File-Hosting Icon AnonFiles Throws In the Towel, Domain For Sale 28
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Founded in 2011, AnonFiles.com became known as a popular hosting service that allowed users to share files up to 20GB without download restrictions. As the name suggests, registering an account wasn't required either; both up and downloading files was totally anonymous. The same also applies to BayFiles.com, an affiliated file-hosting service that was launched by The Pirate Bay. Both sites launched around the same time and shared a similar design and identical features. Both sites had millions of visitors but AnonFiles stood out with over 18 million visitors a month. This popularity didn't go unnoticed by rightsholders, who repeatedly flagged AnonFiles as a "notorious" pirate site.
Rightsholders and law enforcement authorities were not the only ones unhappy with the illegal content posted to the site. For AnonFiles' operators, it caused major problems too. The current owners purchased the site two years ago but didn't expect the abuse to be so massive that the only option would be to shut it down. According to a goodbye message posted on the site, they simply can't continue. "After trying endlessly for two years to run a file sharing site with user anonymity, we have been tired of handling the extreme volumes of people abusing it and the headaches it has created for us."
The operators tried to contain the abuse by setting up all sorts of automated filters and filename restrictions, taking thousands of false positives for granted, but that didn't help much. With tens of millions of uploads and petabytes of data, no anti-abuse measure was sufficient. And when the site's proxy service pulled the plug a few days ago, AnonFiles decided to call it quits. "We have auto banned contents of hundreds of thousands files. Banned file names and also banned specific usage patterns connected to abusive material," the AnonFiles team writes. "Even after all this the high volume of abuse will not stop. This is not the kind of work we imagine when acquiring it and recently our proxy provider shut us down. This can not continue." The current owners have invited others to buy the domain name and give it a shot themselves.
Rightsholders and law enforcement authorities were not the only ones unhappy with the illegal content posted to the site. For AnonFiles' operators, it caused major problems too. The current owners purchased the site two years ago but didn't expect the abuse to be so massive that the only option would be to shut it down. According to a goodbye message posted on the site, they simply can't continue. "After trying endlessly for two years to run a file sharing site with user anonymity, we have been tired of handling the extreme volumes of people abusing it and the headaches it has created for us."
The operators tried to contain the abuse by setting up all sorts of automated filters and filename restrictions, taking thousands of false positives for granted, but that didn't help much. With tens of millions of uploads and petabytes of data, no anti-abuse measure was sufficient. And when the site's proxy service pulled the plug a few days ago, AnonFiles decided to call it quits. "We have auto banned contents of hundreds of thousands files. Banned file names and also banned specific usage patterns connected to abusive material," the AnonFiles team writes. "Even after all this the high volume of abuse will not stop. This is not the kind of work we imagine when acquiring it and recently our proxy provider shut us down. This can not continue." The current owners have invited others to buy the domain name and give it a shot themselves.
Wonder what the domain name is worth (Score:3)
Bit of a bumpy sales pitch though.
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Probably a lot in the right hands. I can think of a malware author buying it because it would be the ideal malware infection vector. You're going to get millions of people trying to access files so you can replace their downloads with fake files carrying your malware.
Basically if you want to create an army of millions of infected PCs, this is an easy way to do it because there will be a lot of links out there.
They were trying to be legit? (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope that's more posturing for some reason, because anybody who launches an anonymous free file storage / sharing service and ISN'T just pretending they don't know most (if not the overwhelming percentage) of the traffic will be pirated media with a definite non-zero amount of criminal sexual abuse porn is just too clueless to start a business in the first place.
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No sign-up for upload and download, 20GB file-size limit? Cannot even see what the business model would be. Maybe they wanted to collect illegal porn for themselves?
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I don't know what paying customers they are wanting to attract. Yes, they will get visitors, but they won't be getting customers, and with ad revenue drying up across the board, knowing what kinks Joe Sixpack has just isn't going to help. Plus, they have to run PhotoDNA on their server, or else Interpol and governments will swoop in and promptly unexist the company. Even then, the local LEOs will be making it loud and clear, showing how encryption is securing the NCMEC related stuff.
If I were doing a fil
Abusing the ME principle. (Score:2)
Piracy is about "ME" so one shouldn't be surprised what happened.
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Piracy is about "ME"
What isn't?
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Charity.
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People who donate to charity have mainly two reasons to do so:
1. Feel-good reasons (it's a "me" thing);
2. Tax reductions (if they do it officially) - very much a "me" thing.
Quote from the owners (Score:4, Informative)
"Although this particular project didn't work out, our abject naivety remains as strong as ever.
Our next project is to start a movement where homeowners set up 'Little Free Liquor Cabinets' in their front yards where everyone can exchange beer, wine and spirits (we're requesting responsible adults only, please). We will start with promotional work, and we will start selling liquor cabinet kits soon."
At this point, the market is fairly small (Score:3)
I love the principled stance of the owners...but few others do...or need to.
The majority of the world, sadly, doesn't really value anonymity. Some do, but most don't really care. To that end, this XKCD [xkcd.com] has largely been solved.
