12 ms·

Anonfiles is shutting down

152 points by Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago

elektor 3y ago
That was quick. Not surprising though, there was plenty of copyrighted and illegal content being uploaded to anonfiles. The name itself didn’t too much to discourage it.
- mtmail 3y ago
  Why quick? Internet archive shows them online for 5 years at least http://web.archive.org/web/20180801065433/https://anonfiles.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180801065433/https://anonfiles....
  - elektor 3y ago
    Thanks for the correction. I was under the impression that it was only around for 2 years, not 5 :)
  - LinuxBender 3y ago
    I recall them being around a bit further back. I had to block them on a forum long ago for the reasons being discussed. whois anonfiles.com | grep Creation Creation Date: 2011-03-23T13:07:29Z
gerikson 3y ago
Hard to see why the operators thought this would be viable in the long term.
- Etheryte 3y ago
  Anonfiles as a file upload site operated in one shape or another for over a decade, which is more than most companies manage. Even when it switched hands, the core concept stayed the same, so I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that it wasn't viable in the long term.
  - loosescrews 3y ago
    Do you have any information about it changing hands? For example, when it happened?
constantly 3y ago
lol yeah duh. If you allow people to upload files to cloud storage anonymously there will always be constant, egregious abuse of the most vile kinds. Someone couldn’t pay me a hundred thousand dollars to operate and manage a site like this.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  I wouldn't take a job with 100k salary either, regardless of tasks. Now if that was 500? Call me admin@shadyuploads.com. (domain is available, I just checked).
Chilinot 3y ago
I have never heard of this service before. But this part in the end: > This is not the kind of work we imagine when acquiring it and recently our proxy provider shut us down. Really? You created a website where people could anonymously upload files to share with others. What did you really expect was going to happen? It's kinda naive to think a service like this would be all happy times in the world we have today.
- Xanza 3y ago
  I really don't think it's some horrendous oversight to expect that people will be kind to a service that you offer. If you offer anonymous and free image uploading it's not wrong to assume that not 100% of your traffic will be pornographic uploads and I also don't think it's wrong that if after years of your offering, if you get to the point where all of your uploads are porn, that you feel the need to shutdown your service. Nobody is entitled to do bad things with good tools.
  - 39 3y ago
    Why is porn bad?
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Lets refine this further... Why is child porn bad... And, why will the government punish you out of existence if you allow the trafficking of it?
    - constantly 3y ago
      In theory nothing assuming it involves only consenting adults. In practice it’s very exploitative of vulnerable people to such a degree that it becomes ethically fraught.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > I really don't think it's some horrendous oversight to expect that people will be kind to a service that you offer. Its not like anonymous file hosting on the internet was a new thing two years ago. It very much is a major oversight to offer (or acquire) a service in an existing, established segment and have no idea what the usage patterns and challenges in that segment are. > If you offer anonymous and free image uploading it's not wrong to assume that not 100% of your traffic will be pornographic uploads Its file, not just image, hosting, but, yeah, you should probably assume that the stuff that the most controversial aspect of it is that it is just porn will be toward the milder end. And their piece doesn't say “porn” it says “abuse”.
yieldcrv 3y ago
could have just been an IPFS gateway and made it easier to use that with the anon branding could always use additional gateways and CDNs people pay subscribing for pinning, even if you don’t do the pinning yourself
- eli 3y ago
  How would that improve the abuse situation?
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    Very well, it would remove the site operators obligation and capability of removing anything, and their activity would no longer rely on appeasing a hosting provider at all
    - seanhunter 3y ago
      I'm not sure this theory would stand up if you actually tried it. If you just make something immutable storage my expectation would be the law would say "well it's up to you to make really sure you're entitled to store things in it before they go in", not "Well why didn't you say so? Oh well put anything you like in there in that case".
      - yieldcrv 3y ago
        what do you mean "tried it"? this reality already exists for a long time now in this system design, anonfiles wouldn't be hosting it, any Section 230 exception problem would be the IPFS node's problem and its not even about the legal aspect? its about working smarter not harder. what you are saying, to me, sounds similar to "this person made an online store to get around the zoning procedures of a brick and mortar store" never considering that they never ever considered making a brick and mortar store to begin with and would find the administration entirely unappealing and unrelated to fulfilling their vision
aae42 3y ago
people are the worst
- RGamma 3y ago
  always have been
pickledish 3y ago
