Security Of Cloud Shared Links
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@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
That kind of touches on my next question.
Are any of these links ever available to search engines?
If you leave them open AND publish them somewhere for the search engines to find, of course they are. Same as if you put your username and password here on ML, the search engines would find that too.
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@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
I was playing around with YouTube video streaming last week, in a testing scenario, and within a few minutes all my test video were at the top of a Google search for my company.
Needless to say I freaked a bit.
Most people would be delighted as that would be the intend of publishing stuff about your company. You submitted company content directly to the search engine and the engine showed your results. that's not creepy, it's both desired (by the 99.999%) and totally expected.
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@Dashrender said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
@BRRABill said:
@Dashrender said
Youtube is Google's product, why would you expect anything less?
It was instantaneous. Creepy.
again.. Google property. but even when not, Google is pretty damned fast at finding things.. I'm sure they have 10's of Gb of bandwidth doing only that.
Or, you know, 100s of Tb of bandwidth.
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@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
@Dashrender said
Youtube is Google's product, why would you expect anything less?
It was instantaneous. Creepy.
SW and ML take under one minute to be listed on Google results, and I know that ML doesn't submit to Google, Google just watches the updates.
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@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
@Dashrender said
again.. Google property. but even when not, Google is pretty damned fast at finding things.. I'm sure they have 10's of Gb of bandwidth doing only that.
Our company is barely on there.
I literally tested a video of myself on ML and it was up in 3 milliseconds.
But the connect is direct. That's like being creeped out that you flipped that thing on the wall and "instantly" the room was bathed in light. When you post to Google, you are submitting directly into the search engine. Of course it returns instantly.
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@scottalanmiller said
That's like being creeped out that you flipped that thing on the wall and "instantly" the room was bathed in light.
That IS creepy.
And how we can talk to each other half a globe away.
CREEPY!
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@scottalanmiller said
If you leave them open AND publish them somewhere for the search engines to find, of course they are. Same as if you put your username and password here on ML, the search engines would find that too.
Well, aren't all these public links we were discussing have such great security all "open"?
Are you saying that unless you publish them directly to the search engine, no search engine is EVER going to find them?
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@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
Well, aren't all these public links we were discussing have such great security all "open"?
yes, in the same way that all of your current files are "open." If you are currently open, then the shared links are still open but more secure than what you have today. If what you have today is closed, then the public links are "more closed."
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I'm not really understanding this thread. If you publish a video on YouTube (or similar) and set it to "unlisted", then only those people with the link can find it. It won't be indexed by search engines because it's marked as unlisted.
If someone takes your link and publishes on a website, then it will be indexed, because it is no longer private - the link has been shared to the world. The video isn't shared or publicly exposed, but the link to it is.
Is that what you're talking about?
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@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
Are you saying that unless you publish them directly to the search engine, no search engine is EVER going to find them?
Not quite. I'm saying that the search engines are less likely to find them than they are to find your username and password and publish everything you have today.
I think the issue is not that you are misunderstanding public link security, but that you overly trust an emotional response to usernames.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
I'm not really understanding this thread. If you publish a video on YouTube (or similar) and set it to "unlisted", then only those people with the link can find it. It won't be indexed by search engines because it's marked as unlisted.
If someone takes your link and publishes on a website, then it will be indexed, because it is no longer private - the link has been shared to the world. The video isn't shared or publicly exposed, but the link to it is.
Is that what you're talking about?
That would be, more or less, the same as someone publishing your username and password. I think that he thinks that in one case that is likely and in one it is not. But I think that he has the "likely" reversed.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
I'm not really understanding this thread. If you publish a video on YouTube (or similar) and set it to "unlisted", then only those people with the link can find it. It won't be indexed by search engines because it's marked as unlisted.
If someone takes your link and publishes on a website, then it will be indexed, because it is no longer private - the link has been shared to the world. The video isn't shared or publicly exposed, but the link to it is.
Is that what you're talking about?
Kind of. My question is...
If I don't post it to be indexed and the person I shared it with doesn't post it to be indexed, will it ever be indexed?
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@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
@Carnival-Boy said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
I'm not really understanding this thread. If you publish a video on YouTube (or similar) and set it to "unlisted", then only those people with the link can find it. It won't be indexed by search engines because it's marked as unlisted.
If someone takes your link and publishes on a website, then it will be indexed, because it is no longer private - the link has been shared to the world. The video isn't shared or publicly exposed, but the link to it is.
Is that what you're talking about?
Kind of. My question is...
If I don't post it to be indexed and the person I shared it with doesn't post it to be indexed, will it ever be indexed?
Potentially, exactly the same as with your non-shared links being indexed with the username and password passed in. Possible, yes, but less possible than the alternative. Same answer I keep giving. Safer than the other option.
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@scottalanmiller said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
Are you saying that unless you publish them directly to the search engine, no search engine is EVER going to find them?
Not quite. I'm saying that the search engines are less likely to find them than they are to find your username and password and publish everything you have today.
I think the issue is not that you are misunderstanding public link security, but that you overly trust an emotional response to usernames.
There are two parts here - which is where I am seeing some possible confusion coming in.
Brrabill asked about these public links - are they safe are they secure.
Then separately he noticed that one or more vendors also included the email address in said link.
These are two separate mostly unrelated questions/concerns.
As for the first one, assuming it doesn't contain the email address or some other identifiable marker of it's owner - is safe because of the unlikeliness of guessing the correct link name to find the file.
With the second one, you have information leakage - you know who the owner is - but that's all. You still have to guess randomly created link to the file.
Is it as good as the first - no, but is it horrible? probably not really.
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@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
If I don't post it to be indexed and the person I shared it with doesn't post it to be indexed, will it ever be indexed?
No, it shouldn't be. That's the purpose of YouTube's "unlisted" option. It's hidden from everyone who doesn't have the link. Search engines can't index URLs that are hidden.
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Shockingly, I was misinformed about how indexing works.
I thought there was a lot more magic to it, apparently!
I now understand that standalone pages on a site cannot be indexed, except by brute force. On any site.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
@BRRABill said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
If I don't post it to be indexed and the person I shared it with doesn't post it to be indexed, will it ever be indexed?
No, it shouldn't be. That's the purpose of YouTube's "unlisted" option. It's hidden from everyone who doesn't have the link. Search engines can't index URLs that are hidden.
That assumes that a spider can't find it. Tons of pages aren't linked anyone on any page, yet Google is aware of them because their spiders crawl all over the page doing ls commands looking for anything and everything.
Now these shared links hopefully aren't real - instead they are hopefully virtual links that tell a DB what file should be connected to, and hopefully the DB itself is not crawlable.
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@Dashrender said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
That assumes that a spider can't find it.
Spidering is defined as the following of links. If it is unlinked, by definition, a spider cannot find it.
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@StrongBad said
Spidering is defined as the following of links. If it is unlinked, by definition, a spider cannot find it.
That is what @scottalanmiller told me. (I think, don't want to put words in his mouth.)
If it's not linked, it can't be found except by brute force.
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@Dashrender said in Security Of Cloud Shared Links:
Tons of pages aren't linked anyone on any page, yet Google is aware of them because their spiders crawl all over the page doing ls commands looking for anything and everything.
ls commands? How would they do that? There isn't any ls command in HTTP.
