You could search for and browse movies by clicking on directors, actors and other staff, download a movie with one click, preview it to select what you want to clip, and make a gif out of it.
Turns out it was a very convenient interface to discover, download, and view movies. All we had to do was front-end to TMDb, a torrent search scrapper, and a layer between the Transmission CLI and the front-end.
We inadvertently built a popcorn-time clone in a day.
Found myself in a situation needing it a few weeks ago and was like, ugh, what do I do now.
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 guess this is why most no-account file hosting is on sketchy sites.
ffsend uses this host, but I don't widely advertise it's address to prevent overloading the server with spam.
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.
Do you think that would be useful to many people?
At the time (2010), link shortening services were all the rage, but they were being used to obfuscate malware links. To fight this, we wanted to create a link shortening service that couldn't be used for malware. Instead of redirecting to a webpage, it broke the page apart into its core elements so you could see what it was about before you visited it. If the site had photos, we even put them into a nice looking image gallery that you could peruse.
We finished the project in 72 hours and got an honorable mention for the competition, but we didn't win. A month later, our free server hosting we were given for the competition was about to expire. I logged in to spin the whole thing down.
Poking around the DB a bit, I realized our little weekend project had thousands of links shortened and the traffic for the site was actually exceeding the limits of the server. Looking at the URLs, I realized they all had one thing in common; they were all porn sites. The simple inclusion of the image gallery had inadvertently created a porn scraping service. It was like your browser's reader view, but perfect for adult sites!
It was so obvious in retrospect, but sometimes in your rush to build an idea, you can be completely blind to its true nature. This time it was amusing, but the next time it could be dangerous, and the lesson always stuck with me.