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[Silverthrone]

I believe so. Having a potential website of mine dependant on a little machine in my house is one of those things I would never quite dare, let alone build and manage. Partly because I would feel burgled every time the hackers got in, partly because I'd worry sick about power outages.
Setting up the router to do the hosting is an idea, but... Well, it is a strange, arcane little apparatus to me. It sits there, and pipes the internet through the cables, and that is about the end of my knowledge. I'd be worried of causing it damage. It'd likely be one great hacker dosshouse by the end of the week. Maybe one of the haxx0rs could make it sprout arms and legs and then murder me.

No, small webhost it is. I ought to have looked into that years ago.

(Now, I do feel faintly ashamed of dumping buckets and buckets of Dwarf Fortress footage onto ImageShack a long time ago, when I LP'd last...)

[wierd]

to me, the router is a tiny, weak kneed general purpose computer that has some network interfaces, some baked in daemons (including a web server, usually lighttpd), that lacks a keyboard or mouse.

it comes pre-configured to route packets across its interfaces, and serve http requests on the private interface.

in most cases, you can send it a "magic packet" on the private interface, and it will open up a root user remote console, that you can use to poke about and change things under the hood. a reboot usually undoes all the changes unless you use a custom firmware with jffs support.

I can get the things to do everything from straight up emulate battle.net for older blizzard games (pvpgn daemon running), to function as a tor exit node, to mining bitcoins, to downloadng from bittorent direct to a usb stick, to getting it to host remote ncurses console games like Nvaders. (a space invaders clone)

the devices are already laughably easy to hack. again, just send them the magic packet, and then batter down the login on the remote console.

the deal is that they are just one uninteresting device among billions, unless you MAKE it interesting somehow, and serving interesting files makes it interesting.

google will happily publicise your file listing, whether you want that or not, and people interested in your files that you did not invite, will start hammering your server to get them.

in my case, i had a password protected section running with an .htaccess control file that had an authorized user account that needed to be logged into to get to my private cloud storage. I had some MP3s in there that I streamed to myself before itunes was even a thing.

the login data and the links to my music archive started showing up on google, and I stated getting swamped with malformed url attacks, heavy portscans, malicious put requests, and gods knows what all else.  I had to take it down. the user login data was NOT used as a system user on the host, so all that their exploit to read the .htaccess file got them was how to get at my music, but still, they turned a personal host into a pirate server overnight by leaking how to login, and where to leech my music.

it was a more innocent time back then, these days it would be even worse.

use the cloud service, and watch what you put on it.

[Starver]

the devices are already laughably easy to hack. again, just send them the magic packet, and then batter down the login on the remote console.

Probably relevent and topical...

[Silverthrone]

It is probably best. I'd rather not fiddle with things I do not understand. It is probably not entirely free of risk to use a webhost either, but at least it will not be entirely my fault if the thing does get broken in to. Not to mention, lying low and not having much to steal has gone well this far.

It does seem that web host services are not particularly fond of any hotlinking business, either. I wonder if it would be enough to write and post the let's play on that page, and then post it on a thread elsewhere, too. Having actual content on the site would probably help ease the site providers. Build a private little LP archive site all for me, essentially. Food for thought, indeed.
Of course, that does create a certain quality threshold, going through the trouble and having some site archive the thing. It'd probably be best to bin the current LP and get back to the Silverthrone's Jolly Let's Play Archive jiggerypokery when I've got some better content to display. Fascinating. I'm rather thrilled by the idea, and I got to learn something new. And all because I do read the Terms of Service. Well worth it!

[Aklyon]

Silverthrone, do you just need somewhere to put pictures you can link to with img tags or similar?
Because if so, dropbox would work for that up to a point.

[Reelya]

You can do some actions to get extra dropbox space. I have permanent space of 6.75 GB (default is 2.0GB), all from doing free actions. And that's without spamming friend referrals. But one of the offers for 3.0GB isn't valid anymore, so the best you can get now would be 3.75GB plus 500MB for each friend you refer.

http://trendblog.net/get-free-dropbox-space/

[Reelya]

Ah, important news. Dropbox plans to kill hotlinking from your Dropbox space next year.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/12/16/2111220/dropbox-kills-public-folders-users-rebel

It's clearly an attempt to save money by reducing server bandwidth for things that don't make a profit (i.e. people using free accounts for hotlinking), although they're going to remove hotlinking for paid accounts too about 6 months after free ones, so clearly hotlinking is costing them more than they make from paid accounts.

[Starver]

They already did something such that XP support got dropped for no reason I could ever find out...

Caused problems to someone I know, who had only just been shown how to share files via Dropbox, when the switch happened, and really didn't want to learn yet another new system (including OS).

[Aklyon]

Thats their problem at this point, as rude as that might be if said person is old enough. Win7 is close enough to xp to being learnable, past that good luck explaining whh things are changed for the worse.

[Reelya]

You can use a third-party syncing app. I'm pretty sure those will support XP.

[Thief^]

I use AllWaySync on my retro XP laptop, pretty sure it supports Dropbox. The UI is nasty though. Careful though, as sites keep tightening their security it won't be too long before you won't be able to open the login page on XP (AllWaySync uses an IE frame for that, and XP doesn't support newer TLS protocols at all).

Chrome / Google Drive don't support XP either (or even Vista!)

