Mozilla's Send is Basically the Snapchat of File Sharing (theverge.com) 107
Mozilla has launched a new website that makes it really easy to send a file from one person to another. From a report: The site is called Send, and it's basically the Snapchat of file sharing: after a file has been downloaded once, it disappears for good. That might sound like a gimmick, but it underscores what the site is meant for. It's designed for quick and private sharing between two people -- not for long-term hosting or distributing files to a large group. It supports files up to 1GB, and after uploading something, it'll give you a link to send to someone else. That link will expire once they've downloaded it or once 24 hours have passed.
Terrorists! (Score:3)
Won't someone think of the children!
Re:Terrorists! (Score:5, Funny)
I'd bet people who "think of the children" would use a service like this a lot.
Re:Terrorists! (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you know what else they use?
Phones! The postal service! Roads! Aircraft! Railways! Banks!
Better shut down the entire society! Think of the children!
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Uploading once for every download would be a gigantic pain in the ass. Standard operating procedure is to password protect a 7z/rar archive with a non-descriptive name, split to 100MB chunks or whatever the board rules say. Upload it to whatever file host works well with TOR with Javascript off and will take a few days to respond to mail, we keep recommended host lists also a mirror on a different site is recommended. Post preview + download links + password to the onion boards, some white knight will alway
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Re: Terrorists! (Score:1)
Don't worry, I'm sure Teresa May is already bitchin' about it and Putin will want semen samples before downloading Firefox.
I don't trust it (Score:1)
I don't really see the point. We have had temperately file hosting services for years. Moreover I find the fact that it requires JS and multiple 3rd party resources in order to work properly extremely annoying (all the other services that I use to share videos of my wife of do not require that).
I think that it would be better if Mozilla focused more on their important projects, such as Firefox, Servo and Rust.
Re:I don't trust it (Score:5, Funny)
I use to share videos of my wife
I really couldn't care less if you do or do not see the point, as long as you keep those videos of your wive coming.
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I use to share videos of my wife
I really couldn't care less if you do or do not see the point, as long as you keep those videos of your wive coming.
Yeah. That last one was amazing! Please keep them coming.
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I can name a number of file sharing services, both paid and free, which offer this functionality. It is nice to have a temporary file service that is part of a web browser and that (hopefully) doesn't require a ton of signing up and such. However, I wouldn't mind Mozilla focus on core things as well. Firefox, Servo, and Rust are useful, but SeaMonkey and Thunderbird are still important, as Thunderbird is a major real cross platform MUA next to mutt.
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but SeaMonkey and Thunderbird are still important
I hate to break it to you but Mozilla parted ways[*] with Thunderbird [mozilla.org] and SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org] some time ago. The developers hired by Mozilla, mainly focus on Firefox/Rust/everything you just mentioned solely. Now that being a good thing or bad thing is, I am sure, a topic for discussion.
[*] Mozilla still proves legal advice/backing and hosting of code for the two projects. However, no Mozilla developer works on either of these projects directly (obviously there's dabbling). They are now community developed and o
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Yep. I'll stick with direct peer to peer file sharing.
That's the entire point of services like Mozilla's "Send" and likely soon several other similar 'me too!' services suddenly being rolled out and hyped heavily by major and minor players alike; Laying the groundwork towards ultimately eliminating the capability for direct connections between regular people, making it mandatory for any data, message, etc to pass through some service's servers where it can all be slurped-up by TLAs with just a relative handful of incoming data acquisition streams while simulta
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And this isn't the case now? Really, there aren't that many ISPs around, and except for a few (ProtonMail, etc.) that do actual encryption, all make your email and any attachments available for viewing by security agencies on presentation of a suitable request. Other than the specifically privacy-oriented services, all store your traffic unencrypted on their servers; SSL/TLS only protect it in transit. So your attachments are now available for scanning by all and sundry. If this Mozilla service actually does end-to-end encryption, that will be a selling point for those who care.
I never said that the current situation supported or was at all friendly to the laundry-list of things you reference. I, too, would like to be able to, for example, run a small server on occasion for limited periods of time like a few hours to a week or two without having to purchase a commercial-class connection along with all the other roadblocks to casual home server use. But, there still remains a plethora of other protocols, methods and types of P2P encrypt-able data transfer/sharing & text communi
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I, too, would like to be able to, for example, run a small server on occasion for limited periods of time like a few hours to a week or two without having to purchase a commercial-class connection
I've been running a server constantly for about 20 years now that provides a wide range of services for myself and a handful of close friends. I've been forced to use Comcast for about 10 years of that. I've never had a commercial-class connection, and it has never been an issue.