Dropbox, Onedrive/Sharepoint, and Google Drive make person-to-person file transfers a breeze, even for large files (which, at this point, far fewer people generally have). It's exceedingly rare for someone to not have at least one of these accounts at this stage. Mega, pCloud, and ProtonDrive take up some of the slightly-seedier, slightly-niche cases, and checkbox-compliance for companies can be handled by HighTail or Citrix ShareFile.
The self-hosters have green pastures of options, from Nextcloud/Owncloud, Pydio Cells, ProjectSend, and Seafile, to a simple sudo apt-get install nginx, possibly adding h5ai or surfer as a frontend, and of course, good ol' FTP. The less-technically-inclined can get hardware from Synology or QNAP that handles *everything* from port forwarding and DDNS to mobile apps; given an afternoon and a little motivation, my mom could have one working.
In addition, choosing a file transfer/hosting service for privacy commonly involves data that is itself traceable. My medical insurance forms wouldn't benefit from being transferred via Anonfiles because the document is inherently identifiable to me. Thus, the need for secure document transfer is not necessarily served by Anonfiles.
We're running out of groups who would use such a service. The rank-and-file are handled by Google Drive and Onedrive, the accountants are taken care of by Sharefile, Onlyfans models have pCloud, and data hoarders have Nextcloud. Even privacy advocates might be happier to self-host since they have the ability to control exactly when files and logs get deleted. So...basically the only folks left are the folks transferring files that aren't more readily served with these options...which is *going* to be a magnet for the sort of files they're not going to want to be involved with hosting or transferring. Even if their intentions are good, that's simply the reality of the technical landscape today. ....and this is why we can't have nice things.
Dropbox and OneDrive have single digit GB quota (Score:2)
Dropbox, Onedrive/Sharepoint, and Google Drive make person-to-person file transfers a breeze, even for large files
How does that work? Does the sender upload a piece of the file until the sender hits the 2 GB quota imposed by Dropbox or the 5 GB quota imposed by OneDrive, wait for the recipient to download the piece, delete it, upload the next piece, and repeat?
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That's what Usenet is for.
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I think you might be operating on years old concepts here.
Onedrive has a file size limit of 250GB
https://support.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com].
Dropbox has a website limit of 50GB and a desktop limit of 2TB
https://www.dropbox.com/featur... [dropbox.com].
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From "How does Microsoft storage work?" [microsoft.com]:
No single file may exceed an account's total quota.
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Critical piece there:
Free, with no subscription
Large file transfers always cost something whether you do them yourself, have to buy a physical drive or pay someone else to do it. The limits are not technological here.
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How does that work? Does the sender upload a piece of the file until the sender hits the 2 GB quota imposed by Dropbox or the 5 GB quota imposed by OneDrive, wait for the recipient to download the piece, delete it, upload the next piece, and repeat?
Well, there's the time tested method of using spanned RAR archives...
Even so, we're stuck defining the scope and frequency of the problem. To reach this problem, all of the following must be true:
1.) The file must be in excess of 2GB.
2.) The file must need to be shared at all.
3.) The file must not inherently identify the sender.
4.) The file must need to be shared with recipients who don't already know the sender, and with whom the sender wishes to remain unknown by the recipient.
5.) The recipients must be u
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2.) The file must need to be shared at all.
I'm not familiar with how this service operated, nor with the boundary of what you're defining as "shared" for the purpose of that comment. Did it make all links public, or was there an opportunity for unlisted links whose URLs can be shared among collaborators on a project? Event videography and distribution of asset archives to collaborators on development of a video game are among the uses that I had in mind.
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I just don't see the market for a file sharing client either. When I'm doing institution to institution transfers, I use gpg and S3 buckets, or a VM on a VPC and the VM there takes incoming sftp from one side, checks the GPG signatures, copies them to the outgoing folder for the other party to fetch and decrypt.
For personal use, if I'm wanting to share files with someone, I use PikaPods and Nextcloud.
Issues with file sharing providers have been around since the 1990s. Back in the early 1990s, I experiment
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The market is people who want to broadcast files, one to many. Without trust and often enough anonymously.
That's a very specific use-case. And it suggests a site design quite different than any file hosting or torrent site I've seen. Basically, your broadcasters would be reporters/bloggers of some kind, basically their real identity would be anonymous but their account would have an established identity / reputation of its own.
In other words, regular users wouldn't go looking for specific files, they'd follow specific accounts.
I have no idea what the anonfiles site design was, but I doubt it was that.
Otherwise,
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if i wanted to send you (as in, you) a 45MB .zip i'd probably resort to two emails, but acknowledge the possibility you don't have "at least one of those accounts at this stage"
Always an AC telling on themselves.
If you were going to send me a spanned RAR archive via e-mail, you'd need my e-mail address (i.e. identifying yourself and myself, at least partially). Moreover, Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega, and Onedrive all require the *sender* to have an account with them, but not the recipient. You could absolutely acknowledge the possibility that I don't have one of those accounts while also using *your* Dropbox account to send me the file.
If you've got an iteration of this where there
Vote Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. (Score:2)
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ÃoeThe current owners purchased the site two years ago but didn't expect the abuse to be so massiveÃoe I didnÃ(TM)t expect that the face-eating leopards would eat MY face.
I don't think that quote about the face-eating leopards means what you think it means.
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I don't think that quote about the face-eating leopards means what you think it means.
Inconceivable!
Ummmmm (Score:1)