[Starver]

Thats their problem at this point, as rude as that might be if said person is old enough. Win7 is close enough to xp to being learnable, past that good luck explaining whh things are changed for the worse.

There's some amount of http://www.xkcd.com/1770/ to this...

But I'm not inclined to force a new machine on them (would be needed in order to run Win7) and then pay more than a third more (last time I checked) to get a 7 licence rather than a 10 one; then deal with the probable lack of TWAIN drivers for some archaic hardware, and have to deal with all the other little things such as working out how to transfer email usage from Outlook Express to probably something like Thunderbird (rather than using the MS up-versions that just obfuscate everything)...  i.e., it's either deal with just DropBox replacement or practically everything else, up to and including hardware and peripherals...   But that's not something currently needing more sorting, just coming from an idle observation based on a recentish niggling problem I encountered...

[Thief^]

I will just say that as time goes on more and more internet stuff will simply stop working. That lack of newer TLS support will bite Outlook Express as well at some point I'm sure.

[wierd]

Outlook needs to die.  Really.

I DONT CARE how many enterprises have standardized on exchange mail and deep outlook integration. Outlook is a horrible clusterfuck, with too many hentai tentacles into active directory, security holes big enough to drive a bus through, and aging terribly to boot.

Email is an ancient technology, and is thus very mature. There are some very nice email clients out there, and there are much more robust email systems than flipping F@#King outlook.  Ones that actually implement real standards, real security features, and real retention policies.


Back on topic with storing files--  For images, you can hotlink from photobucket still.

For other types of files, well--  It is getting to the point where it is not safe for hosting services to provide free anonymous hosting of arbitrary files, due to the absurdly litigious nature of the world today. "OMG!! Your file looks like it might possibly, could be, my super special copyrighted stuffs! DMCA and lawsuit! No fact checking! JUST TAKE IT DOWN NOW! OMG!!" histrionics make it impossible to provide such hosting, even though there is more demand for it than ever. Keeping up with the shouting demands is impossible, The only way to keep up is to disallow free hosting like that. That is most likely the reason why DropBox is disabling public folders. Literally, copyright holders use automated systems to mass-produce the notices, and track them. Human admin staff cannot keep up with computers literally shitting thousands of notices per hour.

If you want to host files that you know for certain are not going to get a DMCA takedown, and are not desirable to pirates, I guess you can still host them yourself. Setting up an http server is not that difficult. The problem is all the hackers wanting to pwn the server for whatever bullshit the idiots would want an http server for-- probably just another mindless drone in a botnet. If you keep an eye on it, and how much you are uploading, I suppose this is still an option.  In the near future, it will probably be the only option. Just keep in mind that hosting an http server is often against the TOS of the ISP. (Because they dont like the DMCA letters either.)

What really needs to happen is reform to make automated production of DMCA letters illegal.

Good luck on that happening.. Ever.

[Starver]

Outlook needs to die.  Really.

Rant aside, note that I'm talking about Outlook Express, not Outlook.

Spoiler: Not the topic of the thread, but... (click to show/hide)

Already, I probably have Mozilla Thunderbird lined up for them (close as it needs to be, interface-wise, give or take a few niggles) just like I transitioned them to Firefox when some websites didn't just pop up "you're using an old browser, try the latest version of IE(/a.n. other) by clicking here" and didn't even do the newer thing of "we won't support you now, so GTFO until you have something that supports <CANVAS>, even though we don't even use that ourselves"¹ but came up with a total blank page in return, suggesting a response to the HTTP-request header of "I'm IE8 and I'm happy about that" is now to send back an effectively null return page.  Even telnetting to port 80 got back a sensible (to the HTML-aware reader, with patience) response.

Obviously IE9 wasn't available for XP, so we went through the slightly painful process of migrating to Firefox.  This is the kind of impediment I expect from further migrations, hence my reluctance to sanction a system-wide revamp, and to drag the Ship Of Theseus thing out for as long as possible, whilst making sure there are backups so long as there's the possibility that the drives fail or some vital mobo capacitor pops and can't be as easily repaired as they usually can. At which point, a decision will have to be made.

¹ Both these things (that I paraphrase slightly) are confirmed as mainly CMS or Dev plugins that these sites got installed upon updates to the mid-to-back-end system. Totally unecessary, in the circumstances. But nothing reasonable we could do about it.

And, personally, I thought it a big mistake to allow text/html mimetype in email, and all that godawful "stationary" thing that started eating up bandwidth even before people knew there was such a thing as bandwidth. I'm no great fan of OE, personally, especially its odd idea that not only is Top Posting the best default, but that it's the only default available.

I was also there when Melissa happened (I'd already stopped using the Preview pane, tended to View Source before I opened anything strange, to scan for WebBugs) and have personally prefered alternate email programs. But the way they're going. The GMail App smothers you in cotton-wool, my Yahoo account keeps getting hints to update to the latest Yahoo app, even though I use K9 rather than the old one.  I think things started to go downhill since I stopped using elm (or, occasionally, pine) and whilst OE had some good newsreading features over trn, it needed to be handled correctly. And then came AOL and WebTV and GoogleGroups and the Eternal September went downhill.  Now there's reddit, taking up the slack, but the interface needs a lot more work and so many people are making so manybof the same mistakes as had actually been solved back in '92.

But I digress...