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There must be some really good protection on this. If I enabled such a thing on any of my servers it would be full of warez, porn, malware, CSAM and who knows what else within minutes.
Yeah, I was going to start a file drop site like 0x until realizing what it'd be used for
Only live for an hour.

But that won't stop people doing bad stuff for an hour I guess. Vibe code up some on-demand thing that you ping...

One hour is great for spearphishing attacks, once the victim has been infected their IT department will have no trace of the source.
They already allow hosting static websites so I think the same guardrails are implemented.
I've never used CF so I could be ignorant in this matter. I assumed perhaps incorrectly that people had to verify their email address and delegate their domain(s) to CF including setting the glue records in the TLD servers meaning there is likely a financial trail somewhere probably in the DNS registrars and perhaps a mail provider, whereas this is just drag-and-drop with no money trail.

I have no idea what guardrails they have in place in the background that blocks malware, CSAM, warez and such on their free accounts.

Just having an account with an email address is enough.

They assign a subdomain automatically for uploads, same as cloudflare workers.

I don't know what they do, but implementing guardrails for this is possible nowadays with AI, but maybe they use a "mechanical turk"

If you want your own domain you need to do a bunch of that but you can also host stuff on your own free subdomain of their workers.dev
The protection is that they're rich enough to handle requests from law enforcement without going to jail themselves. They'll certainly pass your IP address to law enforcement if asked.
At least when it comes to bad types of porn, it's be similar to Imgur allowing anonymous uploads. They already do CSAM scanning on uploads to their R2 storage:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-simpler-path-to-a-safer-intern...

That makes sense. In that case I have to assume that Cloudflare will not permit encrypted archive files as one can hide the image fingerprints all together.
Cloudflare in particular has an enormous fingerprint of your online activities.

Attempting to distribute/acquire illegal things through Cloudflare is an exercise in how to get caught.

Hmm, that's fun and useful. Here is snake game for 60 minutes.

https://drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev

Your code appears to have a bug where if the arrow keys trigger a change of direction twice in a single frame interval, it can mistakenly send the snake back on itself.
Makes sense. It plays nicely with the vibe code kids who don’t know how to do GitHub or don’t know to ask their LLM about it.
From FTP to CI/CD to drag and drop, society is going backwards
It is cool to see not sure why you would use it.

Also it seems to me that this is a good way to exfiltrate data, rubber stamped by cloudflare themselves.

Tried uploading a ZIP and got:

"Something went wrong An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support."

When contacting support:

"Please upload a screenshot of the error by dragging a zip of the png file."

Please zip the contact by dragging a support of the screenshot.
Wait, my first impression was that it points a local browser to your local browser. Now it looks like it uploads your folder to Cloudflare and temporarily serves it over the web. But is that different from what we used to do with FTP? Are there any databases or anything like basic PHP hosts supply? It's just static sites?

Is this a product or what? What's the purpose? Is there an API?

A minute ago I had an HTML doc I wanted to share with a PM. It was a Claude prepared demo of a hypothetical feature. Lots of screenshots.

I ended up just embedding them directly in the HTML as base64 and sending him a 15mb file, but hypothetically this would have been a nice solution instead.

There are also solutions for sharing your homelab with others (basically tunneling from your machine->server (internet accessible) <-> client. Though, if your machine would go to sleep that whole chain would fall apart. A few good automatic solutions out there that solve the problem (no "just replace dropbox with ftp" type of argument).

However, I see the appeal of this. Kind of surprised it hasn't happened yet to be honest.

SSH remote port forwarding. ssh -R 0.0.0.0:80:127.0.0.1:80

Requires the server's sshd config to have GatewayPorts yes, or the server will bind to 127.0.0.1 instead

Absolutely agree. There's an insane "feature" of Claude Design which means you can only share the link to the design with other users on your account?! You can export the design, though, but then you need somewhere to quickly drop a bunch of HTML + assets. This would be perfect for that.
Wow, that does sound like a serious hardship for someone who lets Claude write all their code for them.

Creating a folder for some files. Dude, maybe you should file for disability for repetetive stress disorder for "double clicking" or even single clicking twice.

This aggression will not STAND man!

We need computers to go back to pencil and paper but STILL be computers! But not operated by me? Wierd operated by a fake bot me? Wait! thats malware! Wha?

