[tonymet]

windows 11 now has nearby devices in the share-sheet .https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/share-things-wit...

You're right it's still not yet widely adopted and is less mature than Airdrop.

I think so many attacks on CIFS occurred ~ 2000-2015 that local sharing was locked down into oblivion.

[tentacleuno]

> windows 11 now has nearby devices in the share-sheet

That sounds great, but after reading this...

> you can share over Wi-Fi if the Windows 10/11 PC you’re sharing to is connected to the same private Wi-Fi network. Otherwise, *you can share over Bluetooth.* (emphasis mine)

Bluetooth file sharing is one of the most frustrating, painfully slow experiences (on Windows, at least), to date. It frequently randomly disconnects, all while taking hours to transfer small files. Nobody ever uses this, or if they do, they don't want to.

I'm surprised file sharing is so bad when so many breakthroughs have been made in Bluetooth, and wireless networking tech in general. It seems wrong that we're now on WiFi 6E, and this is still a thing.

P.S. Is the protocol for Nearby Sharing public? It would be a great shame to lock this behind Windows -- it could be a very good solution in the end.

[tonymet]

I did some digging using TCPView and found

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WS-Discovery Web Services Dynamic Discovery (WS-Discovery

Inside windows this listens on UDP 3702 and is hosted by dasHost.exe / Device Association Services.

Here are microsoft's Developer docs for the WSDAPI https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/win32/blob/docs/desktop-src...

I didn't see any linux or android implementation but it could be out there with some more digging.

[tonymet]

> Is it public?

I couldn’t find docs from MS on the protocol. Without knowing anything I would guess enumeration is mdns based and transfer would use http or cifs.

I’ll look into my firewall and see if any port specs are listed for the service as a starting point on reverse engineering it.

I’m also curious.