1. https://github.com/kern/filepizza#faq

I've been using webwormhole a lot to get photos from my iPhone to my Linux box. Works great!

I've used File Pizza to share files with friends, but it feels like the upload speed is being bottlenecked by something that isn't my ISP (I have synchronous upload) - is there an inherent speed issue with using WebRTC for this?

If you're just sending files between devices that you own, KDE Connect [1] is cross-platform and works pretty well.

[1] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

Couldn't someone pretty easily write a native GUI or browser app that wraps Magic Womrhole?

> There's https://webwormhole.io/ and https://file.pizza/ , but can I know what they really do behind the scenes?

Also they're not very reliable. I tried to use both of those a couple weeks ago and it just didn't work. File.pizza crashed during initialization on a large file from a friend, and they both failed when I was trying to send a file that was only about 3GB.

My experience was similar: File.pizza didn't work. However, https://justbeamit.com/ worked flawlessly.

I've started a UI for magic wormhole:

https://github.com/sneakypete81/wormhole-ui

It's GPL, cross-platform, native (Qt) and uses the same Python library as the Magic Wormhole CLI.

I've tested it on my own devices and it installed and worked without a hitch. Thanks.

That's fantastic! I was about to add a request for just that in my above comment, but forgot. Keep at it!

Magic Wormhole is awesome. I've recently come across croc and like that too: https://github.com/schollz/croc/

Hmmm. Several of the listed feature seem like valuable improvements over Magic Wormhole. That leads me to think that maybe several people should go to the bother of an IETF working group so everybody's platform gets at least a baseline interoperable thing in this class (PAKE driven single file transfer) like with TLS or SecSH, rather than all having their own preferred option that's incompatible.

Seems like the relay server does do file transfer?? Seems like it kills the purpose of it for me, or at least is a major negative compared to say webwormhole

Yeah for streaming transfers wormhole is great.

Also check out the the go port https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william (compatible with the original) and https://webwormhole.io/ (not compatible I think)

Only if the sender and recipient are using it at roughly the same time (within a 1-hour time-window).

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