EchoDuck

@jaredl If you want a persistent connection, just never close that tab 😂 If true %99.9999 persistence is what you're after, then go to https://www.linode.com/ and get a Nanode for $5/mo This product serves as an ad-hoc, transient, and completely private solution for (very) large file transfers and temporary static web hosting.

@g_briel I'll make a video about it soon. TL;DR, it's because of this line of code: echo $frame; Long version: the app leverages duplex connections (websockets) for both HTTP-to-proxy communication (user requests) and host-to-proxy communication (responses). 1. The WebSocket server handling these connections is written entirely in PHP (hence the use of the language construct "echo"). 2. It's dumb as a duck. Meaning, it just blindly forwards WebSocket frames to the HTTP request that's waiting for the transaction to be complete. No eavesdropping. No "secret" S3 bucket, no NSA backdoor, nothing. Just a simple echo statement makes your file transfer completely private. The privacy aspect of DuckDuckGo was, indeed, inspiring. Hence, EchoDuck.

@ivan_husarov ngrok is, indeed, awesome! EchoDuck leverages a WebSocket (duplex) connection for HTTP-to-client communication. Currently, all non-GET requests are ignored and simply logged locally. It really wouldn't take much to simply forward those requests to a localhost:{port} with fetch() and intelligently dispatch responses back through that connection. However - and this point is important -, EchoDuck is not a WebSocket alternative to SSH or other tunnelling approaches. It's not meant to replace excellent options like ngrok. It's just a "dumb as a duck" static web server that can run on any virgin laptop or mobile device with one click and go away just as easily. For it to be a valid alternative to ngrok, it would have to bypass some pesky browser limitations (namely WebSocket frame size limits and CPU throttling), so it would have to be rewritten natively in Electron.js/Tauri or similar. But that's just a potentially dangerous executable I don't want on my device 😊 EchoDuck is for your mom. Ngrok is for work.

@markjivko haha, ur a great explainer =) It's hard sometimes to produce a one-purpose service, but you excelled it. I'll be looking for more DuckDrops from you)

@kate_ramakaieva It's free so that everyone with an Internet connection can use it. In fact, I believe it would be awesome if this tool became standard functionality in most browsers. It's not completely free to prevent abuse. Someone has to pay for that bandwidth 😊