A couple of days ago my girlfriend called me that the files she stored at MediaFire where gone. A little after that I tried to login to MediaFire to have a look at how my files where doing.
I was quite surprised to see my own files deleted as well.
After that I came across a FAQ entry on the website
“There is currently no time limit on how long uploaded files will be stored as long as you access your account (i.e. login to your account) at least once every 60 days OR at least one of your files is accessed (i.e. downloaded) every 30 days. If your account is not accessed within the time limit, then the files in your account will be cleared. MediaPro subscribers’ uploaded files will remain forever as long as the account is active.
If you are a Mediafire free user and your files were deleted due to inactivity, they are deleted from all servers and cannot be retrieved.“
This means that files stored on MediaFire will be deleted without any kind of notification if you don’t log in every 2 months. This is something which is quite scary to me.
So be careful when using MediaFire and don’t store any files on there which you haven’t stored anywhere else, or be sure to use your account enough to not get your files deleted.
“Je bent bekender dan je denkt”
This is a dutch subject which is sent around by the government which alerts you to the dangers of having an online profile.
By creating a video clip using an online profile on the hyves site which is sort of a dutch MySpace / facebook.
This uses images from your “friends” and integrates them in the video.
It’s quite interesting that these things can so easily be done nowadays.
It’s getting harder and harder to stay anonymous. When you have an online presence.
_why aka Why the lucky stiff
_why is someone who has an online persona but who didn’t want to be recognized under his own name.
He has created numerous projects, mostly written in and for Ruby,
August 19th 2009 he decided to remove his online accounts and projects.
This started a small wave in blog land with some pretty prolific people writing about it.
It also meant that people where going to try and find out what was the identity of this person in a huge way.
As you can read up on in the link above the effort made to find out who someone is by reading up on what he has done online can be huge.
And there is a huge amount of information you leave behind even if your a smart person.
Hacking of Sites
One would think that if your a smart person then you wouldn’t have to worry as much about these things. Actually it seems to be a sport to get to smart people.
For example Perl Monks (a perl programming site) got hacked and had all passwords of it’s members stolen, the annoying part is that the passwords where all stored in plain text which means that there wasn’t even any decryption necessary to view the passwords.
Jeff Atwood (the man behind CodingHorror.com) got his account hacked for the Stackoverflow site
This means that your passwords from sites you use on the web might be in danger.
1 way to help this is password storing engines.
Password protection programs
There are quite a few password protection programs out there. Some are online some are offline and some are both.
One of the ones which is good to have is Keepass password safe.
there are also quite complete solutions for handling this problem like thycotic secret server.
Conclusion
Don’t think your safe, almost nobody is safe.
But do try to make an effort to stay safe it’s pretty hard.
Good luck.