Well, a lot of cynicism in the comments here! I will say that, though I hadn't heard of this site, it seems like they were trying to do something decent and not profit-driven (free file sharing without advertising, badgering you to make an account, etc) and I'm metaphorically pouring one out for another nice service that the world had to go and mess up. For anyone wanting to know what the site used to look like, here's a random Wayback Machine snapshot from 2021: http://web.archive.org/web/20210309013336/https://anonfiles.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210309013336/https://anonfiles....
- graypegg 3y ago
  I can get down with that sentiment. Sadly it’s just not something that can exist without being ruined, but I admire the fact someone wanted to try with (hopefully) positive intentions.
  - mikrotikker 3y ago
    Tragedy of the commons
Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
I have an idea for a filesharing site where the files must be encrypted. The server tries to parse the file using ffmpeg, ghostscript, libreoffice ect. and if it can read it the file is rejected. Similarly if a decryption key can be provided for any md5 then it is deleted. The hash for every file will be public. Known illegal md5s are blocked/reported. Doesn't need to be md5 specifically. This completely solves all moderation issues with the caveat than anyone who can open the file can also delete it. Not sure how that could make money either.
- Etheryte 3y ago
  This would simply mean your server gets pwned at the speed of light. There is no way you could ever keep up to date with every security patch across that many integrations on one public-facing server. The compute would be expensive too, but that would almost be an afterthought to the first problem.
  - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
    I can copy code that parses the files from these projects without having to execute any programs ie. not actually opening any files. Or you could just set up two servers. Servers A recieves the file from the client and sends it to server B. Server B does not have any network access except to server A. It reads the file, and sends back a magic number to A indicating if the file is good or 0 if it is bad. If server A recieves any other response it wipes server B. This could also just be a VM. And yeah compute would be pretty high. This is just a way to completely solve the responsibility problem. (for one definition of responsibility, that is, which is open to debate, surely.)
    - offices 3y ago
      If you want to ensure all the foos in a box are bar-ed, why not just bar them before you put them in the box?
      - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
Klonoar 3y ago
Same reason Firefox Send shut down.
kxrm 3y ago
20 years ago I setup an anonymous FTP server just see what would happen. It lasted a few weeks before I had to shut it down but it was an interesting experiment in humanity. Certainly there may be a good way to provide a service like this but it needs an incredible amount of thought. Some people just need to execute on an idea to learn. I don't quite get the pessimistic comments here. I don't really blame anonfiles for trying. It certainly provided a lot of experience and certainly opened their eyes on how difficult it is to offer a service like this. This experience will help them to build something better in the future even if the next thing they build has nothing to do with distributing files for anonymous users.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  > it was an interesting experiment in humanity. How so? Atleast one guy did something that made you shut it down. What insight does that give? Surely you knew there is at least one bad guy using the internets before the experiment?
  - kxrm 3y ago
    It wasn't one guy that made me shut it down, it's the pattern of use that typically comes with offering a service like this. At the time, it wasn't my primary focus, just a one off, "What would happen if I did this?" type of experiment. Yes, I knew that there could be abuse, but I didn't know how the abuse would come. As I said, I learned, it cost me very little to do. > What insight does that give? For one, how do you maintain a service that actually has traffic. At the time I had very little experience with mass amounts of users. You can build personal websites all day long and still never know what it is like to handle high levels of traffic. Additionally, given the type of content I received on the service, how could I handle the patterns of use better and encourage the sharing I wanted from users? Given the type of content I got very clear patterns developed that if I wanted to expand I could have. > Surely you knew there is at least one bad guy using the internets before the experiment? Yea, there are people with ill intent on the internet and they are constantly attempting to break into my servers as we speak. Why would I use that as a reason to not offer something online? This reason alone, shouldn't be a deterrent.
oron 3y ago
How do the likes of weTransfer deal with this problem? or any other of the free file sharing sites?
- paxys 3y ago
  They spend money on abuse prevention, and that money comes from monetizing the service.
  - WJW 3y ago
    Exactly this. I used to work for them and the support team had a direct line to the vice department if someone had uploaded CP again. We also built a photoDNA based detection system to automatically flag and report suspect images. The thing was definitely not cheap at WeTransfer scale though.
    - Freak_NL 3y ago
      That only works for unencrypted files though. How do these services prevent people uploading a password protected Singer_9960_Manual_Polish.zip?
      - WJW 3y ago
        We had no illusion that we could catch everything, especially if they were using proper encryption. If you can break modern encryption quickly enough to do it at 400 files per second then there are way more profitable things to do with that ability than running a file transfer service. But even so there were several alerts per week. For comparison, we were doing around 40 million transfers per month at the time, so ~10 million per week.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  Well I'm guessing that one allowed password encrypted 7z archives.
