Another neat feature actually built into Firefox is Take a Screenshot. To the right of the URL field, in the three dots menu. Option to save it locally, or save in the cloud with a URL with some expiration options. Sorta like a pastebin for screenshots. It only takes screenshots within the confines of a Firefox window.
Glad you like it (I worked on it). Just a side note, the cloud service will be going away in the future, but the ability to save it locally will remain.
Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
361–370 of 542 posts
Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
The files are available up until they have been downloaded (from 1 to 100 times) or until a certain timeframe has elapsed (from 5 minutes to 7 days). See the screenshot at the article.
We are working on a plugin for BitTorrent that will automatically re-upload a file to Firefox Send when the old link expires and then make the new link available in the torrent.
Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
#363I've been building a fully featured CLI tool for Firefox Send, supporting this new release. For anyone that is interested: https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend
Mind if I port this to JS?
Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one I've tried it with has ever had it fail on them. But to answer your question, I uploaded a 100mb+ file to FireFox Send, copied the link, RDPd into another computer, kicked off the download, and then cancelled it midway through download. The link did expire after that. So I guess they don't have an easy way of telling whether the download is successful or not. Maybe Mozilla's engineers can figure something out…
I appreciate you took the time to run a test to answer my question. Thank you. Firefox might consider keying off the initial IP seen upon retrieval and extending the TTL of the object until the final byte has been retrieved.
There's probably enough complexity and possibility for abuse in allowing automated requests for files again (i.e. a button on the view page) or special logic for second attempts that the safest option is just to have the receiving party ask for the file again through whatever medium originally kicked off the request (an email, an IM, etc).
Firefox could do any number of things to make it easier on the user, but I expect them to take my security and privacy very seriously and to error on the side of those ideas rather than usability, so hopefully if they come out with something it's not at odds with those goals.
Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
I typoed. I meant `pipx`, not `pipe`. My phone tried to help. `pipx` is a convenience utility for installing cli python tools in separate virtual environments and then being able to update them nicely: https://github.com/pipxproject/pipx So i meant `pip install --user pipx && pipx install magic-wormhole`
Well I'm glad I asked, because that sure is neat!
Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
The files are available up until they have been downloaded (from 1 to 100 times) or until a certain timeframe has elapsed (from 5 minutes to 7 days). See the screenshot at the article.
We are working on a plugin for BitTorrent that will automatically re-upload a file to Firefox Send when the old link expires and then make the new link available in the torrent.
The torrent protocol is already there. Don't put that cost on the Mozilla Org.
Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. Security and secrecy are not binary, though, it's a spectrum. There are many things where you would mostly want to avoid dragnet attacks and undetected intrusion but don't have concerns for targeted attacks like the one you are describing. I think this fills the gap for when you want to share not-critically-secret stuff with non-technical people and would today likely send it over something like e-mail, D…
I don't disagree. I've been thinking about how I would write the announcement copy explaining to non-technical users how the links should also be treated as secret and how email is not encrypted in general. It's a hard problem.
If anything it's probably harder to understand for a somewhat semi-technical person who probably has started to think about encryption and so on but hasn't got far enough to spot that oh - the secret key is in the URL itself as an anchor and so the URL is the secret.
Computer Security is often nicer here than real world physical security, because we are often able to make the extreme cases so implausible as to be irrelevant, enabling intuitive statements to be true in practice rather than subject to endless caveats.
For example a lay person sees a padlock and they imagine that it cannot be opened except with the padlock key. And this is untrue in lots of ways - so a more technical person may think of some of them, and identify that this particular brand of padlock defends against those well, but not realise that other problems are undefended.
So this means the truth about the padlock has to be more nuanced and relative. Breaking the lock open with tools is "difficult". Picking the lock "cannot easily be done in under a minute". But lay people don't like nuanced, relative statements. It sounds a lot like this padlock won't really stop someone stealing my bike! That's because it won't.
But in computer security we often can make these cases irrelevant in practice. What if someone just tries all the key values for this AES encryption? That's fine, there are so many that even if they could try as many as there are grains of sand in the world, every second, the sun would burn out long before they had a meaningful chance of guessing the right one.
Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
#368What changed? Is that rant finally outdated? Couldn't Mozilla at any time serve a corrupted JS bundle (with or without their knowledge) which would leak the key somewhere, silently replace the encryption by a noop, etc?
I ask out of interest, not skepticism. I much prefer an internet where we can trust web apps to do proper crypto than one where we have to depend on some app store to somewhat adequately protect us.
[0] https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/b...
Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
#369Re: Firefox Send: Free encrypted file transfer service
#370Ah man, I literally came up with (and prototyped) this exact thing in 2013. Minus the end to end encryption. I dropped it mostly because I wasn't sure how to prevent illegal use and didn't want to be liable. Edit: mine was actually (partially) better because it assigned a short PIN instead of a full link, which meant you could just look at it and remember it for typing-in, instead of requiring a separate channel to "…
The end to end encryption necessitates a hard to remember uri anyway, so I don't think you can have both "secure" and "memorable".