Or to put it differently, I think it’s ok if two people already have clients set up and working, and they know who to use them, but I wouldn’t use torrents to transfer data in a corporate environment like that. At least not a vanilla one.

@ Kevin Benko:
Using torrents for a simple file transfer in a way shoots above the target. Torrenting doesn’t get around the fundamental problem of needing open ports in the firewall, but is needlessly complex for something like that. What torrents do, and do really well, is ensure the availability of files on networks that are less robust, but a lot of peers. It’s a common misconception that it was designed for speed. Not so, but for robustness. For a simple file transfer, the files will be sent in blocks from random positions in the files. (In a real life scenario, scarce blocks will be prioritized to ensure the health of the entire swarm.) For a person to person transfer, this almost madness of Spartan proportions. The only good thing is that the transfer automatically resumes, which would however be possible with a serial transfer method as well, given a suitable network etc…

Nevertheless, I’m planning to make an ad hoc tracker for doing just these kinds of transfers, making me a huge hypocrite. :)

I will chime in with the others who mentioned torrents.

While the bit torrent protocol has a bad reputation amongst the computer illiterate, it is, first and foremost, a file transfer protocol for transferring big files, regardless of the content of those big files.

Additionally, I’ve got a computer elitist attitude that comes from having grown up with “home computers” since the old Commodore Pet days, and from being a former Sun Microsystems employee. Let’s face it, there are, in my opinion, people out there that really shouldn’t use computers, they are a nuisance, annoyance, and a threat to the sanity of the rest of us.

Look, when the lumber industry screamed and died in Tillamook, Oregon, well, the former lumber workers started making cheese…. times change and human beings either adapt or get different jobs. It seems to me that if a job changes such that one is required to have a clue about computers, you either get a clue or you go make cheese, become a potato farmer, or something else. If someone wants to send a big file and can’t figure out how to use the most appropriate tools, it just sucks to be them. They should pay the 10 year-old kid next door a few dollars to set up a torrent for them.

Just my opinion.
(Can you tell that I am surrounded by computer illiterate people at my current place of employment?)

I would argue at some point we just have to sit down and show Bob something new. So in that case we might as well show him something. With the right program you could make torrents highly easy for him “right click the zip file -> Click “Make Torrent” -> Email fsljla.torrent to Alice”

its a little more complicated but There are 90 year old women getting arrested for using torrents so I think Bob can handle it, or he needs to just shoot himself because he is slowing down the world.

Travis McCrea wrote:

@Luke – Well then maybe not megaupload ITSELF but a service like it (HTTP upload), but I guess the fact remains that it falls outside of the companies server.

Yeah, that and if it is done internally someone has to set it up. And Bob needs to have enough clue to communicate to his supervisor that there is a need for such a service. But left to his own devices Bob will just keep trying to email that file to Alice over, and over and over again getting progressively more frustrated at the IT department for their inability to magically and miraculously push the file through.

Travis McCrea wrote:

I know this is going to sound “outside the box” but what about a torrent file? It could be shared with any number of people, its secure.

I find that torrents are deceptively counterintuitive to non-techies. I honestly can’t figure out why, but I have never actually seen a “regular person” download a torrent IRL. I mean, I know it happens – someone has to be posting all those “how doo u run iso?” comments. But most lusers exhibit almost animalistic fear every time Bittorrent is mentioned.

And besides, Bob would not be able to figure out how to set up a torrent and he probably wouldn’t grasp the concept of seeding.

And if he did, the corporate firewalls and NAT’s would probably make it almost impossible to transfer the file.

@ nitro2k01:

LOL! Good one. I will definitely need to use it next time. :)

nitro2k01 wrote:

And once again, a 500 internal. Or should I say 500 infernal?

Yea, “500 Infernal Error” aka “The Dreamhost Sucks Error”. They are pretty much telling me that my site is regularly hosing the server, and that it can’t keep up with my traffic which is kinda sad, because I’m not all that popular.

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly is causing this error, for a while now and I noticed it only happens when you have several concurrent requests, from the same IP. Like when you post a comment and you get a POST and a GET request in rapid succession. I suspect they might be doing some throttling on the server side, to keep their oversold service afloat. Or it might be that the shared server I’m on is just choking up due to running to many popular sites at the same time.

And once again, a 500 internal. Or should I say 500 infernal?

I’m disappointed you missed an obvious one. It’s goggles.com! Even my grand-son knows that!

@Luke – Well then maybe not megaupload ITSELF but a service like it (HTTP upload), but I guess the fact remains that it falls outside of the companies server. I know this is going to sound “outside the box” but what about a torrent file? It could be shared with any number of people, its secure.

