Rich Persaud sent me this delightful tidbit on Remote Clip, an Internet clipboard:
The clipboard has no documentation, no competition and has won 100% of the market for content-migration-in-less-than-10-seconds.
The sleepy clipboard market got a boost of excitement when DARPA helped fund a cross-platform, secure, P2P, open-source network clipboard from Carnegie Mellon.
Remote Clip can encrypt and publish content (e.g. text) or content files (e.g. documents) to a group of only trusted peers. Over the Internet. Using those two familiar commands. Between Windows, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. Ssh. [ Internet Time Blog ]
Thanks Rich! The always-on encryption feature of this nifty little tool, which synchs data automatically among a group of machines, makes it particularly nice. Of course, in our pre-IPv6 universe, the LANs on which you'd likely use this tool are already relatively secure. Going cross-Internet, you'll run into the usual NAT/firewall issues that folks like Groove have spent countless person-hours working around.
In some alternate universe where IP address space never was constrained, you have to wonder what kinds of secure, lightweight, end-to-end solutions might have flourished. In this universe, another version of the Internet clipboard idea, InClip, uses an FTP server as a rendezvous.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/09/26.html#a426