Wormhole – Simple, private file sharing | Hacker News Reader

Wormhole – Simple, private file sharing

wormhole.app

52 pointsgaws13 comments

There was a Show HN recently by one of its creators:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26666142

Seems like Firefox Send, but it was discontinued due to it being used to spread malware. I wonder how Wormhole will combat that.

One odd thing about the Firefox Send shutdown is that the security community repeatedly asked Mozilla to add a "Report abuse" button to help take down known malware links. Instead Mozilla shut down the whole service, which was a bit extreme. So I think abuse was, at least in part, a convenient cover story for the planned shutdowns/layoffs/refocusing that took place at Mozilla at the end of 2020.

We think it's encouraging that other products that offer end-to-end encryption like Signal and WhatsApp have managed to handle abuse, malware, and other threats.

IMO they shouldn't, that's the whole point of a privacy focused service like this - no one should be able to view/inspect what you're sharing on it.

I wonder is this a webcompiled version of magic wormhole?

See creator's previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26667847

Very useful but why bother storing the file?

Direct transfer is nice, but sometimes people aren't online at the exact same time. I remember when Skype was solely peer to peer, and you'd have to wait to download a file shared in a group chat until the person who shared it was online again.

As a former https://file.pizza user, I had the same question

but file.pizza doesn't seem to work anymore (for me at least)

There's a laundry list of alternatives to file.pizza [0][1]. https://webwormhole.io/ is one.

wormhole.app is comparable to the now defunct uplovd.com and Firefox Send.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17356023

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22273674

We store the end-to-end encrypted file so that the link continues to work after you close the tab. Sometimes the recipient isn't online when you send the link and we want it to still work in that case.

We're considering a "P2P only" option that doesn't send anything to the cloud. Since files are end-to-end encrypted, it doesn't matter from a privacy perspective, but it does help to save bandwidth (and cost for us) if you know you don't need the files stored.

I almost puked with that background, got very dizzy ...

I see why the type of comment above got downvoted, and I know it's not the main point of sharing this.

But I have to agree with the commenter above, the background made me feel really dizzy and strange in a way I've never experienced from a computer screen before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com