Photobucket Ransomware!

Unfortunately, it looks like my posts that were illustrated with photobucket pics are about to be disabled.

All those that were made using Tinypics should be OK.

This is going to ruin many of my posts but there is nothing that can be done, I am not paying their ransom fee out of principle.

DaveP

+1

Downloaded my pictures and deleted my account, bye bye Photobucket.  At a certain point in time, a company needs to start making money, but if the only way they can think of is this, then they were doomed anyway.

Jarno said:

+1

Downloaded my pictures and deleted my account, bye bye Photobucket.  At a certain point in time, a company needs to start making money, but if the only way they can think of is this, then they were doomed anyway.

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Unfortunately a lot of companies have succeeded like this.  Look at Yelp. They really hurt a lot of businesses when they started charging them for the good reviews they got. If they didn't pay up, they took all the good reviews and left the bad reviews up. The businesses could not remove themselves from yelp.  I can only imagine how frustrating that was for small business owners.

I've personally found YeaHelp to be useless because of this, and apparently now Photoboobtit too. 

This is Teh Way to make money on the Internet, do things for free or cheap, get popular, then raise the price. Amazon just about went out of business hoovering up customers, but they're doing okay now. On a smaller scale, I recall Rocketmail, a free email forwarding service, you could get a free email address at not just rocketmail.com, but cheerful.com, educator.com, engineer.com, and on and on. A friend was so excited "Free email for life!" Within a couple years they started charging, so you had to pay to keep your "free" forwarding email address. Maybe I'm a cynic but I wasn't surprised.

I've had a Photobucket page for the past 10 years or so, but haven't used it lately.  I don't think I'll even bother deleting it.

I suppose there's something to be said for having your own domain and hosting account. I've done that off and on, but never did much with it.

bluebird said:

Unfortunately a lot of companies have succeeded like this.  Look at Yelp. They really hurt a lot of businesses when they started charging them for the good reviews they got. If they didn't pay up, they took all the good reviews and left the bad reviews up. The businesses could not remove themselves from yelp.  I can only imagine how frustrating that was for small business owners.

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That's ... fascinating. I've heard about yelp, maybe stumbled over it in a few Google searches, but I haven't heard that. This might be 'perfectly legal' but it seems some business or collection of business would bring a civil lawsuit over ... something, defamation of character or some crap. If I had a business listed, I'd sue to have ALL reviews removed. This is almost as shitty as the Sony Rootkit.

TANSTAAFL  "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch"

JR

bluebird said:

Unfortunately a lot of companies have succeeded like this.  Look at Yelp. They really hurt a lot of businesses when they started charging them for the good reviews they got. If they didn't pay up, they took all the good reviews and left the bad reviews up. The businesses could not remove themselves from yelp.  I can only imagine how frustrating that was for small business owners.

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I don't use Yelp myself, for information, but wow, that's straight out of the Maffia book right there.

Seriously nothing is ever free... except maybe those cellphones President Obama gave away.... 

Today I was trying to find schematics/service manual for a mobility scooter I was repairing for a neighbor... The first three hits that offered a PDF of the manual wanted me to sign up and create an account...  Becoming a spam bucket is not my idea of free....

The web is still a great resource for almost free information....

JR

JohnRoberts said:

Seriously nothing is ever free... except maybe those cellphones President Obama gave away.... 

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John! your so hard hard on Obama. Lol...  Obama loves you!

bluebird said:

Unfortunately a lot of companies have succeeded like this.  Look at Yelp. They really hurt a lot of businesses when they started charging them for the good reviews they got. If they didn't pay up, they took all the good reviews and left the bad reviews up. The businesses could not remove themselves from yelp.  I can only imagine how frustrating that was for small business owners.

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Wow! I had no idea! What scoundrels!!!! I'm never using yelp again!!!

benb said:

That's ... fascinating. I've heard about yelp, maybe stumbled over it in a few Google searches, but I haven't heard that. This might be 'perfectly legal' but it seems some business or collection of business would bring a civil lawsuit over ... something, defamation of character or some crap. If I had a business listed, I'd sue to have ALL reviews removed. This is almost as sh*tty as the Sony Rootkit.

Click to expand...

Its complicated how it works, there is some kind of filtering system and it supposedly filters reviews based on some type of algorithm.  I guess that's how they are getting around the legal stuff. Oh and I'm sure not many people read the pages of "terms" before they hit the [accept] button when signing up.

I commented because a couple years ago my veterinarian told me Yelp asked him to sponsor ads or pay for the service, can't remember exactly what, and when he didn't all of his good reviews were "filtered" out. It really hurt his practice.

I hate photobucket , F'n slow clunky website ,  they don't make things easy and I'm not labeling my pix
although they follow them to the posting and use those as keywords anyway

Any ideas on Good image hosting sites ?

okgb said:

Any ideas on Good image hosting sites ?

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Imgur, Dropbox, and Wordpress.

All free and highly unlikely to change that any time soon.

Well, dropbox used to have a public folder, where you could simply plonk everything you wanted to share. But nowadays you can/need to set access rights to each file that you want to share, it is more flexible, but it is also somewhat more work, and definitely less transparent (if you have a lot of files in a folder). Not sure if rights are inherited (in which case you could simply make a public folder yourself).

Whenever I see a free offer I always look for the hook...

Fish should beware of kind fishermen offering free worms.

JR

Jarno said:

Well, dropbox used to have a public folder, where you could simply plonk everything you wanted to share. But nowadays you can/need to set access rights to each file that you want to share, it is more flexible, but it is also somewhat more work, and definitely less transparent (if you have a lot of files in a folder). Not sure if rights are inherited (in which case you could simply make a public folder yourself).

Click to expand...

When you right click on a dropbox file, pick "copy dropbox link". You'll get something that looks like:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9clgur8se1eygx3/Cigarbox%20guitar.JPG?dl=0

The ?dl=0 at the end of the URL is an instruction to the dropbox website about how to handle the file. dl is short for download, while 0 says "don't do that."

The instruction "raw=1" will tell the link to be treated as as you would normally expect a linked file inside the img tags. We get:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9clgur8se1eygx3/Cigarbox%20guitar.JPG?raw=1

That's a fairly large picture, and it's also in my public folder.

Here's one that's not even in my public folder: