You may have no compunctions about violating the copyright license, but from what I understand of the rules you shouldn’t be advising others to do that here, regadless how easy it is.
And from what I understand of the rules, you shouldn’t be junior modding.
:eek:
Also, continued use is not a copyright infringement. But since you seem to be playing lawyer as well as mod, maybe you’ll be able to pull up relevant legal proof that it is.
Disregard this part. Too late to edit out. Please see me here instead of hijacking this thread.
This symbolizes just how broken the internet is for home users. We are all peers on the same network. We should send the files directly from one computer to the other computer. There should be no need for any third party megaupload like site.
As others pointed out, you MIGHT need to multiply by 8. It’s possible you have a 0.6 megabyte upload speed (4.8 megaBITS per second), but that’d be way above the national average. Test it at a speed test site to find out for sure.
Not everyone has an always-on internet connection, or even an always-on computer. With a third-party site, I can send the file when I’m online, and my recipient can receive the file when they’re online.
Plus, with a third-party site, if I want to send the file to multiple people, I only have to upload it once.
Any idea when that changed? Mine just nags, but I’ve not updated it for a few years.
Actually, never mind, I’ve read the rest of the thread.
Maybe things have gotten significantly easier than when I last tried to do it. What was the process you went through?
And would that process allow 10 GB, password-protected files (if a public tracker)?
If you’re running a private BT setup, it’s still rather pointless to use BitTorrent instead of regular FTP or HTTP unless your connection is unstable enough to warrant continual error-checking and hashing. BT’s main advantage, the dispersal of bandwidth use among downloaders, is negated when there’s only two people involved. Plus, the initial creation of a torrent from a 10GB source will take a short while.
With single person BT, you also get auto-resume and integrity checking by default. If both people are irregularly online, BT can slowly transfer in the background when both people are online without having to bother with splitting the file or managing the process.
Yeah, that’s a good point (the auto-resume).
(S)FTP, HTTP(S), and scp are the “proper” tools for the job, since they were specifically designed for the sole purpose of transferring files, and have all sorts of features for ensuring that the data is transferred in a bandwidth-efficient manner (unlike, say, e-mail), securely (via optional encryption), and robustly (with error correction and resumption of interrupted transfers). Unfortunately, they’re just low-level protocols so unless you’ve got a particularly friendly UI they’re not going to be much help in the OP’s scenario.
Skype solves the user-friendliness problem, but I’m not sure about the other aspects of it. Does it support resumption of interrupted transfers? (No one wants to see their connection drop out after spending hours downloading a file, just before it reaches the end.) Does it send the file more or less as-is, or does it have a massive 37% overhead like MIME-encoded e-mail? Does the transfer implement an open, peer-reviewed encryption scheme, or is all data sent in the clear, or with some undocumented, hand-rolled algorithm that any first-year computer science student could crack? Since Skype is a proprietary client using proprietary protocols, it may not be possible to answer all these questions.
It would have to be awfully old. Linux file systems commonly supported 16 GB or larger files as long ago as 1993; Microsoft Windows’s NTFS, introduced the same year but not popularized on home desktops until Windows XP in 2001, has a practical file size limit of 16 TB. AFAIK the default Mac OS file system has supported file sizes up to 8 EB since 1998.
That wasn’t in response to the OP, whose needs are better served by file sending sites. That was in response to the person who needed to send a 10GB file, above the limit of most of those sites.
Skype does resume.
Skype encrypts using AES with its own keys. Its security concerns are the topic of constant discussion, including many accusations of government backdoors. It’s good enough for most of the world, and it’s good enough for Grandma, who can hardly roll her own verified end-to-end hardware and software anyway.
You can thank FAT for slowing that down. FAT was still used despite XP due to NTFS’s initial incompatibilities (usually wrt to writeability) with OSX and *NIX, USB flash drives, etc.
You’d think this was a problem solved log ago, but from time to time I still see computers struggle with this. It’s certainly rarer now, but still something to watch out for.
File size limits also affected earlier versions of ZIP, AVI containers, etc.
Also, none of those protocols fix the real problem behind transferring files which is punching through NATs. Short history lesson: when the internet was invented, it was decided that IP addresses would be 32 bits, allowing for a total of 4 billion in the address range which nobody ever anticipated running out of. When we started running short on IP addresses, ISPs started putting their users behind NATs, effectively delaying the transition to IPv6. The problem is, barring a few esoteric techniques, a device behind a NAT can only connect to one not behind a NAT. This isn’t a problem in the standard, client-server web surfing model because all web servers are hosted on their own IP address but with peer to peer connections, you often run into problems.
scp, SFTP & the like were invented before NATs became a problem and assume you’re able to form a connection to an IP address.
Do non-institutional home users get NATed by their ISPs? I’ve always had an actual IP with every connection I’ve had (though of course my own router will do NATing).
I do a Google search for a questions, and the 3rd link that comes up is my favorite message board that I spend most of my time on… No wonder we have so many zombies lately. But within a year, so I’ll bump the thread.
So C, I want to send a couple large, as in 350MB to 1GB+ files to a friend of mine, she is computer illiterate (honestly, didn’t even know what a ZIP was), She uses a Mac which I know nothing about, while I use PC… I’ve so far been trying to transfer with Skype, though the transfer speeds are 1/3 to 1/2 of what I would expect with basic speed tests…
So, how would I set up an HTTP server on my computer (which is behind a NAT router) and is this as easy as it sounds? I just want her to be able to download a file from my computer as easy as I tell her to. Both computer will be on during the entire transfer…
Sorry, I don’t know how to set up an HTTP server on a PC; it’s built into OSX. I expect, though, that if you Google “Apache” (the name of the most common webserver) you can find something free to download which will walk you through the necessary steps.
The latest versions of Thunderbird do exactly this. I haven’t used the feature yet, but when I go to email a large file, it asks me if I want to use XYZ file sharing service instead. It looks like it’s designed to be pretty seamless.
As Chronos said, Apache is free, common, and easy to set up (for a technical user). You’ll also need to poke a hole in your router to redirect port 80: usually this involves adding a line to a table in your router configuration that redirects incoming port 80 to your PC’s local IP address. If you want a tiny bit of extra security-through-obscurity, you can use a different port number (any number <=65535; this defeats simple port scanners).
For a little extra ease of use, you can also use a dynamic DNS service, so that you can send a more personalized domain domain to someone instead of a string of numbers. I use the service at freedns.afraid.org.
I trust the advice of GQers, but still, am wary of good-products that are absolutely free! Or else I’m just curious. How does mediafire.com make money?
It looks great, BTW.