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I've been running a server constantly for about 20 years now that provides a wide range of services for myself and a handful of close friends. I've been forced to use Comcast for about 10 years of that. I've never had a commercial-class connection, and it has never been an issue.
I suppose it depends on where you're at and what sort of individuals are actually in charge of decisions on who to go after. Still, having to hope some office drone doesn't happen to be having a bad day when he looks over the logs showing your server activity is not a plan and is a situation ripe for selective enforcement.
Strat
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So, you zip your file and add some padding before sending it. Password protect it while you're at it if you really think they are going to waste cpu-cycles on extracting any archives on the fly to apply their checks. If you're really paranoid you can always pgp it.
Fat lot of good their hash and file size notations will do them.
Oblig. xkcd (Score:5, Informative)
https://xkcd.com/949/ [xkcd.com]
I know my parents want something like this.
Hey mozilla... (Score:1)
Please fix Firefox Developer tools. and never mind this file sharing stuff. Thnx.
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Developers like coding new stuff, not fixing old stuff. BTW, this service is not like Snapchat. Snapchat deletes the photo on your phone after a few seconds. Whereas once your friend or colleague has downloaded your FF-Send file, he may or may not delete it.
Terrorists will love this service! (Score:2, Insightful)
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And it's a data exfiltration nightmare. Oh, can't attach the customer file in Outlook because it's too big. Ok, let's use THIS!!
OTOH, it does at least for now, permit those behind censorship firewalls to obtain big wads of news.... but...as you cite: Terrorists!!!
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Eh, the DoD has had SAFE [army.mil], an equivalent service, for years now. If anyone would be worried about exfiltration, you would think it would be them.
How's that browser coming? (Score:3, Insightful)
- Fix the browser; get back to the original mission of a fast no-bloat browser
- Fire everyone but the five developers it takes to do that and donate any excess money left in the Foundation to the EFF
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Fix the browser; get back to the original mission of a fast no-bloat browser
This is exactly what they're working on now. See FF 57 and the improvements they're making therein.
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Yeah, we'll see. What I've heard from Mozilla about FF57 doesn't make it sound like they've fixed much of what they've broken.
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The browser is fine, have you tried the last version (57) ? Or you just lie to bitch about it you tool?
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The browser is fine
That Chinese propaganda technique was apparently invented by Mozilla.
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Mozilla is infested a lot of problems. Ranging from the "hey, my buddy needs a job -- so we'll just make a job up" type bloat. To the focus on the latest trendy social event everyone has to do something about, which will be forgotten about in 11.83 seconds. Or complete lack of organizational focus, and ignoring what users actually want out of the product.
They're effectively dead at this point, and when you hear normal people say "I regret giving them money." They have a serious problem.
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To the focus on the latest trendy social event everyone has to do something about, which will be forgotten about in 11.83 seconds.
With Firefox's memory leaks, I'm pretty sure that it forgets to deallocate memory much faster than 11.83 seconds.
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You're probably right. It's simply dumping it all to the page file, and aiming for 3.72GB of memory in use all by itself.
My first thought wasn't terrorism (for once).. (Score:3)
My first concern was that it'll actually do what they say, not keep logs, etc.
What's in it for Mozilla? Corporate altruism is extremely rare, or even logical from a business standpoint.
Maybe it's providing more PR visibility for Firefox since it uses that domain name? That seems weak though.
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One reason does seem to be to convert. As per https://github.com/mozilla/send/blob/master/docs/metrics.md [github.com]
Are non-Firefox users converted to Firefox users?
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They're using Google f'ing analytics???
Good lord.
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If you get the Mozilla newsletter, or have read their official blog over the last years, this isn't "new" - Mozilla regularly touts privacy-facing features.
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My first concern was that it'll actually do what they say, not keep logs, etc.
What's in it for Mozilla? Corporate altruism is extremely rare, or even logical from a business standpoint.
Maybe it's providing more PR visibility for Firefox since it uses that domain name? That seems weak though.
