YouSendIt.com

March 27, 2004 12:24 PM

YouSendIt.com With Google-like simplicity, the free service allows you to email up to 1 GB to anyone without flooding their mailbox. 1 GB... that's a whole lotta pr0n.
posted by freakystyley (44 comments total)

there's also dropload, mentioned here.
posted by andrew cooke at 12:33 PM on March 27, 2004

This could come in handy. thanks!
posted by pemulis at 12:56 PM on March 27, 2004

I love the "How it works" page, it says absolutely nothing about how it works.
posted by anathema at 12:59 PM on March 27, 2004

So is this just a group of altruists with unlimited bandwidth?
posted by wigu at 1:05 PM on March 27, 2004

No, they want to send you some blank.aspx's.
posted by vowe at 1:12 PM on March 27, 2004

Interesting.
posted by Keyser Soze at 1:13 PM on March 27, 2004

What, pray tell, would a blank.aspx be?
posted by elwoodwiles at 1:16 PM on March 27, 2004

I'm guessing they expect to make money with the corporate version but also note that files only remain available for a max of seven days and less if there is a huge number of downloads.
posted by billsaysthis at 2:00 PM on March 27, 2004

Excellent, this could prove very useful.
posted by biffa at 2:08 PM on March 27, 2004

Huh? What's this 'bout blank.aspx? I suspect that this service will be free until users demand more interesting features.
posted by freakystyley at 2:19 PM on March 27, 2004

I expect the service will remain free till they can't afford it personally. Everybody assumes that bandwidth is free when somebody else is providing the service. Lot's of businesses with pretty scary business plans come and go. They start off free with an intention of selling advertising or corporate versions. The free version becomes hugely popular and their business plan fails. They either go to a fully fee supported model or cripple the free version and more often than not regardless of how popular they were when they were free nobody wants to part with their ducets when it's not.
posted by substrate at 2:27 PM on March 27, 2004

It's a simple idea and very easy to implement -- just expensive in bandwidth costs. It's good to see somebody doing it.

It was pretty amusing that on their message board they brag about having unlimited bandwidth in one thread, and just a couple threads down from that they initiate a new policy limiting how many times each file can be downloaded due to them running out of upstream bandwidth.

They use Cogent in DC, if anyone was curious. It goes for $1000 per 100mbps, which is one way they cut costs. It also looks like they share servers with http-tunnel.com (same company, maybe?)
posted by Edge100x at 2:34 PM on March 27, 2004

Site won't work for me using Mozilla.
posted by Blue Stone at 2:39 PM on March 27, 2004

Hmm, works fine for me using Firefox 0.8.
posted by Edge100x at 2:44 PM on March 27, 2004

I'd be prepared to pay for the service, obviously dependent on price. Certainly there have been instances where I wanted to get a large file to someone and this would be faster (and possibly more reliable) than burning and sending a CD or waiting to have our webmonkey add it to the dept site.
posted by biffa at 2:52 PM on March 27, 2004

Yeah, I'm getting this "blank.aspx" file as well -- whatsupwitdat?

Tested the service out though and it seemed to work easily enough... thanks for the tip, I'm sure it'll come in handy.
posted by Fofer at 3:55 PM on March 27, 2004

I wonder if this'll be popular with zero-day warez groups...
posted by woil at 4:44 PM on March 27, 2004

for secure filesharing with my friends (and their trusted friends), i suggest using WASTE, from the fab guys at Nullsoft.

still, this is a really cool idea.
posted by lotsofno at 4:59 PM on March 27, 2004

bullshit. and sophisticated internet users are STILL laboring under the delusion of free stuff.

now, as near as i can tell from a quick scan of some google pages, an .aspx file is some .NET crapola, a thing that looks like html, but which is then compiled into a .dll when you ain't looking.


