wormhole-gui VS hyperboot

I’d say wormhole-gui (https://github.com/Jacalz/wormhole-gui), but I might be a bit biased :)

> No, seriously. It’s so simple I thought I missed something. But no. After you run that binary, you have a fully operational node of Syncthing. It’s ready to sync with any other Syncthing node, no other setup necessary. There’s no installers, no package management (but there are packages if you want to), no registration, no email, no logins, no password creation, no 2FA, no consents, no user agreements.

The most similar experience I had to this in recent years was using a program called wormhole for peer to peer file transfer: https://github.com/Jacalz/wormhole-gui

It was refreshing in a similar way; I download and open up the program, a friend does the same, and we can send files to each other, with a code genereated from the program. None of all this accounts stuff.

(For what it's worth, file sending has a similar issue as backup/sync that the author described -- most modern services are some centralized/cloud form, as opposed to the old days of ICQ/AIM/etc. where you could actually establish a direct connection to a friend and send files.)

Any reason for not just using the go mod vendor support? That was what I have planned to use in the future. Actually managed to get a working Flatpak. Could do with some tweaking, but it is generally working now :) https://github.com/Jacalz/wormhole-gui/issues/23

TLDR at the bottom.

It seems the answer is Brian Warner's magic-wormhole. You're gonna see lots of file transfer sites with wormhole in their name, but if you want security you should use the original one, which is BW's m-w.

It is implemented in Python [1], so it's hard to install.

So someone made a Go version of it [2] that has binaries for windows, Mac, Linux, BSD etc. But it's command line so maybe not suitable for lay people.

So another person made a GUI for it that also has binaries for all OS [3].

Also there is an android app [4]. Someone needs to implement an iOS one.

[1] https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole/

[2] https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william/

[3] https://github.com/Jacalz/wormhole-gui/

[4] https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william-mobile/

TLDR: ask them to install [5] and [6].

[5] https://github.com/Jacalz/wormhole-gui/releases/

(click on 'Assets' under 'Latest release' and download the zip or tar.gz for your OS)

[6] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.sanford.wor...

Try it, it's usage is cute and really feels like magic.

It seems like there’s already a GUI version. If you still want to make your own, go for it, but I figured I’d mention this in case you hadn’t seen it.

> the other uses client-server cryptography pretending to be end-to-end

This is misleading and false. Wormhole.app uses end-to-end encryption. It's factually incorrect to imply otherwise.

To address the larger point – auditing a web app is indeed challenging with current web technologies. In the past, I experimented with a technique using App Cache to permanently cache a web app on first use [1]. Later, that technique was expanded into hyperboot [2] to give users the benefits of explicit, immutable versioning with control over upgrades using the html-version-spec while preserving the simplicity of passing around a URL.

With the impending removal of AppCache from most browsers, the web is currently missing a way to "pin" a site to a specific version and only update it with user consent. Service Workers come close but they mandate a 24 hour maximum cache time before refetching from the server.

We'd love to offer the usability benefits of web apps – you can give someone a URL and they can immediately load the app – with the security of installed apps – doesn't change without warning – once web standards catch up. This is something that I care deeply about.

In the meantime, use magic-wormhole if you prefer a locally-installed command line tool and you're sending files to someone who understands the command line. Use Wormhole.app if you want usable end-to-end encryption, similar to what Firefox Send used to provide.

[1]: https://github.com/feross/infinite-app-cache

[2]: https://github.com/substack/hyperboot