Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

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The Google Chrome change looks like the most significant of the two factors that caused Portal to shut down, although it's a shame that they didn't continue running the service for users of other browsers. (Android file transfer apps that implement scoped storage have similar functionality as before if users grant them access to the entire "sdcard" directory.)

Here are some FOSS alternatives to Portal that don't depend on Chrome:

- ShareDrop (https://www.sharedrop.io): WebRTC-based P2P file transfers through the browser

- Sharik (https://github.com/marchellodev/sharik): File transfers via Wi-Fi or mobile hotspot for Android, iOS, Linux, and Windows

- KDE Connect (https://kdeconnect.kde.org): File transfers, notification sync, and other integrations between Android, Linux, Windows, and SailfishOS. Other compatible clients: Soduto for macOS (https://soduto.com), GSConnect for GNOME (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/)

- Syncthing (https://syncthing.net): Continuous P2P file syncing for Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, and BSD

- Wormhole (https://wormhole.app): File sharing from the browser through encrypted uploads that expire after a set amount of time or number of downloads

I use syncthing but not as peer to peer, but as client-server-client.

My phone takes images so large - 108MP - that my normal service (an instance of Up1 pastebin) hangs on complex scenes while encrypting in android Chrome. Installed syncthing on a VM I already had with public facing httpd and I can just hit "share to syncthing". The linking part isn't automated, I type it by hand then copy and paste to recipients.

I looked around for another way to do this, including ssh, and syncthing fit the bill and has been running fine for about 2 years.

I have no idea what it's doing on the backend, though, and now I am wondering if my "node" is passing traffic for people who are not me...

I still prefer my pastebin service, even if it won't accept the largest images from my phone, because you can zoom forever, for some reason, whereas windows viewer, syncthing direct jpeg mime type, etc, will not actually let you zoom 1:1 or beyond on 108 megapixel images. This also ignores the fact that my pastebin only has 200MB of tmpfs storage available, so perhaps 2 crazy images before I have to reboot it... Still worth the zooming, though.

> I have no idea what it's doing on the backend, though, and now I am wondering if my "node" is passing traffic for people who are not me...

AFAIK it shouldn't unless you're a relay: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/relaying.html

108MP phone camera? Wow. Do you find usable detail in images that large from a phone?

i've taken pictures, standing in the middle of a road, of cars at least a quarter of a mile away, and you can zoom so far in you can crop out the front end of a car and see what type it is. it looks like a very high iso low resolution image, but it's enough. The crop area is like 4 pixels on a 1080p screen when viewed fullscreen.

in my opinion on a smaller screen, and especially oled, the unzoomed and uncropped pictures always look better than the other cameras the phone has, but it takes longer to take and save the shot, there's no "pro" mode, and the files, as mentioned, are massive, embarrassingly so.

Also Croc (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.howeyc.crocgui/) croc is a tool that allows any two computers to simply and securely transfer files

website: https://schollz.com/software/croc/

And Snapdrop (https://snapdrop.net)

Snapdrop has the edge over ShareDrop since its server can optionally be self-hosted using Docker and it doesn't depend on Firebase. I confuse Snapdrop with ShareDrop sometimes.

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