I bet with the public launch, they will put bandwidth restrictions in place. Otherwise this will be misused in no time.
Yeah. It's all fun and games until someone shares an image and it goes to the front page of Reddit.
Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
21–30 of 40 posts
Re: Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
#22I don't know why, but I all of a sudden feel like all my private dropbox data is now vulnerable to some form of hack, bug, exploit, malicious script, etc, that turns it all into a public web page.
Sharing with just people I know is one thing, but creating a web page of some of my data is another.
I don't know, it just doesn't feel right.
Dropbox, remember, you're dealing with private files on our personal computers, and one step too far and you're looking at mass exodus. Learn from Facebook. Use caution with new features.
Re: Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
#23Is this a security risk? Could someone, theoretically, enter in a random string of characters and land on your files?
No, you still choose which files and folders to make linkable. Anything you give a url to you should consider to be public anyway.
My first thought is how to unshare a folder and thank God, it's already been there: https://www.dropbox.com/share#tab:linked-items
So, if you feel like "I wanna share this folder to the wild world, now!", just do it! You can change your mind at anytime later and the folder will be no longer accessible. Very intensive, careful design & implementation!
Re: Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you still choose which files and folders to make linkable. Anything you give a url to you should consider to be public anyway.
Still a good analysis of using the security by obscurity model for URL's
What else would you suggest? This is equivalent to randomly generating a username and password.
Re: Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
#25This sounds a lot like drop.io or mediafire etc.. file sharing services with a web interface. Since people were already using the public links to share individual files it makes a lot of sense to expand it to the folder level.
Re: Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
#26Tonido 1-click share does the same thing. Get a shareable link to a file or folder:
Re: Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
#27I don't know why, but I all of a sudden feel like all my private dropbox data is now vulnerable to some form of hack, bug, exploit, malicious script, etc, that turns it all into a public web page. Sharing with just people I know is one thing, but creating a web page of some of my data is another. I don't know, it just doesn't feel right. Dropbox, remember, you're dealing with private files on our personal computers,…
Yes, I have to add to this sentiment. In my mind, I imagine Dropbox to be just as secure and private as my own hard drive. It's a bit of a fiction, I know, but until now nothing caused me to really question it. I use it for important files -- the sensitive ones that I really don't want to lose.
Maybe it's all perception, but this makes my private files feel dangerously close to the wide open web.
Dropbox, don't make me feel dumb for using your service for stuff that matters. If your service is meant for funny cat pictures and not my tax returns, please tell me now.
Re: Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd have to go with yes. Hate to be an entropy nazi, but here goes: Hash is 6 characters long, characters are alphanumeric (a-zA-Z0-9). So that makes: (26 * 2 + 10) ** 6 => 5.6E10 That looks like a big number, but it isn't. Because at the scale of dropbox there will be 10 million links out there in no time. So then the math goes: ( (26 * 2 + 10) ** 6 ) / 10_000_000 => 5680 So you have to make only a few thousand gues…
I haven't used the feature yet, but from reading the forum thread it sounds like the 6 random characters are only created if someone chooses to shorten their link with db.tt (presumably Dropbox's shortener). By default, resources have 15 random characters. Since URL shortening is mostly for use with twitter, I think the number of non-public files/folders with a corresponding 6-random-character link will not approach…
Actually, I got the impression that no public link was available at all unless you chose to create it.
Re: Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
#29Re: Dropbox Forums: New Sharing Model
#30This feature has been available in the iPad client for some time now.