224 pointsby coloneltcb6 hours ago36 comments
  • jonluca4 hours ago
    Wow the people in this thread are a huge bummer. This is much cooler and I doubt this is a real safety issue. You can already sign up for a free cloudflare account and deploy it for free, on your own, on a free workers.dev domain. The friction removal here isn't going to meaningfully change the security / amount of malicious content.
    • esjeon3 minutes ago
      Corporations acting as if naive is a bit of problem in reality. For one thing, CF is probably the largest entity serving pirated content internationally while hiding the identities of actual perpetrators for privacy.

      Same here: CF is basically giving malicious actors an ability to ship contents/data publicly while laundering the legal responsibility of those actors.

      Now tell me what is cool

    • combyn8tor3 hours ago
      Well according to the people in this thread it was previously impossible for bad actors to host a website, and CloudFlare has now given them this unique ability.
      • judge2020an hour ago
        I really hope/imagine this project specifically has a LLM of some kind doing real-time analysis on the uploaded files for malware from the get-go. How good that is could be is anyone's guess (and chances are there would be blind spots / evasion techniques).
    • adithyassekhar11 minutes ago
      I think they are all bots or threatened to see their little hobby now being accessible, classic gatekeeping.
    • arcatechan hour ago
      When you see a group of people being critical, you can either see it as a “bummer”, or you can see it as people critically thinking about a thing.

      Is it really more useful to have everyone expressing how much they like something instead of identifying problems?

      Is seeing people talking about the things they don’t like something that makes you unhappy? Why?

      • ddtaylor11 minutes ago
        I think the HN rule for "curmudgeonly" applies.

        > Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

        I think HN should be a place where I am excited to see what others have to add. When I see a post I am excited to see what takes and spins others have on it. I do want real criticism and a lively debate about important things, but there has to be a balance.

        I want to see other comments that seem like they genuinely want to help steer something or build people up. Sometimes I get the impression that's not happening on HN.

      • dryarzeg17 minutes ago
        > Is seeing people talking about the things they don’t like something that makes you unhappy? Why?

        Probably (I'm just assuming) because that person observes negative/cautious/"I don't like this because X and Y and also Z"/etc sentiment too much and feels like people are only quick to notice issues while forgetting about good sides.

        It's only an assumption, though.

    • superjose3 hours ago
      Agreed I think this is pretty solid especially since you get all the Cloudflare benefits like CDN from the get-go.
    • 3 hours ago
      undefined
    • swingandamiss4 hours ago
      hn has turned into a reddit hate fest. It's getting hard to read non stop negativity and hate. I'm happy to see your positive comment.
      • goshx2 hours ago
        You must be new here :)
        • swingandamiss2 hours ago
          No, I just created a new alt account. I have a year 1 account as my main.
          • j-bosan hour ago
            that's new :)
      • phoghed16 minutes ago
        Brother it’s always been like this. Just check n-gate.com (tragic loss btw, rip)
        • ddtaylor9 minutes ago
          Hi! I have been following n-gate.com a small bit over the years, because I found it very interesting and it was a rabbit hole I wanted to go down.

          I actually setup "xor-gate" for a while, which was trying to be a similar thing co-authored by a friend, but it was too time consuming and we gave up.

          Did the author pass? I'm not trying to be crass, but I don't know the details.

      • jnaina2 hours ago
        wait till anyone remotely mentions apple or apple products. the neckbeards on their thinkpads will come in droves to shit on cupertino's best.
  • andrethegiant5 hours ago
    Netlify made this 10 years ago... they even copied the name! https://app.netlify.com/drop
    • tech234a4 hours ago
      And BitBalloon before that (which Netlify acquired) http://web.archive.org/web/20131028083240/https://www.bitbal...
      • gfat3 hours ago
        Loved this app. What is old is new again.
    • giancarlostoroan hour ago
      Its not exactly a very elaborate name.
      • oasisbob44 minutes ago
        Elaborate enough?

        Funny story: I used to work for a startup which had a trademark on "Airdrop". When Apple announced that feature, it took everyone there by surprise. Ended up reaching out and selling it to them for a buck or two in favor of maintaining goodwill.

        • inventor777713 minutes ago
          Ha, that's funny. When you say "a buck or two" do you really mean it was almost nothing or did Apple compensate you appropriately? I'm also surprised that Apple didn't catch that before if it was trademarked.
      • arm32an hour ago
        My... Aviato?
        • giancarlostoro34 minutes ago
          Infatrode, wtf is Infatrode

          (I might be butchering it, course it is an Office Space reference)

          He was my absolute favorite character in that show.

