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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of Firefox Send.

Found myself in a situation needing it a few weeks ago and was like, ugh, what do I do now.

I swear Mozilla misses out on a ton of opportunities to make money and fund MDN / Firefox properly. They need to stop making free services, and charge money for services that will fund the open source projects in their foundation, that or finally donate it to a real org that will actually maintain the projects in question.

Firefox Send had a known malware problem for awhile but when it was used to successfully target a NGO the pressure forced Mozilla to pull the plug. At least that’s the version that’s publicly available.

If Firefox had used something other than firefox.com the brand trust could be decoupled from the service but by offering it for free they received PR. Catch 22 I think.

The nature of Mozilla not having access to the files eliminated any sort of scanning/vetting and malicious actors quickly exploited it.

If Firefox had decided to charge for send I’m sure fraudulent payments would have been used to procure accounts intended for malware. That could have helped expire out malicious links before unsuspecting users clicked them but it wouldn’t have completely addressed the issue.

I think paras 2&3 were also the curse: firefox.com was a “good neighbourhood”, which made it convenient/accessible, but that’s good for the whole spectrum of actors.

I guess this is why most no-account file hosting is on sketchy sites.

There's still a working donation-supported command-line-focused version of it here [1] for anyone who doesn't know!

[1] https://github.com/timvisee/ffsend

Thanks for linking ffsend! You can also use it in your browser, like Send, at `send.vis.ee`.

ffsend uses this host, but I don't widely advertise it's address to prevent overloading the server with spam.

The year is 2020 and transferring files between devices is still hard.

I think a decade ago I started paying ~5$ a month for a server at OVH with a lot of storage. SSH/Filezilla, Nginx on an obfuscated URL, has solved a lot of my problems. I also use it as a server to test docker images, a VPN when I want a French IP, a pictures backup server and a professional presentation website.

My free email account I am using since the 90s is now telling me it is almost full so I am considering to switch it.

Really, storage is cheap but is not free. Save yourself a lot of hassle: pay it yourself, take back control.

I am working on a pet project, which is an application that would allow people to share files for limited time with short urls.

Do you think that would be useful to many people?

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