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Comment by matham | Hacker News Reader

Do you know what led Mozilla to stop this experiment (I'm assuming spam)? Will this not be an issue for your instances as well?

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The announcement is here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-s...

Quick summary: it was being used for malware and phishing, aggravated by the trustworthy-seeming firefox.com URL.

I think the shifting "product focus" is probably the main factor here, simply because such a service being used for malware hosting was completely predictable from day 1. When they started they probably thought that it was worth it, then later on they changed their mind. That or they were incredibly naive.

In the context of a large corporation, incredibly naive is just an euphemism for bad management. They launched it. An internal security audit found that it was being used for phishing. They planned to fix it but layoffs came along and they had to sunset Send.

So, yes, incredibly naive.

They said they stopped due to spam, but there might be more to it because they also had quite a lot of layoffs that period. I don't know.

I can imagine spam being a problem with such a service with a well recognized brand name.

This is self-hosted, so probably easier to apply security through obscurity.

That means no security at all. Without a way to link files being hosted to identity or inspecting the contents of the files, there is no barrier to prevent spam and illegal files from being hosted.

they have a public instance... and just like Mozilla's version you can self-host... but either way we need more services like this.

> we need more services like this

I don’t know. The internet had hundreds of file sharing sites at one point. They all suffered fates similar to the epic MegaUpload although with not as colorful founders as Kim DotCom.

I don’t see how having them again would be different than last time?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload

Mediafire is still alive and I think it's the last hold out from the "big" file sharing websites of the mid/late 2000s. Though honestly I don't miss the download limits, timers and adf ly spam that came with them. Common cloud storage (gdrive, dropbox) are much easier to use and share files from, although they require you to be logged in. Send seems to be the best of both world though.

> They all suffered fates similar to the epic MegaUpload although with not as colorful founders as Kim DotCom

Well it doesn't matter as much in this case because "Send" is a temporary file host.

Storage in S3 is not cheap.

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