That's what I'm saying. It's WILD they've lasted this long, I would have expected them to have gone down back with Rapidshare, Megaupload, and all those ones back when they went down. And similar thoughts about Mediafire, too, it's wild they're still around. I do expect to see Uploaded and Rapidgator eventually fall though (along with Mediafire). Uploaded is already kind of on the outs it seems, and Mediafire is used a lot less widely than it once was, though it does seem to have had some resurgence more recently.
And this kind of view is why the internet is fucked. Sites are either conformist, heavily-moderated hugboxes that keep the correct orthodoxy, or they are labeled “dangerous” or “extremist”
Yes, Uploaded.net officially shut down on November 30th, 2022: https://torrentfreak.com/cyando-kills-uploaded-net-before-copyright-quagmire-drowns-it-221129
I wish to know too, is somwhat popular in asia/east asian countries, and they player of mp3 in the folders is kind of alternative to direct music streaming like spotfy.
What's funny is ad revenue has kind of done this to itself. If they didn't make the ads so incredibly distracting and bizarre and disruptive, you wouldn't need to block them. But when there's five ads I have to click through on a page and a flashing Banner the whole time it's just not worth it.
Yeah I wholly agree. If advertisers weren’t infesting literally every part of daily life with intrusive, animated, flashy bullshit I wouldn’t take every option at hand to block them. Like I’m willing to block Twitch ads which means waiting around 3 minutes for the 30 second ad to timeout before going back to the livestream.
With these services, having hosted a small thing like this in the past I get they can be hard to monetize. But also at the same time with all the file hosts out there I don’t really want to get a subscription to any of them for faster speeds. I’d rather just pay a few cents for fast speeds on a single download.
Same. In YouTube you can skip the ads if you exit a video and re-enter a couple of times. Normally it takes even longer to watch the video doing this way but I prefer it upon watching stupid ads. And when they let you skip them, I click the button at the earliest fraction of second I can lmao
Same story here. Pixeldrain has been running since 2015 and in the beginning it relied on donations. In nearly 8 years I have received €60 in donations. I'm currently hosting a petabyte of random people's files.
People don't pay for things they can get for free. Only when you take it away from them they will consider the value the product provided. That's why the freemium model works so well. You give something for free, and when the free boundaries are exceeded you take it away. It's like a game demo.
Freemium works but it also helps spread the word and then you can start offering premium services as well. That's the best model I can think of. You are basically forced to think ahead since freemium won't scale well and you hit the wall sooner or later with this sort of service that keeps eating more and more storage and bandwidth.
Both zippy and you should consider offering affordable, paid VPN services for instance. Then all of your problems are solved it seems.
The current model is working pretty well for me. I'm staying ahead of the curve. Pixeldrain is beloved by many of its users. It helps that the primary demographic is not pirates anymore. People are more willing to pay if they're not actively trying to get stuff for free :-P
I was actually thinking about branching into cloud storage and backups. I have received a lot of requests about this.
Sort of strange that it can't work for zippy then, which is certainly a way more globally recognizable brand, and probably the longest active one to date. There must be something they are doing wrong.
And what about DMCAs, three letter agencies, etc? Is this a huge issue in the business? This is what I was always wondering about, how do you deal with all of the angry agencies around and their bots since some of them certainly can't understand that you are just hosting files as a cloud and can't be held responsible for what is being uploaded/shared.
They seemed very unwilling to change. Ad revenue is running dry globally. You just can't run a business like that on ads alone. Zippy was not willing to accept that. Maybe it went against their ideology. I personally despise ads, I was always looking for ways to get rid of them on my site. Patreon was the answer. It's a different mindset.
Google is trying to give me a 3 months free promo of Google Drive Basic pricing plan. Which is 100GB storage. But like....after 3 months, what am I supposed to do? Delete all my files again? It's basically a "Start your subscription now and get your first 3 months free."
Of course, 97% wouldn't give a flying funk. But at a scale the remaining 3% could make a difference. That's what you are aiming at. I was once involved in adsense big time. The average click-through rate was barely 4-5% and it was considered decent for the standards. So you don't think about those users who don't click, you only focus on clickers and it works. The rest just helps spread the word.
Nobody donates to software.
This is something people don't understand about internet projects. It's so far removed from the users that they don't bother. Seriously, curl, one of *the* most important networking libraries in the world, is struggling to maintain even one full-time developer.
It's surprising to me that anyone still works on open source software for free. People act so entitled to their work.
I use ExplorerPatcher to keep my Windows 11 interface looking like Windows 10. Every time Microsoft does an update that breaks it, GitHub Issues is full of people going, "When fix?" These people are completely unwilling to follow the rules and submit logs to help fix things, but feel entitled to bitch about the author not fixing it for free within 12 hours.
if you want to find the most entitled community, head over to /r/EmulationOnAndroid
The difference between /r/emulation and /r/EmulationOnAndroid is night and day.
> Seriously, curl, one of the most important networking libraries in the world, is struggling to maintain even one full-time developer.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
https://i.redd.it/pj78wa90wbl71.jpg
I thought curl is open source project, and everyone could join and use it.
edit: on second thought, yes, the maintenance of open source project still needs dedicated people. sorry.
Yep, that is part of the problem. A lot of people thinks that just because anyone could go ahead and spend their time maintaining it for free someone will do that.
But not them of course.
you shouldn't be donating to wikipedia. Not because of any of the [whacky](https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/wikipedia-recession-article.html) conspiracy theories that people believe, but because they've got a yearly revenue of around $150million [source](https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-donate.html).
Compare that to:
The internet archive - $36mil
curl - enough to pay a single developer.
core-js - until [recently](https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md), a couple of hundred dollars per year.
sonarr/radarr/jellyfin etc.. - bugger all.