Steve wrote:

If I were Sanjit…I have been in his shoes – I simply respond in kind to the idiot. I tell him, point blank, he knows little about PCs and that what he does know, is all wrong. Then I proceed to lock down his PC so that he can’t change anything.

That’s the optimal solution. :) Sadly, it does not always apply since often “Bobs” of the world have more clout with the management than anyone in the IT department. Or you know – they are the management.

Gui13 wrote:

And you get fired because this guy’s 30 years into the company (ah the great computer-less world) and won’t accept that a young IT kiddie locks down his minesweeper access

Sigh… So true. This is what one manager told me some years ago:

“You are here to support these guys and make them happy. Their time is billable. They are making us money, while you IT guys are an expense and overhead.”

@ Alphast:

That sounds pretty cool… And also expensive. The problem with cloud solutions as this one is that in most cases someone else is hosting your data, and that opens up a whole new can of worms. Then you have to worry whether or not they are for example HIPPA compliant. Or if they comply with the confidentiality policy of your client, etc…

The privacy and confidentiality is a major roadblock. A lot of managers don’t even want to hear about storing stuff in the cloud, because they are scared to entrust the data to some 3rd party – even if it is a big, reputable company.

@ MrJones:

Geez… We just barely managed to ban these, and now you want to put them back on again? lol

@ Craig A. Betts:

My favorite scenario is this:

A guy sends me an email with a single line “Call me ASAP”. Great, thanks. This is even worse than a voice mail that simply says “Call me back!” because it takes considerably less effort to write down a single sentence describing what this is regarding. But whatever. I call the guy, and he is like “Can you fax me this one document…”

I’m sort of perplexed, and go “How about I email it to you?”

“Oh! That would actually be even better. Thanks!”

You just know that it didn’t even cross his mind to ask you to email the file, even though he just emailed you like 5 minutes earlier. Ugh!

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

I love Dropbox, but we can’t use it at my company due to confidentiality issues. There was actually an article on Reddit about how Dropbox sort “embellished” the truth on their web page claiming they encrypt everything and even their own techs can’t get at your data. It turns out that they do keep all the encryption keys and their employees do have access to your unencrypted data. That’s sort of thing is why my bosses don’t want to touch anything cloud-like with a 10 foot pole.

@ Sam:

Yep, and IPv6 should be just around the corner too. I mean, Asia is already out of IP blocks, right? Europe and US will be there soon. I’m actually sort of amazed the ISP’s are not making much noise about this – they should be gearing up for the switch just about now.

@ ST/op:

Yep, an SFTP server is a pretty good solution – though it is kinda scary for end users. Plus I don’t think Explorer supports SFTP, and we wouldn’t be able to use just plain FTP due to confidentiality. Better solution is a web portal with SLL.

But, that requires work: hardware must be found, someone has to set it up, management has to be cajoled into signing off on a firewall rule change to expose the box to the web, network guys need to be bribed to actually get it on the network and accessible from the web within the next calendar year. Every time we pitch this, we get the “Eh, we only do this like once or twice a month – we don’t need a server for this” brush off. :P

@ Travis McCrea:

Well, Megaupload won’t work because it is public. You know, confidentiality and all that stuff.

@ Tino:

Web-Dav and similar solutions work great internally. Sadly in my story this was about communication between two companies which previously had no relationship.

It could be done, but it would require cooperation between two IT people – one from each company. Sadly, I have worked with small businesses that had no IT support whatsoever. They were basically like 5 people using a fully hosted, web based turn key email solution and relying on Dell Warranty Support and Geek Squad for all their hardware and software issues.

That text from Bobs perspective got my eyes bleeding. Transfering 1.6 Gb of files? It is easy, just rsync -az the tree to Alice’s computer :D

Joking aside, why not: “Go to ‘my computer’, click on the ‘Bumpertop-webdav’ folder icon, go down Users->Shared, and then drag the files (or directory tree) to that directory.” (Of course one could set this up more nicely with rights, etc., but you get the idea.) As far as I have found, webdav is the only sane and somewhat integrated way to remotely access files from Windows. The FTP support is very poor in comparison and files “don’t work as usual”. SMB may also be ok, but comes with more technical and security problems due to stupidity in the protocol.

But we could really look at this as a UI problem. The email client should detect when a luser is trying to drag more than 20 Mb into an email, and then instead upload the file somewhere and include a link in the email. This could probably be solved by a thunderbird plugin.