Imagine a situation where you want to share large amounts of data among people who are located around the universe. All are sufficiently wired so no worries about connections and probably no worries about bandwidth (but we can always want more). How to go about this?

Among the slightly inconvenient methods I currently use are FTP (via traditional clients, IM), e-mail, and, for when I am connecting to my other machines, remote connections (e.g., Remote Desktop Connection and VNC). There are others, yes; the point of this post is not to methodically go through every way to remedy the hypothetical situation but to highlight two relevant applications about which I just learned.

The first new method is through a Firefox plugin called AllPeers. It works within Firefox and establishes a p2p network among a defined set of users. You can do the basic nifty things with it (for a quick but comprehensive run down, watch the demo). For sharing large amounts of data and in situations where you want users to pull or push the data (i.e., copy to and from), it does not seem to be an ideal solution.

A better solution might be Hamachi, which I just learned about from BH. It creates a VPN’ed LAN. I went through the site’s primary pages and it looks solid, providing a basic solution with some nice frills. Support for Windows is decent–I am talking about the GUI and features, not necessarily stability or completion of the software; it’s in beta–and Linux and OS X progress is, well, progressing. Check it out.