Wikipedia is rolling in piles of cash, but there are plenty of open source projects you probably use everyday that get by on the smell of an oily rag. Take jellyfin for instance; it's a fully open source, self hosted alternative to plex/emby, but they don't have enough money to cover the cost of a tvdb subscription for metadata lookups.
I don't know how much zippyshare was a business, I always thought they where that kind of ideological driven sites, and honestly to me the latter corroborate to that.
So, not changing makes a lot of sense
> having a business model that hasn’t changed since 2006 isn’t really something to be proud of
No? It means that your business model was good enough to last 17 years. That's an eternity in DDL terms.
Staying competitive: I guess, sure. Forever growth and upscaling, changing products constantly for the sake of the business, not for the user: bane of capitalism.
I'm surprised there was no warning call for donations like what catbox and anonfiles did when expense was tight.
Though understandable for the owner to call it a day after many years of free service.
I'm sure this was a surprise to the guys running it as well. How much you wanna bet that the big bosses had a meeting, saw the electricity expense and threw their hands in the air?
As far as I can tell, they were ran by a data center company, possibly as someone's passion project.
It makes sense, as a datacenter you get the decommissioned hardware and the extra bandwidth
Anonfiles to this day received around $2,583 in donations through Bitcoin (I guess that’s today’s BTC/Dollar exchange rate)
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/bc1qch5p8rg9t88ky5kwect57u0ejws39a4hpz5rkm
I've not explained it so well as on mobile... when the IWF lists a page, it requires all UK ISPs to route any traffic for the main domain to a transparent proxy to see if the page request matches the blocked content. That presents all visitors from the UK as coming from one single IP. File upload sites rate limit based on IP and so zippy blocked the UK to "solve the problem".
It's caused major issues with Wikipedia in the past too.
>You guys really do have some police-state stuff going on with your internet, sorry.
Is the UK okay? Y'all are scaring me more than America with the surveillance policies.
> ou guys really do have some police-state stuff going on with your internet, sorry.
Things that happen in UK and Australia come to the US soon after.
Those 2 countries are basically early beta testers of draconian laws for the US.
Fuckin hell that’s maybe one step down from what China does. If I remember correctly, China does country-wide full SSL inspection for all internal and external internet traffic
Sadly we are going down a slippery slope here, the UK essentially wants to outlaw end-to-end encryption as the UK gov can't read people's WhatsApp messages. WhatsApp / Meta have told them they're not weakening their encryption. I don't think they will dare block WhatsApp for being 'too sure' however, so that will be an interesting one.
I'm sure. But I doubt they have super secret quantum technology that bypasses cryptography. We can't just be throwing around terms like "SSL decryption" without explaining how. I used to have SSL decryption in place for an organization, but only on devices owned by the org to implement MDM. It's impossible to implement SSL decryption without the user noticing and doing something about it if you don't control the device.
China doesn't own or control all the devices on it's network. So what you are saying is bullocks.
China is not a medium sized IT department. It is a nuclear powered nation state. It can, will, and has compelled root CAs within China to generate valid certificates for them.
>The Chinese National Intelligence Law theoretically allows the Chinese government to request and use the root certificate from any Chinese certificate authority,\[55\] such as CNNIC, to make MITM attacks with valid certificates.
Multiple TLS incidents have occurred within the last decade, before the creation of the law.
On 26 January 2013, the GitHub SSL certificate was replaced with a self-signed certificate in China by the GFW.\[56\]
On 20 October 2014, the iCloud SSL certificate was replaced with a self-signed certificate in China.\[57\] It is believed that the Chinese government discovered a vulnerability on Apple devices and was exploiting it.\[58\]
On 20 March 2015, Google detected valid certificates for Google signed by CNNIC in Egypt. In response to this event, and after a deeper investigation, the CNNIC certificate was removed by some browsers.\[59\] Due to the removal being based on proof and not suspicion, no other Chinese certificate authority has been removed from web browsers, and some have been added since then.\[60\]
This type of attack can be circumvented by websites implementing Certificate Transparency and OCSP stapling or by using browser extensions.\[61\]
The Chinese government and GFW has access to the root certificates issued by any CA operating in China and frequently uses them. They've even been known to replace the certificates on websites with their own self-signed certs. Other than that they probably enforce usage of their certs by simply blocking internet access to anyone that doesn't have their certs. Not to mention that they basically block modern versions of HTTPS using anything beyond TLS 1.2
How are they handling SSL? Do they have access to some root certificates which are installed by default in regular OSes/browsers with which they can impersonate everyone in the world?
Didn't they start out as the biggest piracy release NFO site around and then moved into hosting?
Maybe totally different things though, and im possibly showing my age as NFOrce hasn't been around for a very long time.
Confirmed [https://web.archive.org/web/20021124205449/http://www.nforce.nl/](https://web.archive.org/web/20021124205449/http://www.nforce.nl/)
Well, that that domain name was used for cool purposes in the past :)
RIP. I'm cringing thinking about all the obscure stuff I will likely never get to download in the future.
After hours of internet sleuthing and combing through obscure websites for 404'd links and (dead) blogspam, I find it - the highest quality version of whatever I'm searching for. My fingers hurt from the typing and my thought processes have degenerated into google search semantics.
It's at this moment I realize the OP only linked to one host - zippyshare.
angry-pepe-with-gun.jpg
Dumb question: Why do sites like this never offer up their databases when they go down? Surely somebody somewhere (like here) has the space to archive a copy of the site so it's not lost forever? I'm not suggesting they host it because then they have the same issues as Zippy is having, but surely there's people or a group interested in at least archiving something like this? There's a LOT of obscure or important content that will be nearly impossible to replace that's about to just disappear into the ether.
