A 1-1 network pipe that auto discovers other peers using mDNS | Hacker News Reader

A 1-1 network pipe that auto discovers other peers using mDNS

github.com

57 pointshippich8 comments

This is awesome for me. Few reasons:

1. I don't own Apple products, so I don't have Airdrop. I'm not against Apple or anything, I just prefer using Linux. However, I do think it's quite awesome that this removes the "airdrop" power from apple. Except on phones. Because out-of-the-box smartphones can't open terminals :(

2. It's written in JavaScript and shows really awesome use of streams & modules. :)

This seems pretty cool to me, but I can't think of any use cases. Can you give an example of any? tia.

I used some OS X APIs like this to have test machines and a test controller machine find each other. That was a while ago so I don't remember the details, but maybe it was built on the same APIs.

You are sitting by a friend in an airport and want to send them a great video of a cat.

  You$ airpaste cat < funny-cat.m4v

  Them$ airpaste cat > the-stupid-video-i-have-to-watch-now.m4v

You don't have to dig out your IP address. You also don't have to toss it up to a server with some awful upload speed, it all stays local.

The name suggests the author was thinking of Apple's AirDrop system which does sort of the same thing. You can share content to an iOS device or Mac without leaving your local network. You pick a recipient from the available, acceptable, recipients and if they accept the content transfers. The usual way of filtering recipients is to only see recipients who are in your contacts.

or just: airpaste cat | mplayer -

Neat.

This should be obvious, but you probably don't want to use it with private data on networks with untrusted hosts.

I am pretty sure some combination of piping through some encrypting can be employed, since it works with streams.

I think this is pretty cool, thanks for posting it!

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