[JDEV] File Transfer Proposals

[Moz]

Some minor thoughts on details of David's idea.

David said:
>  My personal belief is that peer-to-peer connections open up
>  a whole world of problems, such as firewalls and interconnectivity
>  between different clients. 

Flip side is that hosting files opens its own can-o-worms, not least
because of the copyright issue. There's also bandwidth and storage,
which could get annoying. I'm more concerned about cease-and-desist
letters from the RIAA though.

Peer to peer transfers can be intermediated at a peer level if
required, using free email servers if nothing else. I am not sure
that we actually want to build in a violation of the systems that
ISPs use to stop their users being silly (for whatever definition
of silly applies). Clueful users will already tunnel whatever
they want through whatever holes exist, and opening a gateway
for less experienced users might not be good.

That said, if someone who is actually willing to do the work wants to
build this, I'm not opposed to them doing it. It could be the thing 
that makes Jabber wildly popular with the existing IM users. But I 
would want to be able to disable it in any server I'm running, just
to keep costs sensible.

>      - Upload -
>      If the file already exists, there is no need to upload the file again,
>      the user is simply added to the ACL, and given an expiry time. 

?? if they don't need to send the file again, why put them in the ACL?

Terminology too - perhaps consistently say "the sender sends the file"
even if it doesn't parse too well, just to keep it clear?

>      - Download -
>      The receiver sends a 'request to download', consisting of the
>      filename, size and md5. This, along with the ACL stored in the
>      files database record, help form a basic protection against files
>      being downloaded by the wrong person. Its not perfect, but it is
>      functional without requiring unstandard extensions. 

Random, single-use URIs would be a tiny improvement. IMO, since we're
working on top of IM/chat, we can work on the basis that everything
happens "now", or close enough to. I'm not sure that accepting offline
users will make a huge difference to usability, at least IME most
transfers are "hey, here's the file".
 

Moz


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