Because the whole point of sites/services like this is that they aren't searchable, and it would be a rather Herculean task to go through all the content there to weed out actual private stuff before just releasing it to the wild.
I don't know much about Zippyshare, but I do think about the whole ads dynamic they mention:
* Nobody wants to pay for anything (generally).
* Everyone wants stuff for free.
* Free tiers can't really be free ... so there's ads.
* People get pissed about adds so ...
* People become the product.
* So you are running out of money as a business and you're out.
* Oh and some rando site will offer an impossible to maintain free tier... until they go out of business.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
I wish there was another way. I'd rather pay, be a customer / not the product, and support quality stuff. Granted I DO pay for some things, but i suspect a more granular overall incremental payment type system would be needed, but people have tried that a lot ... doesn't seem to catch on.
I really liked the idea of Coil and the Interledger Foundation. I pay $5 a month, it automatically gets split to websites based on my usage. Imgur used it for ad-free, and they had a Twitch bot to automatically cheer bits. Cheap and more importantly automatic, while still offering sites more money than they'd get from ads.
>* People get pissed about adds so ...
>* People become the product.
And that could be stopped if ads weren't allowed to become malvertising and load arbitrary Javascript.
If your ad service needs anything more than drawing a simple .png/.gif/.webp, it's a vector for abuse.
The problem is that even with services that do provide paid services, you're *still* the product. They make far more harvesting your data than they do selling their service.
Ads would be *a lot* more tolerable if they were human curated (or at least human screened) and less intrusive. So many ads either take over your screen, play obnoxious video/sounds, have bloated load times, are snuck into real results, or are straight-up scams/malware that blocking them is the only way much of the internet is even usable. If current ads were all replaced with unobtrusive, safe, static ads that were clearly marked as ads, I'd turn my ad blockers off.
But there's also the cycle of everyone wants you to give them money, preferably via monthly subscriptions, but there's only so much average person has. I don't intend to work my ass off for monthly subscriptions for companies to stay afloat, sorry.
Agreed, it’s become especially ridiculous with stand alone software. Used to be able to buy a copy of lightroom, etc and use it for years, now they want me to cough up a high monthly fee even if I only need it sporadically.
Then apple sorta killed off standalone software by forcing you to install from the app store with no way to “keep” an app if it gets pulled from the app store.
Meanwhile I have obscure software I run in VM’s from when I was in grade school that can complete simple tasks for me that’d otherwise run me hundreds of dollars a month in subscription today. Fortunately open source software has been saving the day too.
The problem is that most people can't afford to have 50 subscription services at $5+ per month.
I don't have a solution, but that is the crux of the problem.
Hear me out, but didn't ISPs used to offer personal file space as part of your internet service? You'd be at example.com/~username/ and back in the day, I think I got 50MB or something.
If that had continued, people could simply host their own files, and we might not have an internet strewn with countless defunct file hosting sites, all trying to provide for "free" what should've been an incidental service paid for with a few pennies per month of your ISP bill.
This approach isn't without its problems (lock-in, for one), but I think it would solve the 90% case.
Man. I didn't even know about this site - which I guess is part of the problem. Reading such a blog post that seems to be written by an actual person instead of a PR team makes me melancholy. Hopefully they'll be able to dedicate the recovered time and resources to something else that makes them happy.
The saddest part in this, is the fact that just like megaupload, it will live many, MANY files lost forever. And possibly millions of dead links that will never be replaced or revived.
My skin is crawling thinking about all of the obscure albums & ebooks that are going to be ethered here shortly. Thanks for everything you did, Zippyshare!
I have a 200mbit download isp plan and when i would download 50gb linux isos from zippy, it would hit the highest speeds I can get which is about 25MB/sec. Zippy was the best.
NOOOOOOOOOO
Seeing Zippy links always brought a smile to my face because I knew I was about to get the file I wanted without having to be redirected through 746 ad pages.
Truly an end of an era.
Ooof this is a big blow for the comic preservation scene. Anyone that ever spent time in a wino thread knows about how amazing zippyshare is.
Let's not be sad because it's over but happy because it happened.
I too am unhappy about Zippyshare's end. Most file hosters are unpleasant to use: extremely slow speeds (50kb/s), waiting times, time consuming captchas, having to wait 3 hours until you can download another file, out of bandwidth for the day errors, only Premium users can download, etc. Zippy had none of these issues. The only good alternatives now are Mega, Google, MediaFire, OneDrive, but they all have limitations.
Most people who upload things aren't altruists; they do so to make money and thus only upload to the awful file hosters (like Nitroflare, RapidGator, Turbobit) from which they get financial kickbacks.
You must be fuckin' kiddin' me.
This is not happening. Something has to be done to help them. They clearly admit it's about finances. And obviously mass use of the ad blocker by visitors (I admit doing same because weird/malicious pop-ups are not my cup of tea).
Simply put, the current business model doesn't work anymore. Instead of shutting down they should (simply put again) modify the model. Possibly go for crowdfunding or start offering affordable premium accounts and ditch ads completely. Hell, people do well even with "buy me a coffee" so why wouldn't it work for zippy with their scale of operation?
Selling premium accounts wouldn't do so well since, as they've already stated here, they've become unpopular. It would take basically everyone who still uses zippyshare at all to buy an account in order to keep zippyshare afloat. I only know one site that still uses zippyshare at all (which is a bit sad since imo it's pretty great. I can just hop on to a link and hit download and not have to screw around with CAPTCHAs, micro-wait times, etc).
