[umvi]

These are always nice little sites to have around, but they can't really grow much in popularity before users start abusing them to distribute illegal things at which point the site has to start doing more and more content moderation or be shut down.

[geek_at]

Can confirm. I had a public demo of my open source image hosting solution [1] (where you can resize images and videos by just entering a different URL) up for years without problems, until idiots started uploading CSAM (Children sexual abuse material).

Luckily I found out before law enforcement did [2] so I proactively talked to my federal bureau for months generating Excel sheets of IPs and access times and devices and countries. I didn't see many of the images myself, basically just looked at one upload per IP which was like three in total and forwarded all uploads of that IP to the police but man.. what the hell is wrong with people. 4 digit number of uploads of CSAM.

[1] https://github.com/HaschekSolutions/pictshare [2] https://blog.haschek.at/2018/fight-child-pornography-with-ra...

[ivan888]

The process of properly reporting and working with authorities seems daunting. (Anecdotally,) It sounds too easy to implicate yourself for a technical violation of the law by (even unknowingly) hosting this content, or accidentally transferring it to one of your personal devices. Much worse following the advice of your local police to print out images which would be completely illegal! On the other hand, if the process was too lenient on reporters, hosting a file sharing service that "gets abused" with illegal content might turn into the ultimate scapegoat for illegal content users/creators/brokers

Nice job going through the reporting process and I'm glad you blogged about it to share with others

[jtokoph]

Came to say this. OP: If this is your site it will be used for piracy, underage porn and phishing within hours.

[philshem]

which makes the p2p file transfer websites so special https://file.pizza/ and https://webwormhole.io/

(*based on https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole)

[bityard]

Not OP, but this site has been around for months at least, maybe a year, it would be sad if it had to taken down right after landing on the front page of HN.

[faeyanpiraat]

It might be a honeypot for exactly that purpose aswell

[anderspitman]

What would it lead them to other than the user's VPN ip/Tor exit node?

[ivan888]

It might lead to: someone who wasn't careful enough to use one of those options, identifying metadata in the file, etc

[tobylane]

Agreed. I was using it* for TravisCI, and having moved to Github Actions I'm glad they have uploads stored per run.

*this one and another few before it.

[anderspitman]

Sad but true. One reason why easy self hosting is important for these types of projects.