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Comment by padenot | Hacker News Reader

WebRTC solves all the issues you're mentioning, and is available in Chrome and Firefox (in some for in Edge, and soon in Safari).

Three examples of this, implemented and working:

- https://www.sharedrop.io/ - https://www.justbeamit.com/ - https://file.pizza/

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So, three systems which all require a central service?

Those services are for the initial peer discovery and SDP exchange, which can be done by other means (using any other side-channel).

Ongoing work is happening, for example by the webtorrent folks, to remove this constraint.

Yeah, it's initial peer discovery and connection setup (if behind NAT) I'm talking about. Once you've found the other PC and got a connection set up then all is well ;-)

Do these services also act as connectors in case of double NAT?

They certainly can, I don't know if they do in practice. It always work for me, so I haven't investigated too much.

STUN allows all sorts of hole-punching for cases where both peers are behind NATs. For cases where the hole-punching doesn't work (a user behind two NATs might be one case), you can use TURN which is a dumb UDP or TCP relay.

They're also needed for the actual javascript code that runs everything.

Which is a step backwards compared to bittorrent, since that can also provide decentralized hole punching, bootstrapping and peer discovery and not just the bulk data transfer. Plus being implemented at the TCP/UDP level allows more fine-grained control over the data flow, making it more friendly towards the network.

What about something like Tor. You can run a hidden service to get an onion address that any Tor client can access.

Would that meet the requirements without being a "central" service?

That's exactly how Onionshare works. https://onionshare.org/

Never seen that before. But running a hidden service on Tor is absurdly easy, then you just shove a file server through whatever port Tor is forwarding.

If privacy isn't your primary concern, and this is absolutely not private, you can also just use a redirection service and access .onion domains without installing Tor.

Just take any .onion domain and append it with .to and it should work. examplelettersblah.onion becomes examplelettersblah.onion.to and that works without needing to muck about with Tor.

This would be a horrible idea if you're concerned with privacy/anonymity. But, it'd make it easy for people to download your shared files.

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