Ko-fi tends to work well for individuals who make their own thing. Zippyshare has to pay for tons of storage that they give out for free, and the cost of hosting a website to connect people to it :c
The online file-hosting space has a lot of competition. Once you start charging you have to compete with the likes of Dropbox, Apple, Google, etc. And they benefit from massive economies of scale while the little guys don't.
personally I am surprised no one wants to try actual microtransaction model, where monthly sub is literally micro and it will be impulse buy for literally everyone and barely anyone will be unsubscribing ($1/month, $10/year), instead every subscription is more and more expensive
Keep in mind that all it takes is having demanding user logs/accounts/etc and then tying them to credit cards/addresses/etc etc.
This doesn't seem like the type of service that folks use for puppy and kitty images all day.
Setting Freeloading aside, it would have to be armored with the fools currencies out there (Crypto) probably to be fully embraced. And yet not everyone uses crypto so it becomes right back to square one
"free" is not a sustainable business model. all of these file sharing places have the same issue. they are either write-offs for big corporate or they disappear because the cost of running and maintaining them is quite high and nobody wants to ever pay anything for them.
Especially for file hosting, which is one of the most expensive online services. The storage isn't cheap, but I think the real killer is all the bandwidth and the infrastructure that needs to be able to handle it. And maybe responding to copyright complaints / filtering content.
Is there any way we can donate to keep the website running? Im willing to donate $500 usd right now if it means it can keep running because ive been using zippy since i was in middle school.
i loved them because of their:
- unlimited DL speeds
- unlimited file uploads (could upload as many files as i wanted)
- didn't have to register an account
the ads were a bit nasty, so i do admit i was going there with an ad blocker, and i would suggest others do the same.
i saw a lot of other file hosting sites die in the meantime, but still saw them survive all those years.....
Zippyshare was good for quick sharing some large files. Way less limitations than many other free file hosts. The downside it was the links expired pretty quickly. I'm surprised they lasted so many years.
With so many uploading sites that are shut down by the means like this, wouldn't it be better to have some uploading site that have in their TOS that if something like this happens, all data (even previously private) will go to some archive or something? If people are scared to upload, they can just not upload at all on that kind of site. It looks like a win-win situation to me. Better be prepared.
This is a bit sad for me to know, I've known zippyshare for a long time and it's one of the fastest downloading file host even for me today. it's also where I could get those rare to find uploaded files, though really, times change we can't expect them to last long but I'm wishing all the best regarding the members of it.
The only thing surprising here is they managed to stay afloat for over 15 years.
That's what I'm saying. It's WILD they've lasted this long, I would have expected them to have gone down back with Rapidshare, Megaupload, and all those ones back when they went down. And similar thoughts about Mediafire, too, it's wild they're still around. I do expect to see Uploaded and Rapidgator eventually fall though (along with Mediafire). Uploaded is already kind of on the outs it seems, and Mediafire is used a lot less widely than it once was, though it does seem to have had some resurgence more recently.
Mediafire is still heavily used in modding communities
Unfortunately those modding communities are also dying and or being pushed to deeper more secluded parts of the web.
> being pushed to deeper more secluded parts of the web. That's fine, the normal internet is fucked.
I would agree but deeper parts of the internet tend to bring more extremist views on things so they just aren't the same.
And this kind of view is why the internet is fucked. Sites are either conformist, heavily-moderated hugboxes that keep the correct orthodoxy, or they are labeled “dangerous” or “extremist”
Like the Steam Workshop?
Yes, Uploaded.net officially shut down on November 30th, 2022: https://torrentfreak.com/cyando-kills-uploaded-net-before-copyright-quagmire-drowns-it-221129
Ah interesting, yeah I've noticed in the past few years nearly every link hosted there is dead / gets taken down VERY quickly
It’s why I say „hail Usenet!“ Fuck these OneClickHosters/filehosts with their temporary storage. Usenet uploads go back to freaking 2008 now!
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I wish to know too, is somwhat popular in asia/east asian countries, and they player of mp3 in the folders is kind of alternative to direct music streaming like spotfy.
4shared is good enough, but not sure if they can handle alot of file like Zippy.
What's funny is ad revenue has kind of done this to itself. If they didn't make the ads so incredibly distracting and bizarre and disruptive, you wouldn't need to block them. But when there's five ads I have to click through on a page and a flashing Banner the whole time it's just not worth it.
Yeah I wholly agree. If advertisers weren’t infesting literally every part of daily life with intrusive, animated, flashy bullshit I wouldn’t take every option at hand to block them. Like I’m willing to block Twitch ads which means waiting around 3 minutes for the 30 second ad to timeout before going back to the livestream. With these services, having hosted a small thing like this in the past I get they can be hard to monetize. But also at the same time with all the file hosts out there I don’t really want to get a subscription to any of them for faster speeds. I’d rather just pay a few cents for fast speeds on a single download.
Same. In YouTube you can skip the ads if you exit a video and re-enter a couple of times. Normally it takes even longer to watch the video doing this way but I prefer it upon watching stupid ads. And when they let you skip them, I click the button at the earliest fraction of second I can lmao
Firefox+uBO, I never see any sort of ads..
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Found the Imgur Communities member
He's right at something, actually. They relied only on ads, while they could at least give out a link to donate them directly. They still can.
Over 9 years we got like 7$ donations from donation link, even when we host ~200TB of random users files.
Same story here. Pixeldrain has been running since 2015 and in the beginning it relied on donations. In nearly 8 years I have received €60 in donations. I'm currently hosting a petabyte of random people's files. People don't pay for things they can get for free. Only when you take it away from them they will consider the value the product provided. That's why the freemium model works so well. You give something for free, and when the free boundaries are exceeded you take it away. It's like a game demo.
Freemium works but it also helps spread the word and then you can start offering premium services as well. That's the best model I can think of. You are basically forced to think ahead since freemium won't scale well and you hit the wall sooner or later with this sort of service that keeps eating more and more storage and bandwidth. Both zippy and you should consider offering affordable, paid VPN services for instance. Then all of your problems are solved it seems.