graypegg 3y ago
Here’s a hole to throw bytes into! I’m going to turn my back so I don’t see you, but I’m responsible for what’s in this byte hole so pinky promise you won’t throw disgusting vile bytes into it! The world, famous for its love of all things disgusting and vile: Throws disgusting vile bytes into the hole. Oh no! How could I have foreseen this?! I’m sure they had good intentions, but I’m sorry, I would never make this, ever.
- jxf 3y ago
  [flagged]
- willsoon 3y ago
  It's not that 99% of people are crazy or stupid, but you're bound to attract the remaining 1%. But why? That's the question. The site is not even on the dark web, I think these guys have a lot of resources to hide their files. I know about freenet, I used to use it but it was boring so I left. That was 20 years ago. Surely the Dark Web has grown since then. I'm writing this after finding the site closed. Now I am going to pay for some space to send large files to people who are struggling to use Dropbox on their shiny silver laptops. And I will not offer a penny for the domain.
kvetching 3y ago
like running silkroad and mad that people started selling guns and drugs
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Silkroad created the categories on its site. Anonfiles at least has a degree of plausible deniability.
nektro 3y ago
[flagged]
- larvaetron 3y ago
  > do better Can we keep the kindergarten-teacher-scolding tier comments to reddit, please?
  - Etheryte 3y ago
    The irony of this comment is sublime.
    - jadamson 3y ago
      My kindergarten teacher never told me to fuck off to Reddit.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Maybe take the feedback to heart instead of acting like a kindergartner and brushing it aside, hmm? I don't see what Reddit has to do with anything either, it usually has better moderation than here.
    - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
      I think the issue they have with your post is that you havn't explained why you think that anonfiles are victims (of what?) and why you think that HN is blaming them, and that you are refering to HN as a collective. This is a common pattern on reddit. The moderation here selects primarily for "convers[ing] curiously."[0] I don't know if the same can be said for reddit. Of course, "don't be snarky" cuts both ways, and I don't necessarily agree with GP's language, although I think pointing out redditisms is in itself fair game. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - flangola7 3y ago
jtokoph 3y ago
20 years ago I launched a site that allowed users to upload arbitrary files. It was 99% pirated software/music, viruses and pornography. This is nothing new.
pnathan 3y ago
This is really sad. I've often thought about offering a similar service, but the abuse potential has always stopped me. I've noodled with a blockchain type system which allows blob uploads as part of the chain, but I haven't really deployed it and publicized it, because of the abuse potential.
tremarley 3y ago
Due to this, expect millions of broken links online. Let's hope the potentially new domain owners are great people.
macic 3y ago
AnonFiles was very sketchy. They had extremely generous file size limits and were apparently funded completely through donations. On their footer they linked to other file sharing sites, which linked to even more file sharing sites. All of them had the exact same layout and generous file size limits. They also shared the exact same IPs. There were around 15 of them. A lot of them impersonated other defunct file sharing websites which shut down such as MegaUpload. All of these sites are now offline. Make of this what you will, but to me it sounds like a honeypot.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  I did a bit of digging; here's a full list of the associated sites I was able to find: - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://anonfiles.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://anonfiles.com/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://bayfiles.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://bayfiles.com/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://file.bz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://file.bz/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://filechan.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://filechan.org/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://forumfiles.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://forumfiles.com/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://hotfile.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://hotfile.io/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://letsupload.cc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://letsupload.cc/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://lolabits.se/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://lolabits.se/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://megaupload.nz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://megaupload.nz/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://myfile.is/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://myfile.is/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://openload.cc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://openload.cc/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://rapidshare.nu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://rapidshare.nu/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://share-online.is/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://share-online.is... - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://upload.st/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://upload.st/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://uplovd.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://uplovd.com/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://upvid.cc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://upvid.cc/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://vshare.is/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://vshare.is/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://zippysha.re/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://zippysha.re/ All of them were hosted by a single IP in svea.net, with a couple of associated IPs at the same host for "cdn##" subdomains.
