Option to cancel stalled download

[hoyla]

Description

Allow users to cancel a file download that is "in progress" if it's not happening fast enough (or at all).

How will this impact SecureDrop users?

File downloads within a submission often fail – in our experience nearly always for files larger than 1Mb. At present there is no way of telling if a download is working or not, or to act on that. The suggested feature #1104 will help inform users how downloads are progressing but will not give users a means by which to intervene if the download has stalled or is occurring so slowly (e.g. due to a bad Tor route) that waiting for it to complete is impractical. Cancel would (I hope) allow us for example to terminate an existing Tor connection and start a new one.

How would this affect the SecureDrop Workstation threat model?

I don't know.

User Stories

As a journalist using the SecureDrop workstation frequently see file downloads that stall. At present it isn't possible for me to cancel a stalled download and try again.

[gonzalo-bulnes]

@cfm Because we've talked about the concept of cancellation / progress tracking in the context of Client async jobs.

@rocodes While this is not directly related to exporting files, if we were to also enable progress tracking of some sort from sd-devices, then it would be nice to share similar interfaces to those of the async jobs. Since you're thinking about the sd-devices/sd-app interface... I assume any conversation happening here might interest you 🙂

@hoyla Thanks for describing this use case. That is useful, even though please don't take the above pings as a sign that we're actively working on it yet! We're not working actively on this just yet, but the use case will certainly inform some thoughts we're slowly maturing. 🙌