Think about Firefox - the web browser. What's in it for Mozilla?
Hand wringing (Score:1)
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Where did they go wrong?
Simply put. Shortly after 2007 they lost serious focus. Back then the Web as a Desktop app was being touted around like the next big thing. The idea was floated around a lot in 2005 and Microsoft began working on Silverlight, the Unspeakable Horror (Flash) began "Air", Apple built a web browser that could do it called Safari (based on WebKit, which was based on KHTML/KJS which the KDE folks were blurring the lines between web and desktop to kind of mimic IE pre-lawsuit), JavaFX 1 was also there, and so o
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slack_justyb has the comprehensive answer, but here's the tl;dr: they forgot what a browser is supposed to be.
I also blame rapid release (what software has that approach not made worse?), the desire to copy Chrome, and the incredibly stupid desire to turn the browser into an operating system.
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Well, you see Mr. Retard, If it's confidential/personal/whatever, you encrypt it yourself before sharing it, obviously.
The problem with that is that you have to use another type of service or method to share the key, in which case why not share the file too through other means?
Never understood why FTP didn't work like email (Score:3)
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The whole point of this is not permanently storing this on a server somewhere.
With FTP, the server of the recipient can also double as the LAN file server if you're always the recipient and never the sender. The same method as email doesn't make sense when you realize multiple people may be accessing the file on the receiving side.
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Re:Never understood why FTP didn't work like email (Score:4, Informative)
FTP is set up to provide a remote file system access, with directories, subdirectories and different access rights to different areas.
And it has the ability to traverse restrictive firewalls through the secondary socket used for data being set up as active (PORT) or passive (PASV). And the ability to have data servers that serve the content, while the control channel server only handles the authentication and command parsing.
What it is not intended for is security. There are add-on extensions, but it's still not a good choice.
Nor is it suited for easy configuration. The great majority of FTP servers are incorrectly set up, especially regarding firewall rules, where the admins (and I use this term loosely) do not understand the difference between incoming and outgoing ports and directions, and now FTP is somewhat special here, in that it uses two sockets, not just one, and one of them might be in the other direction and needs a reverse firewall rule.
These days, sftp has all but taken over for ftp for automated / command line use, and web based upload/download for the masses.
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The great majority of FTP servers are incorrectly set up, especially regarding firewall rules, where the admins (and I use this term loosely) do not understand the difference between incoming and outgoing ports and directions
I would wager that they aren't setup incorrectly because "admins" don't understand. After all "understanding" in the administration of internet servers can be faked by simply following some online guides.
The bigger problem is by having different sets of ports makes it borderline impossible to traverse NAT which would lead to a lot of systems being setup in a best effort way.
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The bigger problem is by having different sets of ports makes it borderline impossible to traverse NAT which would lead to a lot of systems being setup in a best effort way.
No, they really are set up based on lack of understanding. From what I've seen, most firewalls in front of FTP servers are set up with incoming traffic to destination port 20/tcp open, which there is no excuse for whatsoever except not understanding how FTP works.
WeTransfer.com (Score:2)
So, kind of like wetransfer.com?
It does the same thing, with AES-256. Email-link or web-link. Pay for a subscription and you can have control over how long your file lives on the server.
Don't let Zuckerberg read the headline... (Score:2)
Your browser is not supported... (Score:4, Insightful)
I get...
Your browser is not supported.
Unfortunately this browser does not support the web technology that powers
Firefox Send. You’ll need to try another browser. We recommend Firefox!
...when I try to access the service.
If Mozilla's strategy is to lure back old users with web based services like Send, they are going to have to ensure that the service works seamlessly for the people that I exchange files with, without trying to force them to change their browser first. Even if I eventually make the switch to Firefox, I can hardly expect everyone that I exchange files with to do the same in order to be able to receive the files that I send.
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>"I get...Your browser is not supported."
You neglected to say which browser it is that you are using...
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The code is on GitHub, so a quick glance tells me that this is the only place where that error occurs: https://github.com/mozilla/sen... [github.com]
So the browser must support the Web Cryptography API along with the modern GCM cipher for encrypting/decrypting the file. I don't see enforcing high-grade end-to-end cryptography as "marketing bullshit."
Why not do something interesting? (Score:1)
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Not Bad (Score:2)