skilled 3y ago
Domain for sale huh? Sell it to the wrong person (and I doubt anyone else is even remotely interested) and you got tens of thousands of files that you can replace with malware and nobody is going to be any wiser about it.
GhostWhisperer 3y ago
would love to read more about their infrastructure and war stories
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
We had an client side pastebin called 0bin.net Recently, the last CP addict idiot basically killed us. We always remove those posts when we get a report (we can't see them by our-self, that's the point), but we were swamped by other things, and we didn't catch this one in time. It's a free volunteer project after all. Our host took down our server and our backup server. We didn't have an offline backup because it makes taking down bad content more work. We are still struggling to go back up. This is why you can't have nice things. (and also, don't host your backup server with the same host)
- david_shaw 3y ago
  For what it's worth, 0bin is an excellent service. I hope you figure things out in a way that causes less of a headache for you.
- lionkor 3y ago
  I very much enjoy using 0bin, its excellent. Hope you figure things out!
- abwizz 3y ago
  > and also, don't host your backup server with the same host cheap way to get some resiliancy is to host a hot-spare/replika at another provider/isp and failover at the dns level with an alternative record
- loxias 3y ago
  I also appreciated 0bin. Internet progress seems to resoundingly be going backwards. Remember when pastebin used to be super active? Hell, remember when google had informative search results?
  - prox 3y ago
    All is part of the capitalization of the internet. People seek to make money and how they do it is not always morally or ethically sound. The view of “the global village” with betterment for human society has become another rent seeker “getting my own” hustle culture. It’s the way people are I guess on the whole.
Modified3019 3y ago
I am reminded when someone on reddit created a site that would show a waterfall of thumbnail tile live updates of all the new public images uploaded to imgur. It did not last very long when it became clear what kind of stuff would be rolling down the screen.
- stef25 3y ago
  One of my first "projects" was a proxy server through which people could access sites blocked in their country. This was 20+ years ago. When I started logging what people were accessing, search terms and all that I quickly shut it down. Perversion on a whole 'nother level
- datpiff 3y ago
  Photobucket had a "recently uploaded images" section on the front page, at one point
not_your_vase 3y ago
Well, lot of grey stuff can be shared with little-to-no restrictions over the internet (any pirated stuff goes pretty much unpunished, except for the occasional exemplary lawsuits). If you are paranoid, there are lotsa VPNs for affordable prices, with various anonymity levels. The only thing that really needs such anonymity to share is hard illegal stuff, which will put you in prison if you get caught. Such sites don't really have any other realistic usecase, so not really sure what were they thinking...
- msm_ 3y ago
  I agree with you in principle, but sometimes I get my "anonymous" mood and only use Whonix, anonymous imageboards and share files using solutions similar to anonfiles. I don't really have anything to hide, I just want to spite the Googles of the world.
rodolphoarruda 3y ago
I'm very surprised. So far I thought file abuse was a thing of the past. A time when people used to know what a 'file' was. When I look at my kids and their friends 2 generations older or younger, I see people who live in file-less world. Content just exists within their phone apps. A file is something not even in their imaginary field. With all that said, I wonder who are these people flooding file sharing services nowadays, and the type of file they are sharing...
sorenjan 3y ago
I don't understand how these shady sites are monetized. Through shady ads from other shady services? How are these shady ad networks operating? I've been led to belive that operating a file sharing site would be quite expensive with all the bandwidth and storage needs.
- GhostWhisperer 3y ago
  advertisements; obfuscates files operators/sponsors want to share; watering-hole attacks; honeypot
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    That makes sense. If you are a mafia type that needs to send hundreds of gigabytes of contemporaneous data to others secretly and sneakernet is too slow, then throw up an "anonymous" file sharing site, advertise it a bit, let the creeps and weirdos use it to flood out the actual payload from online watchdogs and then let it fall to pieces when it has served its purpose. Kind of like when Bitcoin was used primarily for the drug trade in the silk road days.
Ms-J 3y ago
That is so sad. I've used their services for so long. Anonymous file and image hosts are such an important part of the free and distributed internet. Does anyone have any recommendations for anonymous file hosts? Thanks.

