FilePizza

October 18, 2022 12:38 AM

Free peer-to-peer file transfers in your browser

I hesitate to share this because they offer the option to donate with cryptocurrency and I don't actually like their pizza combos, but it's just such a sweet friendly little service and I thought you might like to know about it.

posted by aniola (20 comments total)

I suppose you could run a torrent-style music blog just keeping URLs alive in lynx instances (or less) on bandwidth-possessing server instances. How much is S3 these days? Looks like $23/mo per terabyte. Maybe this is overcomplicating things, but it's still kinda neat.
posted by rhizome at 2:58 AM on October 18, 2022

Cool idea, but couldn't get it to work with some coworkers just now. Just could not find peers, after testing extensively with different browsers and network setups.
posted by jklaiho at 3:32 AM on October 18, 2022

Test this, I will leave it open for a while...
posted by Meatbomb at 4:11 AM on October 18, 2022

Test this, I will leave it open for a while...

Nope. 0 peers found.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:51 AM on October 18, 2022

Same here, 0 peers found.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 4:54 AM on October 18, 2022

No joy. 0 peers found for me, too. Both on your test and my own.
posted by mikelieman at 5:01 AM on October 18, 2022

“If You Build It, They Will Come…”
posted by beesbees at 5:08 AM on October 18, 2022

0 peers found.
Maybe it's some kind of art project?
posted by signal at 5:17 AM on October 18, 2022

0 peers found.
Maybe it's some kind of art project?

I always knew I was peerless.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:55 AM on October 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

so here is the code base, which hasn't been touched in 3 years. http://xkcd949.com/ seems to be a better working example in my testing.
posted by jrishel at 5:57 AM on October 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah and my open page also says peers 0 up 0 bytes. So closing it now, whatevs.
posted by Meatbomb at 6:03 AM on October 18, 2022

It just gives me a 404
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:19 AM on October 18, 2022

A similar program I like to use for sending files with personal information is croc:

My motivation to write croc, as stupid as it sounds, is because I wanted to create a program that made it easy to send a 3GB+ PBS documentary to my friend in a different country. My friend has a Windows computer and is not comfortable using a terminal. So I wanted to write a program that, while secure, is simple to receive a file. croc accomplishes this, and now I find myself using it almost everyday at work. To receive a file you can just download the executable and double click on it. The name is inspired by the fable of the frog and the crocodile.

posted by chinesefood at 8:12 AM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Note that the above link to croc produces a lot of broken images and hasn't been updated since 2019.
Here is a link to the latest release of croc., including ready-to-run packages for all major OSs.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:25 AM on October 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Noooooooo... I used it successfully a couple years ago to move some files between my e-reader and my computer and it was very fun to just type in a bunch of pizza toppings for the url. I'm glad y'all were able to come up with a couple other ones. xkcd is right, there really isn't much out there!
posted by aniola at 8:50 AM on October 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

[J]ust download the executable and double click on it. The name is inspired by the fable of the frog and the crocodile.

In which the crocodile eats the frog and the moral is never, never download an executable from the Internet and click on it trust a crocodile, no matter how tempting the offer of help may be. So. Well named!
posted by The Bellman at 10:47 AM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

If you're just looking for a dead-simple way of transferring files to another person and the link doesn't have to work for more than a day, and you don't care if it's being distributed via a torrent-like network, I suggest wormhole.app. It uses end-to-end encryption and can begin downloading on the receiver's side while the file is still being uploaded. It's free, but not (yet) open source.
posted by WaylandSmith at 11:52 AM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Every time someone writes a tool to easily share a file between two computers on the internet, it dies in short order. You used to be able to do things like this in old IM clients, but they're all dead now. Mozilla made such a tool a few years ago that never did work right for me, and it wasn't long until they officially dropped it.
posted by JHarris at 12:01 PM on October 18, 2022

JHarris, why do they die?
posted by pelvicsorcery at 10:14 PM on October 20, 2022

NO ONE KNOWS.... really, I couldn't say. There are other tools for transferring files between two devices, I've got one on my laptop and phone called Warpinator that's both free and open source, but it's not ubiquitous like IM used to be? There's also tools like Dropbox, OneDrive and box.net of course, but those have drawbacks, require remembering passwords, are just for hosting a bunch of miscellaneous things on a general basis, if you have to move a specific file right now from one machine to another, sneakernet is still probably the best solution unless the other machine is off-site.

If there is a reason that services for sharing specific files easily die, I'd imagine it's probably related to efforts to stamp out copying copyrighted data. One of those vague weights on the long-term health of the internet, the rust in its joints, in its way the brother of spam.
posted by JHarris at 12:35 AM on October 21, 2022