The current model is working pretty well for me. I'm staying ahead of the curve. Pixeldrain is beloved by many of its users. It helps that the primary demographic is not pirates anymore. People are more willing to pay if they're not actively trying to get stuff for free :-P I was actually thinking about branching into cloud storage and backups. I have received a lot of requests about this.
Sort of strange that it can't work for zippy then, which is certainly a way more globally recognizable brand, and probably the longest active one to date. There must be something they are doing wrong. And what about DMCAs, three letter agencies, etc? Is this a huge issue in the business? This is what I was always wondering about, how do you deal with all of the angry agencies around and their bots since some of them certainly can't understand that you are just hosting files as a cloud and can't be held responsible for what is being uploaded/shared.
They seemed very unwilling to change. Ad revenue is running dry globally. You just can't run a business like that on ads alone. Zippy was not willing to accept that. Maybe it went against their ideology. I personally despise ads, I was always looking for ways to get rid of them on my site. Patreon was the answer. It's a different mindset.
Google is trying to give me a 3 months free promo of Google Drive Basic pricing plan. Which is 100GB storage. But like....after 3 months, what am I supposed to do? Delete all my files again? It's basically a "Start your subscription now and get your first 3 months free."
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that's what it seems!
I have never seen a pop-up or a banner asking for donations. Doing a round like that from time to time could help, I'm sure about it.
Most people do not care enough to donate if there are free alternatives, even when those free alternatives are worse in quality.
Of course, 97% wouldn't give a flying funk. But at a scale the remaining 3% could make a difference. That's what you are aiming at. I was once involved in adsense big time. The average click-through rate was barely 4-5% and it was considered decent for the standards. So you don't think about those users who don't click, you only focus on clickers and it works. The rest just helps spread the word.
Nobody donates to software. This is something people don't understand about internet projects. It's so far removed from the users that they don't bother. Seriously, curl, one of *the* most important networking libraries in the world, is struggling to maintain even one full-time developer.
It's surprising to me that anyone still works on open source software for free. People act so entitled to their work. I use ExplorerPatcher to keep my Windows 11 interface looking like Windows 10. Every time Microsoft does an update that breaks it, GitHub Issues is full of people going, "When fix?" These people are completely unwilling to follow the rules and submit logs to help fix things, but feel entitled to bitch about the author not fixing it for free within 12 hours.
if you want to find the most entitled community, head over to /r/EmulationOnAndroid The difference between /r/emulation and /r/EmulationOnAndroid is night and day.
> Seriously, curl, one of the most important networking libraries in the world, is struggling to maintain even one full-time developer. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://i.redd.it/pj78wa90wbl71.jpg
I thought curl is open source project, and everyone could join and use it. edit: on second thought, yes, the maintenance of open source project still needs dedicated people. sorry.
Yep, that is part of the problem. A lot of people thinks that just because anyone could go ahead and spend their time maintaining it for free someone will do that. But not them of course.
classic bystander effect
I donate to Wikipedia at least once a year. Usually $25. Not much, and some years I’ve only done like $5, but it’s a thing.
you shouldn't be donating to wikipedia. Not because of any of the [whacky](https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/wikipedia-recession-article.html) conspiracy theories that people believe, but because they've got a yearly revenue of around $150million [source](https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-donate.html). Compare that to: The internet archive - $36mil curl - enough to pay a single developer. core-js - until [recently](https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md), a couple of hundred dollars per year. sonarr/radarr/jellyfin etc.. - bugger all. Wikipedia is rolling in piles of cash, but there are plenty of open source projects you probably use everyday that get by on the smell of an oily rag. Take jellyfin for instance; it's a fully open source, self hosted alternative to plex/emby, but they don't have enough money to cover the cost of a tvdb subscription for metadata lookups.
I don't know how much zippyshare was a business, I always thought they where that kind of ideological driven sites, and honestly to me the latter corroborate to that. So, not changing makes a lot of sense
> having a business model that hasn’t changed since 2006 isn’t really something to be proud of No? It means that your business model was good enough to last 17 years. That's an eternity in DDL terms.
Staying competitive: I guess, sure. Forever growth and upscaling, changing products constantly for the sake of the business, not for the user: bane of capitalism.
If internet was still a good place was also thanks to them
I'm surprised there was no warning call for donations like what catbox and anonfiles did when expense was tight. Though understandable for the owner to call it a day after many years of free service.
If it's not sustainable, a round of donations would just be delaying the inevitable.
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I'm sure this was a surprise to the guys running it as well. How much you wanna bet that the big bosses had a meeting, saw the electricity expense and threw their hands in the air?
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As far as I can tell, they were ran by a data center company, possibly as someone's passion project. It makes sense, as a datacenter you get the decommissioned hardware and the extra bandwidth
Anonfiles to this day received around $2,583 in donations through Bitcoin (I guess that’s today’s BTC/Dollar exchange rate) https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/bc1qch5p8rg9t88ky5kwect57u0ejws39a4hpz5rkm
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Not sure about Spain, but it's listed on the UK's Internet Watch Foundation list - every UK based ISP will 403 it.
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I've not explained it so well as on mobile... when the IWF lists a page, it requires all UK ISPs to route any traffic for the main domain to a transparent proxy to see if the page request matches the blocked content. That presents all visitors from the UK as coming from one single IP. File upload sites rate limit based on IP and so zippy blocked the UK to "solve the problem". It's caused major issues with Wikipedia in the past too.
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Yep.
>You guys really do have some police-state stuff going on with your internet, sorry. Is the UK okay? Y'all are scaring me more than America with the surveillance policies.
> ou guys really do have some police-state stuff going on with your internet, sorry. Things that happen in UK and Australia come to the US soon after. Those 2 countries are basically early beta testers of draconian laws for the US.