152 points by Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago

That was quick. Not surprising though, there was plenty of copyrighted and illegal content being uploaded to anonfiles. The name itself didn’t too much to discourage it.

mtmail 3y ago
Why quick? Internet archive shows them online for 5 years at least http://web.archive.org/web/20180801065433/https://anonfiles.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180801065433/https://anonfiles....
- elektor 3y ago
  Thanks for the correction. I was under the impression that it was only around for 2 years, not 5 :)
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  I recall them being around a bit further back. I had to block them on a forum long ago for the reasons being discussed. whois anonfiles.com | grep Creation Creation Date: 2011-03-23T13:07:29Z

gerikson 3y ago

Hard to see why the operators thought this would be viable in the long term.

Etheryte 3y ago
Anonfiles as a file upload site operated in one shape or another for over a decade, which is more than most companies manage. Even when it switched hands, the core concept stayed the same, so I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that it wasn't viable in the long term.
- loosescrews 3y ago
  Do you have any information about it changing hands? For example, when it happened?

constantly 3y ago

lol yeah duh. If you allow people to upload files to cloud storage anonymously there will always be constant, egregious abuse of the most vile kinds. Someone couldn’t pay me a hundred thousand dollars to operate and manage a site like this.

kristopolous 3y ago
I wouldn't take a job with 100k salary either, regardless of tasks. Now if that was 500? Call me admin@shadyuploads.com. (domain is available, I just checked).

Chilinot 3y ago

I have never heard of this service before. But this part in the end: > This is not the kind of work we imagine when acquiring it and recently our proxy provider shut us down. Really? You created a website where people could anonymously upload files to share with others. What did you really expect was going to happen? It's kinda naive to think a service like this would be all happy times in the world we have today.

Xanza 3y ago
I really don't think it's some horrendous oversight to expect that people will be kind to a service that you offer. If you offer anonymous and free image uploading it's not wrong to assume that not 100% of your traffic will be pornographic uploads and I also don't think it's wrong that if after years of your offering, if you get to the point where all of your uploads are porn, that you feel the need to shutdown your service. Nobody is entitled to do bad things with good tools.
- 39 3y ago
  Why is porn bad?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Lets refine this further... Why is child porn bad... And, why will the government punish you out of existence if you allow the trafficking of it?
  - constantly 3y ago
    In theory nothing assuming it involves only consenting adults. In practice it’s very exploitative of vulnerable people to such a degree that it becomes ethically fraught.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > I really don't think it's some horrendous oversight to expect that people will be kind to a service that you offer. Its not like anonymous file hosting on the internet was a new thing two years ago. It very much is a major oversight to offer (or acquire) a service in an existing, established segment and have no idea what the usage patterns and challenges in that segment are. > If you offer anonymous and free image uploading it's not wrong to assume that not 100% of your traffic will be pornographic uploads Its file, not just image, hosting, but, yeah, you should probably assume that the stuff that the most controversial aspect of it is that it is just porn will be toward the milder end. And their piece doesn't say “porn” it says “abuse”.

yieldcrv 3y ago

could have just been an IPFS gateway and made it easier to use that with the anon branding could always use additional gateways and CDNs people pay subscribing for pinning, even if you don’t do the pinning yourself

eli 3y ago
How would that improve the abuse situation?
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  Very well, it would remove the site operators obligation and capability of removing anything, and their activity would no longer rely on appeasing a hosting provider at all
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    I'm not sure this theory would stand up if you actually tried it. If you just make something immutable storage my expectation would be the law would say "well it's up to you to make really sure you're entitled to store things in it before they go in", not "Well why didn't you say so? Oh well put anything you like in there in that case".
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      what do you mean "tried it"? this reality already exists for a long time now in this system design, anonfiles wouldn't be hosting it, any Section 230 exception problem would be the IPFS node's problem and its not even about the legal aspect? its about working smarter not harder. what you are saying, to me, sounds similar to "this person made an online store to get around the zoning procedures of a brick and mortar store" never considering that they never ever considered making a brick and mortar store to begin with and would find the administration entirely unappealing and unrelated to fulfilling their vision

aae42 3y ago

people are the worst

RGamma 3y ago
always have been

pickledish 3y ago

Well, a lot of cynicism in the comments here! I will say that, though I hadn't heard of this site, it seems like they were trying to do something decent and not profit-driven (free file sharing without advertising, badgering you to make an account, etc) and I'm metaphorically pouring one out for another nice service that the world had to go and mess up. For anyone wanting to know what the site used to look like, here's a random Wayback Machine snapshot from 2021: http://web.archive.org/web/20210309013336/https://anonfiles.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210309013336/https://anonfiles....

