Dan Ritter wrote:
Cool, I played with this today. So it seems like the website is called 'pairdrop.net' that works by default with the android app.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...
Bit of a shame that it requires an external introducer site. I read a bunch of sites, nothing seems to explicitly say that the file transfer is direct between one and the other and not through some sort of "bent pipe". I'll tcpdump it at some point to convince myself.
I did not set up my own server (yet), though I read through the instructions. Seems to be nodejs based and looks like a manual setup. I guess nobody has built a debian package yet...
Did some research how to do this over bluetooth, apparently most android phones, certainly newer ones, you can pair the two phones and then use the share feature of one phone and choose bluetooth and share it. Built into the OS. Apparently works between phones and Windows. No internet connection required, perfect. Doesn't work between ios as you say. Learn something new every day!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.
Thanks for that! Michael Grant