"ASP.NET turns each ASPX file into assembly. While the page is termed for the first time as ASP.NET, this leads to the:

1. Generation of a *.cs file holding code that matches the ASPX declarations.
2. Using of csc.exe (C# compiler) to compile *.cs file into DLL (you can see csc.exe if you monitor running processes).
3. Running of the compiled DLL "

reduced ad absurdum, ASPX is just another way to for crapposoft and it's corps of developer minions to place and execute arbitrary code on your system without your knowledge.
posted by quonsar at 5:48 PM on March 27, 2004

Why does bandwidth have to cost so much? Is it like some rare commodity? Can we not just put exabyte-per-second fiber in the ground once and for all?
posted by scarabic at 6:12 PM on March 27, 2004

quonsar, I'll match my dislike and distrust of Microsoft with anyone but you've got this one wrong. ASPX is no more inherently dangerous or evil for visitors than are PHP, or JSP, or Perl, or ColdFusion (you're soaking in it). The steps you described above happen on the originating server, not on visitors' computers. ASPX is just another way to automate the server-side generation of HTML.
posted by TimeFactor at 6:36 PM on March 27, 2004

yeah, maybe, but it sure sounded good. (and yes, i HAVE noticed we're drowning in cold fusion around here. PHP has been keeping much more complex sites high and dry for years. :-)
posted by quonsar at 7:58 PM on March 27, 2004

oh, and this .DLL referred to above, you are saying it is extracted from ASPX into .cs, a C# compiler is run and the resulting .DLL is executed, all on a remote machine? the point being? i mean, if you need a .DLL loaded and run on a server, why is the client involded at all? i smell koolaid.
posted by quonsar at 8:01 PM on March 27, 2004

quonsar, aspx is just like php except code to be run server-side is either a) in the aspx file itself, compiled on the server and kept in memory, and run when you hit the page, sending you back HTML or b) stored in a "code behind" file which is pre-compiled and stored on the server in a DLL. when you actually have an aspx file yourself, it can never and will never get run on your system as it would be like having a php or html file sitting around. its probably a stupid bug in their code that is causing trouble. i dont like MS either, but everyone is so quick to yell conspiracy. where did occam's razor go?
posted by cmicali at 8:13 PM on March 27, 2004

wow! this may in fact, explain something that occurred the other day. i was certifying employment data as part of a jobless benefits application online. (i use firefox .8) several pages were emphatic that they be printed for presentation later in person. having no printer, i saved the files as complete html and next day i was visiting a friend (a comfortable 5 year aol'er who doesn't know or care what a "browser" is.) when i attempted to load these files locally IE complained they could not be displayed because it could not locate the server! all *i* wanted was a printout of the html, and i could see no references to external code calls or even javascript, etal. yet IE steadfastly refused to display or print the content. i d/l firefox, loaded, printed, and deleted all traces of my sins since my dear friend has an understandable aversion to makeing ANY adjustment to her MicroTimeWarnerAOLSoft machine.
posted by quonsar at 8:55 PM on March 27, 2004

Why does bandwidth have to cost so much? Is it like some rare commodity? Can we not just put exabyte-per-second fiber in the ground once and for all?

The cost of bandwidth is primarily driven by the cost of maintaining the equipment and the cost of supporting customers (the NOC, for instance). Bandwidth is actually cheaper now than ever due to the amount of fiber that's already in-place, much of it still dark. $1000 for 100mbps is very cheap; Cogent can afford it because it has a simplistic, low-cost oriented backbone and does not peer very well with other major backbones.
posted by Edge100x at 9:31 PM on March 27, 2004

Another free file hosting service. Remember 50megs.com or whatever that was called? It didn't remain free for long.

What bothers me about MS's version of what the "internet shoud be" is that there is very little support for ftp, heck there's not even a GUI ftp client for windows by MS (IE haf-asses it, but its not a real client). So everyone treats their mail servers as a de facto P2P server and everyone wonders why its so slow.

On top if it, most broadband ISPs will not give you a static IP unless you buy their expensive business-class service. So even if go the ftp route, you still have to be mindful of your constantly changing IP. There are solutions to this, but this problem shouldnt exist in the first place, especially when most broadband enabled PCs are on all the time anyway.
posted by skallas at 10:04 PM on March 27, 2004

Can we not just put exabyte-per-second fiber in the ground once and for all?

what of potential deletrious effects on earthworms and grubs? not to even mention giant mutant voles.
posted by quonsar at 10:57 PM on March 27, 2004

Rumour has it that Microsoft are also removing the FTP capabilities in i.e.
For security reasons.
posted by seanyboy at 11:19 PM on March 27, 2004

skallas - the reason FTP is disappearing is because it's inferior to HTTP and less reliable (not to mention that the servers tend to suck massively compared to web servers from an admin's point of view). Users attempting to send enormous files in email isn't a transfer protocol issue; it's only going to go away with education - almost as often for sysadmins as for the users. It's amazing how often our users' collaborators do not have access to any sort of server - sure, they'll have a departmental web server but there's nowhere for someone to drop a file they want to send to 50 people.
posted by adamsc at 11:44 PM on March 27, 2004

So everyone treats their mail servers as a de facto P2P server and everyone wonders why its so slow.