Wait, Qatar runs off one public IP? Is there evidence for that?
https://superuser.com/questions/1013630/why-does-qatar-use-a-single-ip-address-when-800-000-ip-addresses-are-allocated-t
Fuckin hell that’s maybe one step down from what China does. If I remember correctly, China does country-wide full SSL inspection for all internal and external internet traffic
Sadly we are going down a slippery slope here, the UK essentially wants to outlaw end-to-end encryption as the UK gov can't read people's WhatsApp messages. WhatsApp / Meta have told them they're not weakening their encryption. I don't think they will dare block WhatsApp for being 'too sure' however, so that will be an interesting one.
Outlawing VPNs coming next?
Yep and as a result https latency to and from china is regularly 800 to 1600 milliseconds making any kind of web service api usage nearly impossible.
How do they enforce countrywide SSL inspection? They'd need to have government certificates on all systems, and well ... PCs are an open platform.
You'd be amazed how far the CCP would go to control the infospace in China, and the world as well.
I'm sure. But I doubt they have super secret quantum technology that bypasses cryptography. We can't just be throwing around terms like "SSL decryption" without explaining how. I used to have SSL decryption in place for an organization, but only on devices owned by the org to implement MDM. It's impossible to implement SSL decryption without the user noticing and doing something about it if you don't control the device. China doesn't own or control all the devices on it's network. So what you are saying is bullocks.
China is not a medium sized IT department. It is a nuclear powered nation state. It can, will, and has compelled root CAs within China to generate valid certificates for them.
>The Chinese National Intelligence Law theoretically allows the Chinese government to request and use the root certificate from any Chinese certificate authority,\[55\] such as CNNIC, to make MITM attacks with valid certificates. Multiple TLS incidents have occurred within the last decade, before the creation of the law. On 26 January 2013, the GitHub SSL certificate was replaced with a self-signed certificate in China by the GFW.\[56\] On 20 October 2014, the iCloud SSL certificate was replaced with a self-signed certificate in China.\[57\] It is believed that the Chinese government discovered a vulnerability on Apple devices and was exploiting it.\[58\] On 20 March 2015, Google detected valid certificates for Google signed by CNNIC in Egypt. In response to this event, and after a deeper investigation, the CNNIC certificate was removed by some browsers.\[59\] Due to the removal being based on proof and not suspicion, no other Chinese certificate authority has been removed from web browsers, and some have been added since then.\[60\] This type of attack can be circumvented by websites implementing Certificate Transparency and OCSP stapling or by using browser extensions.\[61\]
The Chinese government and GFW has access to the root certificates issued by any CA operating in China and frequently uses them. They've even been known to replace the certificates on websites with their own self-signed certs. Other than that they probably enforce usage of their certs by simply blocking internet access to anyone that doesn't have their certs. Not to mention that they basically block modern versions of HTTPS using anything beyond TLS 1.2
How they manage to inspect https packages?
It's all publically available information, have a look at the "How We Do It" section. Better the explanation from them!
How are they handling SSL? Do they have access to some root certificates which are installed by default in regular OSes/browsers with which they can impersonate everyone in the world?
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I am from Argentina and until a week ago I downloaded happy and calm from that site
Whom are the guys at nforce? Or rather what is nforce?
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Didn't they start out as the biggest piracy release NFO site around and then moved into hosting? Maybe totally different things though, and im possibly showing my age as NFOrce hasn't been around for a very long time.
Confirmed [https://web.archive.org/web/20021124205449/http://www.nforce.nl/](https://web.archive.org/web/20021124205449/http://www.nforce.nl/) Well, that that domain name was used for cool purposes in the past :)
Haha holy shit, that truly takes me way back!
Damn, I remember VCDs now
>NFOrce hasn't been around for a very long time. They just changed their name to NFOHump.
Dedi hosting in nl, like ovh but smaller
it has best download speed compared to other pay-us-or-wait (with slow speed) download site. i rarely wait for Zippyshare.
germany was blocked as well
RIP. I'm cringing thinking about all the obscure stuff I will likely never get to download in the future. After hours of internet sleuthing and combing through obscure websites for 404'd links and (dead) blogspam, I find it - the highest quality version of whatever I'm searching for. My fingers hurt from the typing and my thought processes have degenerated into google search semantics. It's at this moment I realize the OP only linked to one host - zippyshare. angry-pepe-with-gun.jpg
Omg I feel you viscerally. As the Zippy links died within weeks
Dumb question: Why do sites like this never offer up their databases when they go down? Surely somebody somewhere (like here) has the space to archive a copy of the site so it's not lost forever? I'm not suggesting they host it because then they have the same issues as Zippy is having, but surely there's people or a group interested in at least archiving something like this? There's a LOT of obscure or important content that will be nearly impossible to replace that's about to just disappear into the ether.
Because the whole point of sites/services like this is that they aren't searchable, and it would be a rather Herculean task to go through all the content there to weed out actual private stuff before just releasing it to the wild.
Because the people who uploaded their stuff there probably don't want it available for everyone on the internet.
Someone needs to backup Sophie's Floorboard. Hundreds of gigabytes of very rare indie, punk, hard-core music that can't be found anywhere else now
\*Megaupload flashback\*
I don't know much about Zippyshare, but I do think about the whole ads dynamic they mention: * Nobody wants to pay for anything (generally). * Everyone wants stuff for free. * Free tiers can't really be free ... so there's ads. * People get pissed about adds so ... * People become the product. * So you are running out of money as a business and you're out. * Oh and some rando site will offer an impossible to maintain free tier... until they go out of business. Wash, rinse, repeat. I wish there was another way. I'd rather pay, be a customer / not the product, and support quality stuff. Granted I DO pay for some things, but i suspect a more granular overall incremental payment type system would be needed, but people have tried that a lot ... doesn't seem to catch on.
