Michael Grant wrote: > I have long been plagued by the problem if sitting in a room or on a boat > with someone, 2 devices right next to one another, and no trivially easy way > to send a file from one device to the other without say first uploading it > to some mutual third party (e.g. whatsapp).
... > To this day, I have yet ever to see an easy way to share a file between 2 > devices without full internet connectivity, except by say getting one to run > an ftp or ssh server and ftp or ssh'ing over the file between local ip addrs > (e.g. 192.168.x.y). I'd love to know some well know good, not-evil, open > source app that runs on all the platforms that I could tell people to > install to send them a file without using the internet. I can't really see > any technical reason such an thing couldn't work, say over bluetooth or > local IPs and maybe it does exist, I've just never run across such a thing. > The key word here is EASY. I can't be hacking someone's phone for an hour > just to transfer them a file. The web browser technology called WebRTC does that quite well, but for security reasons -- nobody wants a self-perpetuating worm -- you need an intermediary device to introduce the two participants but not to actually transfer the file. And so there is snapdrop.net, which you can choose to trust or you can run your own copy -- it's GPL3. Works between any two devices that run modern web browsers, including iPhones, Androids, Linux, Windows, Macs... There are bluetooth solutions between Linux and Android and Windows, but Apple does not allow bluetooth file transfer from or to IOS with any operating systems they don't control. -dsr-
