Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

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I once created a location-based file sharing web app [0] to simplify sharing non-sensitive content with people nearby, e.g. sharing slides for a public presentation with a room full of people. Anyone nearby just had to go to http://quack.space -- no funny long URLs.

I never monetized it, but it got quite a few users and I definitely could have started a path to monetization. I had ideas, such as incorporating location-based ads.

Unfortunately Chrome decided at one point it was malware for some reason. I have no idea why. On the backend I had a 1-hour time limit on files and didn't store either files or location data beyond that. Chrome would throw up a malware warning whenever someone visited the page, and that was pretty much the end of the project.

It's frustrating that they play gatekeepers to the internet, and they don't even have a fair arbitration process. They should have at least made efforts to contact the owner of the website. This should be downright illegal.

[0] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/quack-space

I suspect it was basically legit--somebody used it to try to spread malware, their spider found it.

How is blocking an application because of the actions of one user “legit”?

If their spider were treating sites fairly, it’d also block google search, and the chrome team wouldn’t budge on the decision even though the rest of the company collapsed.

I hope the anti trust investigators focus on these sorts of instead of some trivially-bypassed thing, like bundling.

After the botched MS antitrust suit, I’m not holding my breath.

Write your representatives ! Some of them actually want to help, they just legitimately don’t realize the reality of the situation on the ground.

Interesting. I blocked executable file types I knew of though. It's possible someone uploaded a MS Office file with a virus, a HTML file with a phishing scam or some such, though.

Still, I don't think it's right for Google to use their iron feet to stomp an entire website / product / small business / personal project just because of a small fraction of users abusing that service.

ALL services get abused at some point or another during their growth. Learning to deal with those abuses one at a time is a part of the growth of any product and nobody can be expected to have prevented all forms of abuse upfront. If the owners (e.g. me) were made aware of the specific piece of malware I would have definitely done something about it.

In my experience, a lot of malware scanners don't care about file types, they just look for patterns of bytes.

Exactly. The service was used to distribute malware and it got blocked by google and co.

There was a similar story last month about someone running a URL shortener. It started being used to obfuscate links to porn and scams. Then it got blocked by twitter/facebook and that's the end of the road for the service.

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