24 points by gregsadetsky 5 hours ago | 11 comments
- Croc has broke down for me quite a few times when transferring large files. I switched back to MW.
- I use croc instead of magic wormhole as of a year ago now. In my testing the throughput is higher than magic wormhole because it uses multiple TCP connections to transfer the files.
- Sounds like Magic Wormhole (https://magic-wormhole.io/). The readme acknowledges Warner at the end.
Key differences seem to be resumable transfers and proxy support.
Another is a single binary, whereas MW is in Python, but there’s now https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole.rs
I appreciate that the project acknowledges its inspiration. I wish it were more common for projects to provide detailed comparisons with similar ones for people trying to choose.
- I’ve found croc to be more reliable than MW in across different network architectures — croc has worked in places where MW has not. I’m not sure why.
- Hm. I had the exact opposite experience. Weird.
- Hard-coded to use his relay server and then asking for donations for bandwidth?
- one thing that gets me is this should be one of the most basic tasks between two machines and it has been increasingly, systematically abstracted from us, to control what channels it goes through, if it even goes through at all. so kudos to this app but this should be easy at an OS level and it isn't, by design. likely for the same reason airdrop is not a thing in china
- If you have IPv6, it’s easy. In IPv4 land… Good luck.
- File transfer isn't an OS level problem. There are already a million utilities that let you get a file from computer A to computer B if they are reachable over IP. Connecting the computers in a secure way is the hard part, hence the need for all the workarounds.
- Fair, though I think a large part of why this has always been more difficult than it should be is the fundamental design of TCP and IP. The former encodes notions of “roaming client” and “durable server” in ways incompatible with devices that periodically want to assume either role, and the latter (at least IPv4) encourages network segmentation in such a way that reachability and discoverability are harder than people might think.
The centralized powers that be definitely deserve a share of the blame to be sure, but some of it is architectural.