graypegg 3y ago
I can get down with that sentiment. Sadly it’s just not something that can exist without being ruined, but I admire the fact someone wanted to try with (hopefully) positive intentions.
- mikrotikker 3y ago
  Tragedy of the commons

Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago

I have an idea for a filesharing site where the files must be encrypted. The server tries to parse the file using ffmpeg, ghostscript, libreoffice ect. and if it can read it the file is rejected. Similarly if a decryption key can be provided for any md5 then it is deleted. The hash for every file will be public. Known illegal md5s are blocked/reported. Doesn't need to be md5 specifically. This completely solves all moderation issues with the caveat than anyone who can open the file can also delete it. Not sure how that could make money either.

Etheryte 3y ago
This would simply mean your server gets pwned at the speed of light. There is no way you could ever keep up to date with every security patch across that many integrations on one public-facing server. The compute would be expensive too, but that would almost be an afterthought to the first problem.
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
  I can copy code that parses the files from these projects without having to execute any programs ie. not actually opening any files. Or you could just set up two servers. Servers A recieves the file from the client and sends it to server B. Server B does not have any network access except to server A. It reads the file, and sends back a magic number to A indicating if the file is good or 0 if it is bad. If server A recieves any other response it wipes server B. This could also just be a VM. And yeah compute would be pretty high. This is just a way to completely solve the responsibility problem. (for one definition of responsibility, that is, which is open to debate, surely.)
  - offices 3y ago
    If you want to ensure all the foos in a box are bar-ed, why not just bar them before you put them in the box?
    - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago

Klonoar 3y ago

Same reason Firefox Send shut down.

kxrm 3y ago

20 years ago I setup an anonymous FTP server just see what would happen. It lasted a few weeks before I had to shut it down but it was an interesting experiment in humanity. Certainly there may be a good way to provide a service like this but it needs an incredible amount of thought. Some people just need to execute on an idea to learn. I don't quite get the pessimistic comments here. I don't really blame anonfiles for trying. It certainly provided a lot of experience and certainly opened their eyes on how difficult it is to offer a service like this. This experience will help them to build something better in the future even if the next thing they build has nothing to do with distributing files for anonymous users.

rightbyte 3y ago
> it was an interesting experiment in humanity. How so? Atleast one guy did something that made you shut it down. What insight does that give? Surely you knew there is at least one bad guy using the internets before the experiment?
- kxrm 3y ago
  It wasn't one guy that made me shut it down, it's the pattern of use that typically comes with offering a service like this. At the time, it wasn't my primary focus, just a one off, "What would happen if I did this?" type of experiment. Yes, I knew that there could be abuse, but I didn't know how the abuse would come. As I said, I learned, it cost me very little to do. > What insight does that give? For one, how do you maintain a service that actually has traffic. At the time I had very little experience with mass amounts of users. You can build personal websites all day long and still never know what it is like to handle high levels of traffic. Additionally, given the type of content I received on the service, how could I handle the patterns of use better and encourage the sharing I wanted from users? Given the type of content I got very clear patterns developed that if I wanted to expand I could have. > Surely you knew there is at least one bad guy using the internets before the experiment? Yea, there are people with ill intent on the internet and they are constantly attempting to break into my servers as we speak. Why would I use that as a reason to not offer something online? This reason alone, shouldn't be a deterrent.

oron 3y ago

How do the likes of weTransfer deal with this problem? or any other of the free file sharing sites?

paxys 3y ago
They spend money on abuse prevention, and that money comes from monetizing the service.
- WJW 3y ago
  Exactly this. I used to work for them and the support team had a direct line to the vice department if someone had uploaded CP again. We also built a photoDNA based detection system to automatically flag and report suspect images. The thing was definitely not cheap at WeTransfer scale though.
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    That only works for unencrypted files though. How do these services prevent people uploading a password protected Singer_9960_Manual_Polish.zip?
    - WJW 3y ago
      We had no illusion that we could catch everything, especially if they were using proper encryption. If you can break modern encryption quickly enough to do it at 400 files per second then there are way more profitable things to do with that ability than running a file transfer service. But even so there were several alerts per week. For comparison, we were doing around 40 million transfers per month at the time, so ~10 million per week.
sebstefan 3y ago
Well I'm guessing that one allowed password encrypted 7z archives.