Everyone would do that anyway, because it saves a step. Mail servers could be smarter about it, to be sure.
posted by kindall at 11:44 PM on March 27, 2004

the reason FTP is disappearing is because it's inferior to HTTP

this /. discussion explains things (it's not reliability - more that ftp is too complicated for its own good, so it's not fully implemented and is a pain to admin).
posted by andrew cooke at 5:13 AM on March 28, 2004

This is a very nice series of comments. (I love reading all this technical gibberish, even though I have very little idea what any of it means.)

does not peer very well with other major backbones . . .

I think this is why the dinosaurs went extinct.
posted by LeLiLo at 7:41 AM on March 28, 2004

"reduced ad absurdum, ASPX is just another way to for crapposoft and it's corps of developer minions to place and execute arbitrary code on your system without your knowledge."

Just to make sure this is made clear... ASP.NET does not involve placing any code at all ont he client machines, nore does it involve the downloadingor execution of any .DLL or any such silliness. It is a server side technology and the compiled code and relates support files remain on the server.

It also happens to be really, really good. The object and event model stomp PHP and Codfusuon into the dirt :)
posted by soulhuntre at 7:45 AM on March 28, 2004

MS IE getting rid of FTP functions? But that's one of the better features of IE! Oh no! I never thought that sooner or later, I'd have to install an FTP client. Dang it.
posted by freakystyley at 7:59 AM on March 28, 2004

that's a whole lotta pr0n.

You mean, *they'll* have a whole lotta pr0n.
posted by carter at 8:40 AM on March 28, 2004

IE may have crummy FTP support, but explorer's WebDAV support isn't bad (well, it has it at least, and it looks fancy ;). Look it up; it's pretty cool.
posted by Freaky at 9:31 AM on March 28, 2004

I don't understand any of the technical stuff surrounding this (yeah, I'm dumb), but I've been using this site for the past couple days in order to transfer some files from one computer to another (my CD burner is broken) and it's treated me well.
posted by elf_baby at 1:48 PM on March 28, 2004

Yeah, if quonsar changes the subject quickly enough, maybe no one will notice that he was telling blatant lies :)
posted by ed\26h at 3:33 PM on March 28, 2004

> the reason FTP is disappearing is because it's inferior to HTTP and less reliable

Youre missing my point here. Im not just talking about downloads for video game demos, I'm talking everyday file exchange. For instance if I had a unix shell account I could just move a file to our /pub ftp directory and have the person I'm sending it to just go there and get it.

Currently, a lot of companies try to cram large files into email, snail-mail CDs *snicker*, try IM for file transfer, etc. Its just a tad ridiculous.

Sure, there are many work-arounds here like having IIS serve up a public folder, but I'm not seeing it and just about every client I've worked with depends on email for file exchange. If that doesn't work its snail mail. There's a lot of wrong there and the problem isnt just with the users, MS has to share some blame.
posted by skallas at 6:28 PM on March 28, 2004

Couldn't upload LARGE files using YouSendIt (choked on 222 Meg and 120 Meg) 66 meg went out with no problem but the recipient is behind a content filter that blocks this site in it's 'Games' category (*go figure*). DropLoad is not blocked, but has a limit of 50 Meg, 2 days and one download.)
posted by DBAPaul at 6:53 AM on March 29, 2004

Guess it's dead ? I accuse you insensible lot of sending tons of pr0n each other, a metaorgy so to speak.
posted by elpapacito at 9:06 AM on March 29, 2004

skallas - I didn't miss your point - it's just that it continues to be invalid. There's no significant difference between copying a file into your public_html directory and copying it into your public directory on an FTP server - this is in fact what much of the world does on a regular basis. If you don't have a public directory on a web server, _by definition_ your problem has nothing to do with client support and everything to do with incompetent sysadmins.

Even with IIS (where it's not automatic) there's no difference in the time it takes to setup a public directory using HTTP rather than FTP - the process is identical unless you're taking advantage of the extra features only HTTP supports.
posted by adamsc at 5:48 PM on March 29, 2004

As mentioned at the top of this thread, Dropload is VERY cool, doesn't want to send you anything bad back, and works like a dream. AND it's done by the man behind FilePile.
posted by wibbler at 7:47 AM on March 31, 2004