[jasonkester]

Please don't try to imply that the rest of us here agree with you in any way just because we're on this site. Hanging out on a site called HackerNews and having a basic sense of right and wrong are things that plenty of us can do simultaneously.

[jacquesm]

There hasn't been a storage facility labeled get 'x' bytes,Kilobytes,Megabytes,Gigabytes or even Terabytes free that did not result in people wondering about if they could use it for general purpose storage.

What surprises me is that a service like this isn't hardened from day one against the most obvious of flaws.

Of course it's wrong, but it is only really wrong when a billion or so people adopt it, and chances are that this will never see widespread adoption, it's just a guy saying 'see what I could do', not an army of people overrunning Flickr.

The cognitive dissonance of seeing a single person perform a neat little trick versus an army of people performing that same trick bringing down a service sits well in my head, I don't feel this is in any way destroying Flickr, nor do I think that it potentially will destroy Flickr.

It didn't happen with Gmail or any of the other services that were 'exploited' in this fashion before. In fact, those are now trying to get me to put as many files on their storage devices as possible (which I really don't want to, the cost of storage is so low I don't need an external service to host my files for me).

Lighten up.

[swombat]

Worth noting that the original comment said:

> This is kind of a dick move to use IMHO.

Didn't say anything about creating the script, just about using it. Possibly, using it at scale was even implied.

Creating this is a hacker move. Using it to store your server backups is a dick move (and also potentially a poor backup policy).

[ohwp]

Also: setting up a webserver with over 1TB of storage is probably simpler, faster and more reliable.

I also think in this case the hack is a little useless. But I've seen examples where they use it to transfer a lot of 3D data for use in WebGL. And the author of this script is also linking to a nice usecase where is is used for game data: http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2008/05/compression-using-canvas-an...

[mike-cardwell]

I remember playing with storing files in gmail years ago. Unfortunately, they rate limit how quickly you can "upload" emails via IMAP (or at least they did), which prevents you from using it as a general purpose filesystem. Also, it's dog slow, but that was always going to be the case.

[chm]

Well, it also should be clear to everyone that:

1) The overwhelming majority of Flickr users will never read these stories or even dream about uploading files;

2) Most people who read this POC will not try it, and of those who try it, most will use it only once;

This is a non-problem.