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Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

"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. :)

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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 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!

> 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.

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

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/

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

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?

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

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