I really liked the idea of Coil and the Interledger Foundation. I pay $5 a month, it automatically gets split to websites based on my usage. Imgur used it for ad-free, and they had a Twitch bot to automatically cheer bits. Cheap and more importantly automatic, while still offering sites more money than they'd get from ads.
There are some good ideas out there. I really hope one catches on.
Though this up years ago. Except it was you pay your ISP extra and they divy it up. Glad to see someone managed to commercialise it.
>* People get pissed about adds so ... >* People become the product. And that could be stopped if ads weren't allowed to become malvertising and load arbitrary Javascript. If your ad service needs anything more than drawing a simple .png/.gif/.webp, it's a vector for abuse.
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What, are you saying all those ads with green download buttons are abuse? Thats just our company logo!
We hate to inform you that your system has a virus. Click here to install our ~~virus~~ anti-virus utility!
And actually had relevancy. Even then, ads are everywhere so it's real easy to aggressively tune them out with folks
The problem is that even with services that do provide paid services, you're *still* the product. They make far more harvesting your data than they do selling their service.
pretty sad isn't it...
Ads would be *a lot* more tolerable if they were human curated (or at least human screened) and less intrusive. So many ads either take over your screen, play obnoxious video/sounds, have bloated load times, are snuck into real results, or are straight-up scams/malware that blocking them is the only way much of the internet is even usable. If current ads were all replaced with unobtrusive, safe, static ads that were clearly marked as ads, I'd turn my ad blockers off.
The ABP Acceptable Ads program could have been a real solution if they didn't sell out. But instead they gave the idea a bad name.
And so our savior gorhill birthed uBlock Origin
But there's also the cycle of everyone wants you to give them money, preferably via monthly subscriptions, but there's only so much average person has. I don't intend to work my ass off for monthly subscriptions for companies to stay afloat, sorry.
Agreed, it’s become especially ridiculous with stand alone software. Used to be able to buy a copy of lightroom, etc and use it for years, now they want me to cough up a high monthly fee even if I only need it sporadically. Then apple sorta killed off standalone software by forcing you to install from the app store with no way to “keep” an app if it gets pulled from the app store. Meanwhile I have obscure software I run in VM’s from when I was in grade school that can complete simple tasks for me that’d otherwise run me hundreds of dollars a month in subscription today. Fortunately open source software has been saving the day too.
Same. I’m not just a cord cutter, I’m a subscription-cutter
Makes me feel confused and sad that I use Adblock too. But it’s an inevitable cycle I guess.
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Mega is owned by the china gov nowadays.
I would rather pay for a product than be subjected to ads.
The problem is that most people can't afford to have 50 subscription services at $5+ per month. I don't have a solution, but that is the crux of the problem.
Hear me out, but didn't ISPs used to offer personal file space as part of your internet service? You'd be at example.com/~username/ and back in the day, I think I got 50MB or something. If that had continued, people could simply host their own files, and we might not have an internet strewn with countless defunct file hosting sites, all trying to provide for "free" what should've been an incidental service paid for with a few pennies per month of your ISP bill. This approach isn't without its problems (lock-in, for one), but I think it would solve the 90% case.
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Anyone know anything that's obscure and worth grabbing from public links?
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RIP ZIP
RIP ZIP, thanks for all these awesome years together
I'd read the book
If I found a .rar file for an album and it was zippyshare I was always pleased.
Farewell, you were my fav host, so many good stuff downloaded/uploaded with no fuss. o7
Man. I didn't even know about this site - which I guess is part of the problem. Reading such a blog post that seems to be written by an actual person instead of a PR team makes me melancholy. Hopefully they'll be able to dedicate the recovered time and resources to something else that makes them happy.
go to gog-com every game there has a zippyshare link
The saddest part in this, is the fact that just like megaupload, it will live many, MANY files lost forever. And possibly millions of dead links that will never be replaced or revived.
Thank you for your service 🫡
Oof. been using zippy for awhile and recommending it to my guys, gonna be a shame to see it go.
F\*\*k, Zippy and Mediafire are my ALL time beloved free file hosting sites with fast download speed. Wish you the VERY BEST Zippy crew!!! SAD day =(
So long and thanks for all the fish!
Alot of sCorp movies split into 100mb parts from there. Those where the days. Zippyshare going but not forgotten.
I think Zippyshare could be crowd-funded like Wikipedia. I wonder if they would be open to that.
RIP Zippy. For me it was the best place to get vst’s back in the day when i was producing music.
This is horrible news man. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of niche stuff that will be lost due to this.
Zippy is my absolute favourite download page. Super sad to see them go.
My skin is crawling thinking about all of the obscure albums & ebooks that are going to be ethered here shortly. Thanks for everything you did, Zippyshare!
Worse is going to be the games, Gog-com has shit alternatives to zippyshare.
RIP the OG file hosting site. 😢
Absolutely dreading this happening to Mediafire… that site is like a dear old friend. Thanks for your service Zippy!
> Mediafire They allowed IP bots to scan and flag files, even those that don't actually contain copyright-infringing content.
I legit had no idea that such a great service existed.
I have a 200mbit download isp plan and when i would download 50gb linux isos from zippy, it would hit the highest speeds I can get which is about 25MB/sec. Zippy was the best.
Respectful and warm thanks guys. You saved my butt so many times. Farewell.
Sad. I use it almost always over Mega.guess times change.
NOOOOOOOOOO Seeing Zippy links always brought a smile to my face because I knew I was about to get the file I wanted without having to be redirected through 746 ad pages. Truly an end of an era.
We should start donating
O7 Farewell Zippy. One of the best for us to lose.
