News Photobucket privacy hole patched

[CardJoe]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/07...hole-patched/1

A flaw in the popular Photobucket photo-sharing site opened up private albums to anyone capable of guessing a filename has been patched, according to a security researcher.

[iwog]

meh, never had any private photos on there anyhow. Is just a place where I dump anything I want other people to see

[Timmy_the_tortoise]

I keep my "private" photos on an encrypted USB key, under lock and key, in an electromagnetic safe, in my basement, behind a solid diamond door, guarded by two mahcine gun toting facial recognition cameras.

[wuyanxu]

i found that out also.

i usually only upload Untitled.jpg file because im too lazy. first uploaded a Untitled.jpg, then deleted it, and a few days later, uploaded another Untitled.jpg. because the first one doesn't exist, the latter gets put on without renaming. going back to a forum, i discovered that the newly uploaded photo gets shown instead of the not-found mini-picture.

[Firehed]

I don't often use the privacy features, but you're being awfully short-sighted if you don't see why they exist, Gareth. I'm not talking about throwing porn on the site, but photos from a private event for example that you want to share with the people that were there but nobody else are a great candidate. Of course everyone will use it differently (and many, not at all), but I find it quite handy to know its there even if it's something I'd rarely touch.

[Tile]

It's absolute stupidity to host pictures of your important events on a 3rd party host.

[Timmy_the_tortoise]

Originally Posted by Tile

It's absolute stupidity to host pictures of your important events on a 3rd party host.

What? You think everyone has their own personal (1st party) host server which they can upload to and their friends around the world can access at any point?

[Arkanrais]

what? this trick never worked for me. I've gotten the URL from many peoples photobucket accounts using the 'copy image location' option on FF,then paste it into the address bar and take off the file name, leaving the album name, leading me to their album. Never works for private ones; as a forum I'm an admin on has VIP and Staff tags that are made of pictures so they can be placed under peoples avatars, and these pictures are located in an album set to private (presumably so people cant go sneaking through the album as the forum is a 'membership by approval from staff' type deal).

simply put, setting your album to 'private' means people can't browse it, but if you embed an image in a forum from that album, everyone can see it. you can also give people the password to the album so they can browse it, without all the riff-raff seeing what's inside.

[frontline]

I only upload pics to photobucket and imagshack that i'm going to link to webforums and the like.

[Blademrk]

I would have thought setting an album to private means that you can share the photos in that album with only the people you actualy want to share that album with.

[Tile]

Originally Posted by Timmy_the_tortoise

What? You think everyone has their own personal (1st party) host server which they can upload to and their friends around the world can access at any point?

You're totally wrong here because some pictures are absolutely private and no responsible person would host them on a 3rd party hosting service that can be easily hacked.

[Timmy_the_tortoise]

Originally Posted by Tile

You're totally wrong here because some pictures are absolutely private and no responsible person would host them on a 3rd party hosting service that can be easily hacked.

I'm sorry, I don't understand your argument.

[Cheapskate]

I just want to know when they are getting rid of all the bloat. They load everything but the 'glitter effect' applet on the damn pages. I have a high speed connection, it shouldn't take a full minute to load a page.

[Arkanrais]

You're totally wrong here because some pictures are absolutely private and no responsible person would host them on a 3rd party hosting service that can be easily hacked.

I didn't realize hackers were after those photos of me being drunk at an office part or someone elses photos of their weight loss progression, or someone giving birth.
you know you can use sites like photobucket to store pictures so that you can get them from any other computer that has internet access (I know USB memory sticks make this somewhat redundant). you can also use photobucket for backing up your photos as it hold 1GB (I thought it was 5GB, but just checked and it's now 1GB :\ ). there is a lot you can do with it aside from the standard storage for forum images.

[Tile]

Backing up photos on Photobucket - no way because the pics can be deleted during maintenance.

[Timmy_the_tortoise]

Originally Posted by Tile

Backing up photos on Photobucket - no way because the pics can be deleted during maintenance.

If there is an accident which The Photobucket team will promptly apologize for..

That's like saying backing up Government data on a(n ordinary) hard drive is a no-go because the data can become corrupted during defragging.

[1ad7]

Ive known this for a long while...... hmm I should of said something ehh?

[Redbeaver]

Originally Posted by Timmy_the_tortoise

What? You think everyone has their own personal (1st party) host server which they can upload to and their friends around the world can access at any point?

no, but i think if u need to show your friends a bunch of important event pictures, you can just email them or burn them a CD or lend them ur usb kit or somethin... anything BUT 3rd party online host that are accessible to the public...

IMHO anyway...