I built a tool _just the other day_ for this exact purpose. Now my agents proactively make disposable links for me: https://jlnk.us
Replit is used a lot in this context. Their agent is good, but their circumvent-policies-to-get-something-in-front-of-execs-quickly is an amazing and mis-priced feature.
Check out Tailscale - they have TUNS + share the source files with someone else in tailnet.
> this would have been a nice solution instead

Until he takes 65 minutes to get to reading the email. Or wants to look at it again tomorrow.

This isn’t usable for that kind of business.

Netlify made this 10 years ago... they even copied the name! https://app.netlify.com/drop
Low barrier services don't care who's first in this epoch.
But this time it's with ~blockchain~ AI!
Oh, how I miss the golden days of blockchain hype so much.

The luxury blockchain resort island is just soaking somewhere in the ocean, collecting dust and guano, while its former inhabitants are all the rage about AI now :'(

ouch... I get that it's a simple concept but darn it really does seem like ctrl c ctrl v lmao
Its not exactly a very elaborate name.
Elaborate enough?

Funny story: I used to work for a startup which had a trademark on "Airdrop". When Apple announced that feature, it took everyone there by surprise. Ended up reaching out and selling it to them for a buck or two in favor of maintaining goodwill.

Ha, that's funny. When you say "a buck or two" do you really mean it was almost nothing or did Apple compensate you appropriately? I'm also surprised that Apple didn't catch that before if it was trademarked.
It rounded down to nothing. Might have been $10 or $100 to make it real consideration.
Why did you value Apple's goodwill more than a couple million dollars?
We were a provider very intimately dependent on Apple's ecosystem and had no appetite whatsoever for a fight.
Isn't this what we used to do with Geocities a quarter century ago? And with most other websites that offered FTP upload? You didn't have to be very technical -- there were windows FTP clients where you could just type in the IP, username, password and see an explorer-like view, onto which you could just drag and drop your HTML and image files.
Most browsers even had (read only?) FTP clients built in.
>Something went wrong An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support.

I have a few qualms with this app.

Congratulations on launching!

I tried uploading a git repository that I have previously successfully published on Github pages. This is a "no build" website I have built with the help of Claude. It should just work but I keep getting an error. Who can I reach out to give them steps to reproduce? The website repository is public and I feel like anyone at Cloudflare who wants to reproduce my problem can quite literally clone my repo and upload it to cloudflare drop.

Please drop your cloudflare email address and I will reach out to you with my repository information.

Or you could do some of your own troubleshooting? Uploading a git repo is different than uploading a zipped/folder, especially if your index.htm/l isn't at the root.
Thank you for the reply. Index dot html is already at the root of the folder and it deploys just fine on GitHub pages.
Hey stranger, welcome to 2026. It’s somewhat different to what you’re used to in 2035. We do things differently here.
I copied the folder to a new folder without the `.git` folder and that deployed just fine. Thank you to everyone who helped me.
Cloudflare is really good at launching features that facility low-friction deployment of malicious content (such as phishing) on the Internet, piggybacking on their hosting reputation and the fact that you can't easily block their ASN or domains.
I don't know your experience. Once I was toying around and doing a basic auth with registration and so. The weekend was over and couldn't get back to that couple of months. The worker was quarantined and marked as phishing automatically. So I believe they have something in place to prevent those you complain.
Your anecdote just illustrates that their system detects legit uses as abuses, not that they have a system that effectively detects abuses.
But it is not that they have nothing. It was my laziness that I could not setup dev prod env's. When you develop on preview, I don't think they will do much.
Cloudflare is also like a Chinese copycat machine. They mostly copy some successful project and sell it at cheap price.
It would be nice if we could see some information such as file size limitations, demos, link structure, management, etc. Am I expected to upload a random HTML file and see how it works?
Yep, I chucked it a file on my desktop: index.html present Max individual file size 25MB Total file count <2000 Total size less than 100MB
Yeah I'm very lost on what this is supposed to do -- "Summon your site" is quite vague. "see it live", like a demo? or is this actually published somewhere? Is it forever?

Desktop mode doesn't show any more information either

I remember doing this in 2006. FTP. Good times.
I remember making a Qt app for a friend that would upload dropped files via ftp and copy the link to the clipboard. Good old days!
Cloudflare has the astonishing ability to make me hate them more as a company every new feature they launch.
Cloudflare folks: Please consider supporting WARC archives for deployment.
Is that something you use often?
Wow the people in this thread are a huge bummer. This is much cooler and I doubt this is a real safety issue. You can already sign up for a free cloudflare account and deploy it for free, on your own, on a free workers.dev domain. The friction removal here isn't going to meaningfully change the security / amount of malicious content.
hn has turned into a reddit hate fest. It's getting hard to read non stop negativity and hate. I'm happy to see your positive comment.
You must be new here :)
wait till anyone remotely mentions apple or apple products. the neckbeards on their thinkpads will come in droves to shit on cupertino's best.
It's not Apple in general. If they release a new Mac Mini, it's fine. The thread when the Neo was released, was outright jubilant. It's whenever macOS is mentioned, it devolves in extreme negativity. I always, always avoid those.
Brother it’s always been like this. Just check n-gate.com (tragic loss btw, rip)
Hi! I have been following n-gate.com a small bit over the years, because I found it very interesting and it was a rabbit hole I wanted to go down.

