I appreciate that the project acknowledges its inspiration. I wish it were more common for projects to provide detailed comparisons with similar ones for people trying to choose.
How can one be sure that the relay does not record all the data flowing through it? There's not a second independent channel where the key is exchanged between sender and receiver.
I use croc instead of magic wormhole as of a year ago now. In my testing the throughput is higher than magic wormhole because it uses multiple TCP connections to transfer the files.
one thing that gets me is this should be one of the most basic tasks between two machines and it has been increasingly, systematically abstracted from us, to control what channels it goes through, if it even goes through at all. so kudos to this app but this should be easy at an OS level and it isn't, by design. likely for the same reason airdrop is not a thing in china
Fair, though I think a large part of why this has always been more difficult than it should be is the fundamental design of TCP and IP. The former encodes notions of “roaming client” and “durable server” in ways incompatible with devices that periodically want to assume either role, and the latter (at least IPv4) encourages network segmentation in such a way that reachability and discoverability are harder than people might think.
The centralized powers that be definitely deserve a share of the blame to be sure, but some of it is architectural.
File transfer isn't an OS level problem. There are already a million utilities that let you get a file from computer A to computer B if they are reachable over IP. Connecting the computers in a secure way is the hard part, hence the need for all the workarounds.
It was easy, via Airdrop, but the CCP doesn’t like people being able to share files in a decentralized manner in groups, and Apple ceases to exist as we know it if they don’t do whatever the CCP wants, so it was nerfed.
Sounds like Magic Wormhole (https://magic-wormhole.io/). The readme acknowledges Warner at the end.
Key differences seem to be resumable transfers and proxy support.
Another is a single binary, whereas MW is in Python, but there’s now https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole.rs
I appreciate that the project acknowledges its inspiration. I wish it were more common for projects to provide detailed comparisons with similar ones for people trying to choose.
I’ve found croc to be more reliable than MW in across different network architectures — croc has worked in places where MW has not. I’m not sure why.
Hm. I had the exact opposite experience. Weird.
How can one be sure that the relay does not record all the data flowing through it? There's not a second independent channel where the key is exchanged between sender and receiver.
I keep a list of mostly browser based and some cli, p2p file sending tools in like croc. https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/fd6e275e44009b72f64d0570...
Hard-coded to use his relay server and then asking for donations for bandwidth?
https://github.com/schollz/croc/issues/931
I use croc instead of magic wormhole as of a year ago now. In my testing the throughput is higher than magic wormhole because it uses multiple TCP connections to transfer the files.
one thing that gets me is this should be one of the most basic tasks between two machines and it has been increasingly, systematically abstracted from us, to control what channels it goes through, if it even goes through at all. so kudos to this app but this should be easy at an OS level and it isn't, by design. likely for the same reason airdrop is not a thing in china
Fair, though I think a large part of why this has always been more difficult than it should be is the fundamental design of TCP and IP. The former encodes notions of “roaming client” and “durable server” in ways incompatible with devices that periodically want to assume either role, and the latter (at least IPv4) encourages network segmentation in such a way that reachability and discoverability are harder than people might think.
The centralized powers that be definitely deserve a share of the blame to be sure, but some of it is architectural.
File transfer isn't an OS level problem. There are already a million utilities that let you get a file from computer A to computer B if they are reachable over IP. Connecting the computers in a secure way is the hard part, hence the need for all the workarounds.
It was easy, via Airdrop, but the CCP doesn’t like people being able to share files in a decentralized manner in groups, and Apple ceases to exist as we know it if they don’t do whatever the CCP wants, so it was nerfed.
If you have IPv6, it’s easy. In IPv4 land… Good luck.
Croc has broke down for me quite a few times when transferring large files. I switched back to MW.
What does this give me that unison doesn't?
Unison is dead, this project is alive.
I mean i still see commits and afaict it just works for me. How much active development does a service like this need?
As someone else mentioned a while ago, I think unison suffers from 'lisp curse'.. it just works. [0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20629571
this has been fine working since the 80s
No auth? I like to live dangerously too lol.
Jokes aside, the probability of it being exploited is low though.
Also, this assumes pc1 has a publicly, where as with Croc and MW, you can transfer files between two PCs on both behind different NATs.