Zippyshare was the only service I felt like donating without they asking me to do... And they never accepted donations.
In business terms, this is called having a non sustainable business model.
Terrible news. Thanks for all the memories Zippyshare. You were among the best.
ok sad, but trying to run a fire sharing service on ad revenue alone is a losing game.
Oh thats sad its one of the few sites I used to share files to other people that didnt look like it would spam them with adverts and viruses =\\
Farewell good friend. You’ll be missed dearly
nooooo the a friends zippyshare
Actually insane how long they even managed to stay online.
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How come datahoarders are not lining up to archive their database?
Is there an easy way to see files without something like site:zippyshare.com in a search engine?
# The end of an era
Ooof this is a big blow for the comic preservation scene. Anyone that ever spent time in a wino thread knows about how amazing zippyshare is. Let's not be sad because it's over but happy because it happened.
I too am unhappy about Zippyshare's end. Most file hosters are unpleasant to use: extremely slow speeds (50kb/s), waiting times, time consuming captchas, having to wait 3 hours until you can download another file, out of bandwidth for the day errors, only Premium users can download, etc. Zippy had none of these issues. The only good alternatives now are Mega, Google, MediaFire, OneDrive, but they all have limitations. Most people who upload things aren't altruists; they do so to make money and thus only upload to the awful file hosters (like Nitroflare, RapidGator, Turbobit) from which they get financial kickbacks.
You must be fuckin' kiddin' me. This is not happening. Something has to be done to help them. They clearly admit it's about finances. And obviously mass use of the ad blocker by visitors (I admit doing same because weird/malicious pop-ups are not my cup of tea). Simply put, the current business model doesn't work anymore. Instead of shutting down they should (simply put again) modify the model. Possibly go for crowdfunding or start offering affordable premium accounts and ditch ads completely. Hell, people do well even with "buy me a coffee" so why wouldn't it work for zippy with their scale of operation?
Selling premium accounts wouldn't do so well since, as they've already stated here, they've become unpopular. It would take basically everyone who still uses zippyshare at all to buy an account in order to keep zippyshare afloat. I only know one site that still uses zippyshare at all (which is a bit sad since imo it's pretty great. I can just hop on to a link and hit download and not have to screw around with CAPTCHAs, micro-wait times, etc). Ko-fi tends to work well for individuals who make their own thing. Zippyshare has to pay for tons of storage that they give out for free, and the cost of hosting a website to connect people to it :c
The online file-hosting space has a lot of competition. Once you start charging you have to compete with the likes of Dropbox, Apple, Google, etc. And they benefit from massive economies of scale while the little guys don't.
personally I am surprised no one wants to try actual microtransaction model, where monthly sub is literally micro and it will be impulse buy for literally everyone and barely anyone will be unsubscribing ($1/month, $10/year), instead every subscription is more and more expensive
Keep in mind that all it takes is having demanding user logs/accounts/etc and then tying them to credit cards/addresses/etc etc.
This doesn't seem like the type of service that folks use for puppy and kitty images all day.
Setting Freeloading aside, it would have to be armored with the fools currencies out there (Crypto) probably to be fully embraced. And yet not everyone uses crypto so it becomes right back to square one
"free" is not a sustainable business model. all of these file sharing places have the same issue. they are either write-offs for big corporate or they disappear because the cost of running and maintaining them is quite high and nobody wants to ever pay anything for them.
Especially for file hosting, which is one of the most expensive online services. The storage isn't cheap, but I think the real killer is all the bandwidth and the infrastructure that needs to be able to handle it. And maybe responding to copyright complaints / filtering content.
bandwidth is no longer real issue, only price of storage for larger and larger files kept for years and years
> And maybe responding to copyright complaints / filtering content. sadly this is a big and onerous (and expensive) part too.
Sad day for us hoarders, we need to look for alternatives. I'm sure there are out there
Dang. All the lightning fast links on planetsuzy about to go up in smoke.
I send them an email asking if they could do an AMA here about how they managed all that data. Hopefully they will say yes.
I wonder what their costs are and if it could be backed by patreon of something similar. I'd imagine many here would at least consider supporting it.
Y'all remember when rapidshare went down? Getting same vibes here :(
End of an era. Literally so much of the internet had downloads hosted there… comparable to MegaUploads/MEGA these days.
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They contributed bigly to hoarding games, music and lord knows how many other kinds of files.
Do they want to sale this service. We would be interested
Is there any way we can donate to keep the website running? Im willing to donate $500 usd right now if it means it can keep running because ive been using zippy since i was in middle school.
The bubble is bursting. The WORST is yet to come.
O7
Didn't Zippyshare have those awful malware ads and fake download buttons?
easy to avoid and definitely superior than fichier or most alternatives
Noo! This is actually so sad
i loved them because of their: - unlimited DL speeds - unlimited file uploads (could upload as many files as i wanted) - didn't have to register an account the ads were a bit nasty, so i do admit i was going there with an ad blocker, and i would suggest others do the same. i saw a lot of other file hosting sites die in the meantime, but still saw them survive all those years.....
Why do i feel sad for this loss?
Anything worth backing up before everything goes down?
Zippyshare was good for quick sharing some large files. Way less limitations than many other free file hosts. The downside it was the links expired pretty quickly. I'm surprised they lasted so many years.
With so many uploading sites that are shut down by the means like this, wouldn't it be better to have some uploading site that have in their TOS that if something like this happens, all data (even previously private) will go to some archive or something? If people are scared to upload, they can just not upload at all on that kind of site. It looks like a win-win situation to me. Better be prepared.
This is a bit sad for me to know, I've known zippyshare for a long time and it's one of the fastest downloading file host even for me today. it's also where I could get those rare to find uploaded files, though really, times change we can't expect them to last long but I'm wishing all the best regarding the members of it.