graypegg 3y ago

Here’s a hole to throw bytes into! I’m going to turn my back so I don’t see you, but I’m responsible for what’s in this byte hole so pinky promise you won’t throw disgusting vile bytes into it! The world, famous for its love of all things disgusting and vile: Throws disgusting vile bytes into the hole. Oh no! How could I have foreseen this?! I’m sure they had good intentions, but I’m sorry, I would never make this, ever.

jxf 3y ago
[flagged]
willsoon 3y ago
It's not that 99% of people are crazy or stupid, but you're bound to attract the remaining 1%. But why? That's the question. The site is not even on the dark web, I think these guys have a lot of resources to hide their files. I know about freenet, I used to use it but it was boring so I left. That was 20 years ago. Surely the Dark Web has grown since then. I'm writing this after finding the site closed. Now I am going to pay for some space to send large files to people who are struggling to use Dropbox on their shiny silver laptops. And I will not offer a penny for the domain.

kvetching 3y ago

like running silkroad and mad that people started selling guns and drugs

bdcravens 3y ago
Silkroad created the categories on its site. Anonfiles at least has a degree of plausible deniability.

nektro 3y ago

[flagged]

larvaetron 3y ago
> do better Can we keep the kindergarten-teacher-scolding tier comments to reddit, please?
- Etheryte 3y ago
  The irony of this comment is sublime.
  - jadamson 3y ago
    My kindergarten teacher never told me to fuck off to Reddit.
- flangola7 3y ago
  Maybe take the feedback to heart instead of acting like a kindergartner and brushing it aside, hmm? I don't see what Reddit has to do with anything either, it usually has better moderation than here.
  - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
    I think the issue they have with your post is that you havn't explained why you think that anonfiles are victims (of what?) and why you think that HN is blaming them, and that you are refering to HN as a collective. This is a common pattern on reddit. The moderation here selects primarily for "convers[ing] curiously."[0] I don't know if the same can be said for reddit. Of course, "don't be snarky" cuts both ways, and I don't necessarily agree with GP's language, although I think pointing out redditisms is in itself fair game. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - flangola7 3y ago

jtokoph 3y ago

20 years ago I launched a site that allowed users to upload arbitrary files. It was 99% pirated software/music, viruses and pornography. This is nothing new.

pnathan 3y ago

This is really sad. I've often thought about offering a similar service, but the abuse potential has always stopped me. I've noodled with a blockchain type system which allows blob uploads as part of the chain, but I haven't really deployed it and publicized it, because of the abuse potential.

tremarley 3y ago

Due to this, expect millions of broken links online. Let's hope the potentially new domain owners are great people.

macic 3y ago

AnonFiles was very sketchy. They had extremely generous file size limits and were apparently funded completely through donations. On their footer they linked to other file sharing sites, which linked to even more file sharing sites. All of them had the exact same layout and generous file size limits. They also shared the exact same IPs. There were around 15 of them. A lot of them impersonated other defunct file sharing websites which shut down such as MegaUpload. All of these sites are now offline. Make of this what you will, but to me it sounds like a honeypot.

duskwuff 3y ago
I did a bit of digging; here's a full list of the associated sites I was able to find: - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://anonfiles.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://anonfiles.com/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://bayfiles.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://bayfiles.com/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://file.bz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://file.bz/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://filechan.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://filechan.org/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://forumfiles.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://forumfiles.com/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://hotfile.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://hotfile.io/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://letsupload.cc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://letsupload.cc/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://lolabits.se/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://lolabits.se/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://megaupload.nz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://megaupload.nz/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://myfile.is/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://myfile.is/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://openload.cc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://openload.cc/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://rapidshare.nu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://rapidshare.nu/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://share-online.is/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://share-online.is... - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://upload.st/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://upload.st/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://uplovd.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://uplovd.com/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://upvid.cc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://upvid.cc/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://vshare.is/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://vshare.is/ - https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://zippysha.re/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230801/https://zippysha.re/ All of them were hosted by a single IP in svea.net, with a couple of associated IPs at the same host for "cdn##" subdomains.

skilled 3y ago

Domain for sale huh? Sell it to the wrong person (and I doubt anyone else is even remotely interested) and you got tens of thousands of files that you can replace with malware and nobody is going to be any wiser about it.

