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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

Who uses a download manager in the days of high speed internet access and, in general, cloud services?

Happy FileZilla user here, on my FreeBSD laptop. I move tons of files from remote astronomical observatory routinely, sometimes need to define custom rules - what to download, upload, filter across folders, etc. Sometimes I need to push a file from very low data-rate link from somewhere in the middle of nowhere to the observatory, sometimes over a satellite link. Sometimes I want a throttled download of a large queue so I won't overload my connection and leave some bandwidth to other users. Also, I have a directory of different FTP servers I work with, it's easy to keep them in one place. So, there you have it.

R sync has a --bwlimit option.

But I suppose you're probably talking about devices that only know about internet protocols before 1991....

And curl has --limit-rate and supports more protocols. But so what? If they are happy using FileZilla and it helps them getting stuff done, why berate them? It's not even like they're abusing a tool in an entirely unintended way, quite the opposite.

I'm saying this as a shell-user.

People who are still on dialup modems or very slow wireless ISPs with flaky connections. High Speed Internet is not universal even today, despite what web developers seem to think. Ever try to surf raw Facebook on a 128kbps wireless link? It's not fun. Cloud services are a joke for these people.

Hacker News is one of the last holdouts in the low bandwidth friendly website game.

A decade ago, I remember buying 500MB or 1GB of mobile internet credit and burning through that in an evening just reading news and stuff. Today, with uBlock Origin and NoScript, I can buy the same amount of mobile internet and it lasts me quite a while. I therefore concluded that, while website bloat does exist, what really consumes bandwidth is advertising, and that can be avoided. Moreover, a decade ago lazy loading of images was not common, but now the respective CSS tag exists, is supported by browsers, and widely implemented by CMSs like Wordpress.

For news I just head to gopher://magical.fish (the news section) and gopher://gopherddit.com under Lynx and the data usage gets down fast.

On linux...

I mean if I found something called free download manager on a technologically challenged family member's PC I would just assume its malware to start with.

Honestly, there were several download managers which were essentially forced by folks like Microsoft and Logitech. If I remember correctly, when I had an educational license with Microsoft Imagine, the most challenging bit was getting the mandatory download manager working. IIRC, I didn't actually have a Windows machine to put it on or something. So, I had to jump through some hoops. The software was plain inaccessible without going through the proprietary download manager.

Logitech did similar hijinks for a long time. I can't remember whether it was mandatory, but it sure was difficult to avoid.

They can be very useful for:

- bypassing antiquated per connection throttles on otherwise fast servers by downloading chunks in parallel

- downloading files such as videos from sites that don't really want you to download the file

I have never heard of the program in the article, but this one still sees many active users on windows for the above reasons: https://jdownloader.org/

There's even a little community still making and maintaining plugins for extracting files from uncooperative websites. Really does feel like the kind of program you only ever want to be running in a sandbox though!

JD2 is great for cutting through redirect-er to get the source of the file. There are some sites that use multiple of redirect-ers for single link.

I do. Just because your internet access is fast that doesn't mean remote servers don't throttle on a per connection basis.

Or that everyone else also has fast Internet

Similar software is used in some products. For example, synology DSM has a package called download station. Who knows if it’s based on some obscure .deb (or scripts such as youtube-dl).

It could give rise to a supply chain attack.

I'm trying to imagine the kind of user that's both able to blindly install a random .deb downloaded from a website, while also being willing to do so. Linux geeks with no sense of danger on the internet?

One can google "install .deb fedora" and get a litany of web pages which will contain words explaining how to do this. Fedora (and other distributions) is easy enough to install that one doesn't really need to be a "Linux geek" in order to be on Linux and such a person is not quite so likely to wonder whether or not they trust the code they're running.

Couple that with the fact that it works out well Most Of The Time[0] and you've got a pretty likely scenario even if it affects a relatively small number of people.

[0] I mean in general when downloading software as well as in the context of this particular story[1].

[1] > Starting in 2020, the same domain at times redirected users to the domain deb.fdmpkg[.]org, which served a malicious version of the app.

If you have a web browser and Linux, you can often install a .deb just by opening it in Software Centre or other graphical utilities to install apps. The comparison might be someone on windows trusting a random .msi or installer .exe or someone on Mac installing a random .app package. It’s somewhat normal these days. Package managers are sometimes harder to understand and app stores often don’t have the app you want or the newest version. Sometimes the app directs you to the website to install an update - or updates itself from a compromised location.

This shocked me too. I kind of expect this to happen more on Arch because it gets marketed heavily to new users on Reddit but Debian seems geared more towards “olds” like me who just want a complete OS without a lot of effort. I couldn’t imagine using non-standard repos in a normal operating environment.

not too terribly different from `sudo (curl | bash)`

Download managers are more important on high speed links than ever.

The more bandwidth you have (and use), the less adequate the little "downloads" pane in your browser is.

It's really handy to be able to kick bigger or automated file operations to a backend service.

axel -n 10

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