Show HN: My weekend project - Uberzet | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My weekend project - Uberzet

uberzet.com

11 pointsuberzet24 comments

I like the idea so I'd like to share my thought processes as I used it.

Firstly, I had a basic idea of what it probably was having heard about the hack involving file hashes a while back.

While it gets permissions for my entire Dropbox I was aware it only interacted with my Public folder. That's fine.

After signing up it wasn't obvious what to do next, even with the random link. I searched for a file that's in a folder with no luck. My first random file is one of my own. through that trial and error I figured out it only interacts with the top-level folder.

Personally, I organize my public folder. In fact, I have a "persistent" folder that I use to link to, to imply the links are largely non-transient. I'd love to be able to index folders of my choosing.

If you redirected to a page to control that it would be immediately obvious what's shared and what's not.

EDIT: As an aside, I found some pretty neat files I'd forgotten about!

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah - it only links with the top level foler - basically for simplicity of design. As explained here : http://uberzet.com/sharing-more a possible use of folders within your Public folders is to 'hide' files from Uberzet.

Anyway - there are obviously some pretty gaping holes in messaging and functionality. If I have time in the future I may fix these things up. Again, thanks for the feedback!

Dropbox is in some serious need of better permissions.

* This app will have access to your entire Dropbox.

* Please make sure you trust this app before proceeding.

There's no way that I'm going to approve of access like that.

that's exactly what i tough

Yes, Uberzet has access to your entire Dropbox (as is made clear in http://uberzet.com/sharing-more it doesn't access anything other than your Public folder.

Still a deal breaker. I don't know who runs Uberzet or how the site is protected against hacking.

For what it's worth, Dropbox does have an alternative permissions model where the app is sandboxed into its own folder. I used it recently for a project of mine, and it was really easy to set up, so I highly recommend checking it out.

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/start/core

You should be explaining your value proposition on the first page. If I had gone just by what I read there I would have assumed that Uberzet was an alternative upload-and-get-public-link UI.

For everyone else: it is an index of the public Dropbox files of everyone who is signed up.

It says that NOWHERE. I understand it's a weekend project, but there's absolutely no explanation of what Überzet does on the landing page.

From the landing Page: "What is Überzet? Überzet a new way to share and discover files. It's built on top of your Dropbox Public folder. "

Then there is a link to http://uberzet.com/sharing-more - which goes into more detail on this.

I really agree with chrisdroukas, I had no idea I would be sharing my public folder until after I'd already approved the permissions and poked around.

Also when it comes to deciding if I want to share my public folder it would be nice if you could list what's in my public folder for me. I had to go check.

Yes, agreed, sorry. Initially I thought it would be a great 'minimum friction' entry point.

> Also when it comes to deciding if I want to share my public folder it would be nice if you could list what's in my public folder for me. I had to go check.

Agreed. It's shame Dropbox doesn't let you see what files you have in your Public folder more easily. It would be great if they could some how directly link it to a folder on your computer so you could quickly and easily manage those files.

Ah well, such is the state of the art I guess.

Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you here - but - ~/Dropbox/Public might be what you're looking for?

I've manually removed the app via dropbox.com yet my public dropbox items are still visible and downloadable.

This is really a problem since it wasn't made all that clear to me what I was authorizing in the first place

Public dropbox folders still operate on some security through obscurity. Previously you could access files but only if you had the link. Allowing these items to be indexed removes that security so it should be made extremely clear what's going on.

I'll implement removal functionality when I have time. In the meantime you can email the address on the contact page and I will happily remove the offending files from uberzet.

I gave it a try to figure out what it was about (as others say, this should be explained on the main page) Pretty cool idea, but if I remove the app from my Dropbox, will it still have an index of my public folder? It wouldn't be able to index any new items, but I'm guessing the items in there already will remain in your index. Is this correct?

Yeah unfortunately that is correct. As a quick hack I couldn't really be bothered to code up a deauth callback (in-fact I'm not even sure of Dropbox has this).

If you email me at the Contact address I'd be happy to manually remove any files you want removed!

Teehee. Sorting by size sorts the string size rather than the true size. At first this leads to logical results, like 0.9GB being at the top of the results, and then you realize that 53mb file is right next to that 53.6kb file. Wait a second~

Yeah I just threw in the default 'twitter bootstrap' zebra-sorted table. http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/#tables

Again, just a weekend project so all the bells and whistles aren't really there.

For those wishing to remove files from the index: Move the file from your top-level Public folder into a (sub) folder within your Public folder. see : http://uberzet.com/sharing-more

very usefull!

crap i just crashed your server, sorry :(. I was playing with the download system, didn't want to crash it :(.

Interesting - I'm guessing you're they guy who uploaded 'cash.html' a link to 'donate to your startup' - then hammered it's /download GET request 1338 times to make it the most popular file on the system.

Whilst I am at fault for exposing this as a possibility on my system - I think it's seriously not cool to exploit a very unambitious weekend project like this for your own financial gain.

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