GhostWhisperer 3y ago

would love to read more about their infrastructure and war stories

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

We had an client side pastebin called 0bin.net Recently, the last CP addict idiot basically killed us. We always remove those posts when we get a report (we can't see them by our-self, that's the point), but we were swamped by other things, and we didn't catch this one in time. It's a free volunteer project after all. Our host took down our server and our backup server. We didn't have an offline backup because it makes taking down bad content more work. We are still struggling to go back up. This is why you can't have nice things. (and also, don't host your backup server with the same host)

david_shaw 3y ago
For what it's worth, 0bin is an excellent service. I hope you figure things out in a way that causes less of a headache for you.
lionkor 3y ago
I very much enjoy using 0bin, its excellent. Hope you figure things out!
abwizz 3y ago
> and also, don't host your backup server with the same host cheap way to get some resiliancy is to host a hot-spare/replika at another provider/isp and failover at the dns level with an alternative record
loxias 3y ago
I also appreciated 0bin. Internet progress seems to resoundingly be going backwards. Remember when pastebin used to be super active? Hell, remember when google had informative search results?
- prox 3y ago
  All is part of the capitalization of the internet. People seek to make money and how they do it is not always morally or ethically sound. The view of “the global village” with betterment for human society has become another rent seeker “getting my own” hustle culture. It’s the way people are I guess on the whole.

Modified3019 3y ago

I am reminded when someone on reddit created a site that would show a waterfall of thumbnail tile live updates of all the new public images uploaded to imgur. It did not last very long when it became clear what kind of stuff would be rolling down the screen.

stef25 3y ago
One of my first "projects" was a proxy server through which people could access sites blocked in their country. This was 20+ years ago. When I started logging what people were accessing, search terms and all that I quickly shut it down. Perversion on a whole 'nother level
datpiff 3y ago
Photobucket had a "recently uploaded images" section on the front page, at one point

not_your_vase 3y ago

Well, lot of grey stuff can be shared with little-to-no restrictions over the internet (any pirated stuff goes pretty much unpunished, except for the occasional exemplary lawsuits). If you are paranoid, there are lotsa VPNs for affordable prices, with various anonymity levels. The only thing that really needs such anonymity to share is hard illegal stuff, which will put you in prison if you get caught. Such sites don't really have any other realistic usecase, so not really sure what were they thinking...

msm_ 3y ago
I agree with you in principle, but sometimes I get my "anonymous" mood and only use Whonix, anonymous imageboards and share files using solutions similar to anonfiles. I don't really have anything to hide, I just want to spite the Googles of the world.

rodolphoarruda 3y ago

I'm very surprised. So far I thought file abuse was a thing of the past. A time when people used to know what a 'file' was. When I look at my kids and their friends 2 generations older or younger, I see people who live in file-less world. Content just exists within their phone apps. A file is something not even in their imaginary field. With all that said, I wonder who are these people flooding file sharing services nowadays, and the type of file they are sharing...

sorenjan 3y ago

I don't understand how these shady sites are monetized. Through shady ads from other shady services? How are these shady ad networks operating? I've been led to belive that operating a file sharing site would be quite expensive with all the bandwidth and storage needs.

GhostWhisperer 3y ago
advertisements; obfuscates files operators/sponsors want to share; watering-hole attacks; honeypot
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  That makes sense. If you are a mafia type that needs to send hundreds of gigabytes of contemporaneous data to others secretly and sneakernet is too slow, then throw up an "anonymous" file sharing site, advertise it a bit, let the creeps and weirdos use it to flood out the actual payload from online watchdogs and then let it fall to pieces when it has served its purpose. Kind of like when Bitcoin was used primarily for the drug trade in the silk road days.

Ms-J 3y ago

That is so sad. I've used their services for so long. Anonymous file and image hosts are such an important part of the free and distributed internet. Does anyone have any recommendations for anonymous file hosts? Thanks.