Ask HN: A more convinient Magic Wormhole alternative?

5 points by vsenko 6 years ago | 3 comments

Magic Wormhole (https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole) is an incredible piece of software that facilitates data transfer between computers when URL/id/hash digital transfer or copy-paste is not an option.

But, in my opinion, it has one significant drawback - it has to be installed and has not so few dependencies.

Thus if, for example, the objective is to transmit a single send.firefox.com URL from one machine to another, then installing Maic Wormhole on both of these machines is an overkill.

I usually resort to manually typing data on the second machine (a binary data block could be base64 encoded beforehand).

Do you know any software or services that could facilitate such scenarios (you need to transfer a small amount of data from one machine to another but it's impossible to use ssh, rdp, clipboard, etc.)?

ktpsns 6 years ago |

I use QR codes to move snippets between mobile phones. That could work on a notebook (with a camera). There is also https://messenger.chirp.io/ to use sound for information transfer (works better on notebooks, but probably not kiosks). All that is pretty useful for quickly sharing URLs.

sgillen 6 years ago |

can you have to be more specific with what scenarios you are facing where you need this? If ssh and rdp are unavailable what is available?

vsenko 6 years ago | |

I'm talking about a broad range of scenarios where it's impossible to use standard tools, like this one: - You need to transfer some data from your machine to the one you do not trust (e.g. kiosk). USB drive is a bad idea in such situation, logging in to any service on an untrusted machine is even worse. One could create a temporary email account for this purpose, but it's a burden.