I actually setup "xor-gate" for a while, which was trying to be a similar thing co-authored by a friend, but it was too time consuming and we gave up.

Did the author pass? I'm not trying to be crass, but I don't know the details.

Agreed. This is the same crowd that is mad about free tiers going away on other dev-friendly hosting services…
Agreed I think this is pretty solid especially since you get all the Cloudflare benefits like CDN from the get-go.
Well according to the people in this thread it was previously impossible for bad actors to host a website, and CloudFlare has now given them this unique ability.
I really hope/imagine this project specifically has a LLM of some kind doing real-time analysis on the uploaded files for malware from the get-go. How good that is could be is anyone's guess (and chances are there would be blind spots / evasion techniques).
Why would Cloudflare do that? They shouldn't help bad actors.
Who, exactly, should help people host a website?
Best case: themselves. Since we are not there yet, reliable services.
Same folks who are very concerned AI will give malicious actors the ability to produce text containing falsehoods.
Do free accounts require any kind of email validation such as retrieving and pasting in a code?
When you see a group of people being critical, you can either see it as a “bummer”, or you can see it as people critically thinking about a thing.

Is it really more useful to have everyone expressing how much they like something instead of identifying problems?

Is seeing people talking about the things they don’t like something that makes you unhappy? Why?

> Is seeing people talking about the things they don’t like something that makes you unhappy? Why?

Probably (I'm just assuming) because that person observes negative/cautious/"I don't like this because X and Y and also Z"/etc sentiment too much and feels like people are only quick to notice issues while forgetting about good sides.

It's only an assumption, though.

I think the HN rule for "curmudgeonly" applies.

> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think HN should be a place where I am excited to see what others have to add. When I see a post I am excited to see what takes and spins others have on it. I do want real criticism and a lively debate about important things, but there has to be a balance.

I want to see other comments that seem like they genuinely want to help steer something or build people up. Sometimes I get the impression that's not happening on HN.

There needs to be another rule against being a techno-sycophant.
To the curmudgeon, its techno-sycophancy to say the wheel is a pretty good thing.

It’s just another take on shill / sheeple / etc. it gets old.

I think I might agree, but just so we're clear: what exactly is a "techno-sycophant"?
Discussing the privacy implications of a big box that says "drag files to me!" is thoughtful criticism.

I would get the point if this was someone's personal Show HN project but this is Cloudflare. They can withstand a little critique.

The problem is that everything is negative, all the time. Nothing good is allowed to be acknowledged. Everything someone or some company does must not be acknowledged to have any redeeming value- it’s all just negative

Which is sad, because so much amazing stuff is happening on the world right now, and seems to be only accelerating. For everybody.

Maybe AI slop has something to do with it?
> Nothing good is allowed to be acknowledged.

What makes you say this?

Amazing stuff? You mean technical stuff right? Because politically, demographically and climate wise we're headed for disaster or at least dystopia.

I wished I could find all the science and technology as uplifting as my friends do.

You just need to dial up the infantile acritical autism.
I don't know, I find it very hard to stay positive about our general direction in the last couple of years, and know few people in real life who don't share this opinion, in or outside of tech. And I'm also not entirely sure I understand why others are excited, it perplexes me. I would appreciate any insight into this.
It may not be critical thinking though, but simply being contrarian, which is one of the easiest ways to sound smart without necessarily providing much of value or substance. And strangely, seeing as it’s relatively rare IRL, seemingly the default on the internet. Blindly praising isn’t worth much either, but I doubt that’s what jonluca is encouraging. It’s possible to “yes, and” without resorting to either sycophancy or relentless negatively.
This is what the influencer propaganda machine on social media has done to people's view of critical thinking.
I think they are all bots or threatened to see their little hobby now being accessible, classic gatekeeping.
Corporations acting as if naive is a bit of problem in reality. For one thing, CF is probably the largest entity serving pirated content internationally while hiding the identities of actual perpetrators for privacy.

