Show HN: Seven Words – An easy way to receive large files

https://sevenwords.net

by aparks517 • 9 years ago

1 5 9 years ago

sevenwords.net

aparks5173• 9 years ago

Inspired by https://xkcd.com/949/ and https://www.xkcd.com/936/

KajMagnus2• 9 years ago

Hmm I'm thinking people can sign up for Dropbox or Google Drive instead and transfer via them?

The website seems easy to understand, I like that. Something that's a bit unclear to me is how will I pay? It costs money, but nevertheless "There's no sign-up or hassle for either of you" ?

Another thing that comes to my mind — what about privacy? I don't know who you are. Likely there's something important in the file that I don't want unknown people to have access too. — Google Drive feels safer in this regard, feels as if I know who Google "is" and it doesn't have any interest in looking inside my large files.

How large files b.t.w.? 1 GB? 1 TB?

If you want feedback from more people, you can try https://usability.testing.exchange (I'm developing it).

aparks5173• 9 years ago

Thanks for the feedback and for the kind words.

You certainly can ask people to sign up for Dropbox or Google Drive and a lot of folks do. It can be a bit of a side-quest if you just need them to send you a file so you can get to work on something. I've tried to make this easier to explain to the person you need a file from.

If you exceed the free tier, you'll be prompted for payment. Payment is associated with your email address, which you would enter anyway to get a link, so no additional sign-up is required. More convenient than that, I think, is that the person you are requesting a file from doesn't have to sign up for anything.

The file is encrypted in transit and at rest, but I think these are only basic measures. I agree that you shouldn't trust some guy from the Internet (including Google, perhaps). If the information to be sent is sensitive, I would recommend taking measures suitable to the level of sensitivity before sending it, probably encrypting it with keys you control rather than depending on the service provider.

Right now the size limit is 25GB, but I'm open to suggestions on that. Of course there has to be some limit, but I wanted to make it high enough that it didn't feel like there was one for most folks.

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out :)

KajMagnus2• 9 years ago

Ok thanks for the explanations. Yes in some cases this seems like simpler than Google Drive etc. — I'm wondering though, if that's enough to make people want to try this. I've never sent a file larger than what I can already do via Dropbox etc.

Maybe people who send 10 - 20 GB files typically already have Google Drive accounts or something like that? .... They're not "normal" people. I've been developing software for 10+ years and never had the need to send that large files.

I agree about encryption, I would probably encrypt something also before uploading to Google. (In fact I do, already, any important stuff of mine.)

Book tips: http://www.startupwerkboek.nl/startupcenter/Momtest.pdf — it's about how to find out if a service like Seven Words is needed, without writing any code. The i.m.o. "most important" part is free: the first few chapters.

Best wishes anyway.

Show HN: Seven Words – An easy way to receive large files

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