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Comment by visil | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely amazing piece of software, the kind that makes you wish you had a use-case for that. Kudos to devs for taking security seriously, too.

By the way, the youtube video showcases this project really well.

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Heh... I have one... have always wanted to make a little solar-powered "library" on my front-lawn...

(You know, like the neighbourhood "take-a-book, leave-a-book" little libraries, except for... digital content... It would fly an appropriate "skull + crossbones" flag...)

I've wanted to do something like this, but I live within WiFi range of a school and am concerned someone would put something "harmful" on there so have never done so.

I created a PirateBox on a little GliNet router a while back with the intention of sharing public domain content but didn't do so beyond having a quick play around with it myself.

And like most things nowadays, it would get filled with highly illegal content within hours of you putting it there. The good old (innocent) days are gone and the society we’re living is not mature/educated enough for such ideas.

I don't think the idea is to put it on the global internet; just make it broadcast a wifi SSID.

As others have said - it would be standalone, not connected to the internet.

Have debated making it "read-only", but then I would be culpable for the curation of content...

That and perhaps I just don't want to encourage people loitering around in front of my house for long-transfers...

OTOH - this could be useful for essentially a "dead-drop" independent standalone box for, uh... "civil disobedience" reasons... (or a free alternative to those "prepper-internet-in-a-box" devices they are currently selling...)

It would still be physically located on your property with potentially illegal content on it. Sounds like a nightmare.

... well, I live in Canada - my understanding is that the maximum lifetime fine for copyright infringement is about $5,000 when files are shared for personal, non-commercial use...

Which sounds like alot, but if we factor in the extended family and cross-media sharing and the number of separate streaming services we all subscribe to across many many years, then this is a "deal"...

OTOH - I don't want to be the first case/person to help determine what precedent will be set if something actually gets taken to the end-state statutory damages..

On the spectrum of illegality, things can get a lot more extreme than a bit of copyright infringement.

True - I mean, one could try and block based on file-extension/MIME-types, but... nothing stopping a malicious user from renaming a file to an allowed extension, with some sort of malicious/secret payload. (Or... spreading some sort of malware/virus/exploit via media file formats, I have never looked into the possibility of that until just now, apparently it can be a thing - https://cyberpress.org/cybercriminals-exploiting-media-files...)

So yeah - this is probably one of those half-baked ideas that just wouldn't be a good one to actually implement "in-the-wild".

Check this out. This was at one point one of the cheapest and smallest Linux computers around. It’s USB powered and this project turns a WiFi device designed to share photos from an SD card over a standalone SSID into a male USB A powered miniature SBC. (Edit: okay it’s two PCBs technically)

https://github.com/Emeryth/openwrt-zsun

https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/projects:zsun-wifi-card-reader

I got them in bulk from China for ~$6 each.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but wouldn't this work great (albeit huge overkill) for the extremely common problem of trying to get files from one device to another (especially when one of those devices is a phone)? I see tools that are supposed to do that posted to HN all the time, with the comments usually pointing out one or another problem with any given utility. This seems like it would be pretty great self hosted, open source, solution to that problem?

I have been having a lot of luck with Blip[0] recently regarding phone <-> laptop file transfer. My biggest issue so far is that it does support iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows ... but not Linux.

[0]https://blip.net/

Try https://payload.app/

Resumable, can queue, send directories, drag & drop, LAN (without account) & WAN (hybrid p2p), all transfers + metadata are e2ee. Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android.

Disclaimer: I’m the creator

?? Airdrop works well.

Not everyone uses Apple products.

If you have not tried "localsend" I would highly recommend.

There is also https://pairdrop.net - same thing, but you don't have to download anything, it works on the web.

Termux and python -m http.server. I use that embarrassingly often, except for cases where I can just use scp or rsync (e.g. between two Android devices that both have Termux installed and I have bothered to copy the public ssh key from one to the other).

$kdeconnect-cli -d somedevice --share somefile

A very simple shell script:https://github.com/sancoderhost/ShareFiles

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