Same here: CF is basically giving malicious actors an ability to ship contents/data publicly while laundering the legal responsibility of those actors.

Now tell me what is cool

> Now tell me what is cool

Not immediately being a copyright bootlicker.

The fact that you went straight to "BuT pIrAtEs" already shows who you actually care: Corpos, not people.

A dirty secret is that piracy is being abused by criminal organizations[1]. When people unknowingly access such sites to see contents for free, it generate ad revenue for those organizations, which can fund other crimes.

[1]: https://www.interpol.int/en/Crimes/Illicit-goods/Projects/Pr...

Broadly speaking any organisation facilitating piracy is implicitly a criminal one. Piracy is a pretty large field though and the economics of say a streaming site are going to be very different from running a torrent tracker. The fact you can use a torrent tracker without even visiting the site (Radarr/Sonarr etc) tells me that running a tracker site, probably isn't very lucrative.
Are you talking about:

> The suspects subscribed to 40 Korean cable TV service accounts, re-broadcasting content to Indonesia and offering video-on-demand (VOD) services through customized TV boxes, applications, and web browsers.

Sure, that is a case, but I mainly wanted to quote INTERPOL (the international police):

> Criminals behind pirate sites can be part of organized crime groups. They can use the proceeds to fund other illegal activities, such as illegal online gambling, online sexual exploitation, drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering.

Another notable example would be Operation KRATOS 2 by EUROPOL[1]. The case was roughly the same — crime organization pirating video content. IPTV piracy is certainly a lucrative business, because videos are relatively more difficult to handle for normal people.

[1]: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/29-a...

> For one thing, CF is probably the largest entity serving pirated content internationally while hiding the identities of actual perpetrators for privacy.

That's awesome, glad to hear it

>Now tell me what is cool

Piracy is cool. Information wants to be free.

I hate the corporate bootlicking that is so prevalent here.

What about centralizing the internet like Cloudfare is doing? Once corporate greed starts creeping we will find ourselves on the verge of pay per visit a website
You mean centralizing the web? Doesn't bother me. Most of the web is a dumpster fire of AI slop anyway.

There's more to the Internet than the world wide web, though. NNTP and IRC communities remain vibrant, if diminished in size

Are you aware of any projects to replace the current web implementation?

I've noticed the current version is largely accessed by Chrome which appears to be a trojan.

Other than gopher/Gemini, not really, no
> CF is probably the largest entity serving pirated content internationally while hiding the identities of actual perpetrators for privacy.

I'm already on board, you don't need to sell it to me!

You're encountering the "contrarian dynamic" which dang described in this post (which also explains why your own anti-contrarian comment reached the top) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601
Thanks for linking that comment! I wasn't familiar with the term, but it perfectly describes the pattern that manifests in every single HN thread about certain topics. The Grok announcement thread that is on the main page today is another perfect example.
Oh poor you, bummed by people WHO ACTUALLY care about the web.
After my hoster started asking me for 700€ for a year of hosting a static website of like 100Mb i moved to CF worker and github. I would selfhost but thats not allowed without license
Yet I can't drag and drop a plain old HTML file without putting it in a folder or a ZIP file first.
You can, the file just has to be named "index.html".
Desktop operating systems should be able to run zipped web apps the way Electron apps run today. It ought to just be part of the OS.
And if there's a form or something with a backend? Just break?
Adobe Air, for the obscure nostalgia bomb
Unzip it.

Double click the html file.

The OS will run the web app using a browser that is just part of the OS.

CORS issues due to trying to a .json via file://.

CORS issues on a tainted canvas if you try to render an image from a file:// src.

The internet will soon be flooded with even more scam landing pages.
And you should be using cloudflare to protect yourself...
Is cloudflare a religion now? Identify/Provide/Tell people that normal life is a problem to be solved and then sell the solution.
Dropped a folder with a small HTML project, and after 20 seconds got "Something went wrong. An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support.".

Note how the error has zero information.

Looking at the network requests, a POST request to /upload returned 403 and an HTML page starting with "Sorry, you have been blocked", and to "email the site owner to let them know you were blocked". Happens even with adblocker and cookie extensions disabled, and I don't usually have problems with Cloudflare sites. Firefox on linux.

I'm very tired of this adversarial approach to software and vague errors.

(comment deleted)
Reminds me of web development in the 1990s.

I honestly miss those days of deployment simplicity.

FTPing files to `~/public_html` was the best... Miss those days.