          • floydnoel29 minutes ago
            I think it was Initrode. I used to watch it every day haha
            • giancarlostoro4 minutes ago
              They intentionally butchered it I think but it still cracked me up
    • brightball5 hours ago
      There are numerous products like this out there. Isn’t that where Dropbox got its name in the first place?
      • hoherd3 hours ago
        I thought it was a reference to the Mac OS X `~/Public/Drop Box` directory, which was a write-only place for people to send files to your user, which has been around since the first OS X beta came out in 2000.
        • jamesfinlaysonan hour ago
          I vaguely remember being told to put assignments in a drop box (like a mail box on campus) in the mid 2000s at least, and I'm sure it wasn't a new concept then.
          • hoherdan hour ago
            Oh dang, you're right. Mac OS X was my first Mac OS, but it looks like the Drop Box concept existed long before OS X. Here's a reference from 1991 titled "AppleShare Drop Box: Access for System 6 and 7 Clients" https://www.savagetaylor.com/TIL/TIL09033.pdf
      • scubbo3 hours ago
        I was always under the impression that that was referencing the notion from spycraft.
      • latchkey4 hours ago
        Don't forget Digital Ocean Droplets.
        • frankdenbow3 hours ago
          Or Drop.io which got bought by Meta
    • dmillar4 hours ago
      Low barrier services don't care who's first in this epoch.
    • r_lee3 hours ago
      ouch... I get that it's a simple concept but darn it really does seem like ctrl c ctrl v lmao
    • ares6233 hours ago
      But this time it's with ~blockchain~ AI!
  • jjcm2 hours ago
    Cloudflare is obviously more trustworthy/robust here, but if name of the url matters to you, my site non.io [1] allows for named uploads, ie https://html.non.io/solara [2]

    Somewhat useful if you want a url that isn't a hash / is more self descriptive.

    [1] Launch discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695

    [2] This was a demo of the output of a design tool I'm working on, only the home/accommodations/about pages work.

  • Bender6 hours ago
    There must be some really good protection on this. If I enabled such a thing on any of my servers it would be full of warez, porn, malware, CSAM and who knows what else within minutes. Curious how they manage to keep it clean.
    • mattlondon5 hours ago
      Only live for an hour.

      But that won't stop people doing bad stuff for an hour I guess. Vibe code up some on-demand thing that you ping...

      • Y-bar4 hours ago
        One hour is great for spearphishing attacks, once the victim has been infected their IT department will have no trace of the source.
    • hoppp3 hours ago
      They already allow hosting static websites so I think the same guardrails are implemented.
      • Bender2 hours ago
        I've never used CF so I could be ignorant in this matter. I assumed perhaps incorrectly that people had to verify their email address and delegate their domain(s) to CF including setting the glue records in the TLD servers meaning there is possibly a financial trail somewhere probably in the DNS registrars and perhaps a mail provider, whereas this is just drag-and-drop with no money trail.

        I have no idea what guardrails they have in place in the background that blocks malware, CSAM, warez and such on their free accounts.

        • hopppan hour ago
          Just having an account with an email address is enough.

          They assign a subdomain automatically for uploads, same as cloudflare workers.

          I don't know what they do, but implementing guardrails for this is possible nowadays with AI, but maybe they use a "mechanical turk"

    • DakotaR5 hours ago
      Yeah, I was going to start a file drop site like 0x until realizing what it'd be used for
  • alberth3 hours ago
    Reminds me of web development in the 1990s.

    I honestly miss those days of deployment simplicity.

    • gesis3 hours ago
      FTPing files to `~/public_html` was the best... Miss those days.
      • hoppp3 hours ago
        It still works...
        • 3form2 hours ago
          It's not the ability that's missing; it's those days.
          • bigbuppo18 minutes ago
            Yeah, these days if you aren't treating even the smallest of small projects that do something like "query database spit out report" as if they are major IT infrstructure projects, complete with designers, UX specialists, and accessbility experts that never talked to a disabled person to find out what they actually need, spin up 375 ec2 instances, use 19 different database systems, and send the logs to a third party, then you're literally the worst person possible, or so I've been told.

            It's like, my dude last week this was an excel spreadsheet.

  • _pdp_5 hours ago
    It is cool to see not sure why you would use it.

    Also it seems to me that this is a good way to exfiltrate data, rubber stamped by cloudflare themselves.

    • gruez5 hours ago
      Isn't there already thousands of ways for exfiltrating data that must be whitelisted by corporate firewalls? office365/gsuite, for instance. Not to mention the classics like dns.
  • steve_adams_862 hours ago
    Cool, it worked!

    https://drop-1e1a536f-10d.honeysuckle-gull.workers.dev/

    It's minesweeper, but the logic uses xstate/store. The link in the bottom is broken; it's supposed to go to `building-minesweeper-with-xstate-store.html`

    I have no need for this but I love that my friends could vibe out a website, drop it here, claim it, and host it for pennies. This is great.

    "Your site is reachable within ~32ms of 95% of the world’s Internet-connected population" isn't new but it's cool to see that achieved so trivially.

  • smalltorch5 hours ago
    Hmm, that's fun and useful. Here is snake game for 60 minutes.

    https://drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev

    • Self-Perfectionan hour ago
      $ curl -I https://drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev/ curl: (7) Failed to connect to drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev port 443 after 47 ms: Couldn't connect to server

      Tried from two hosts, different countries.

      • tmp10423288442an hour ago
        Yes, it's expired I think - it only lasts for 1 hour
    • tengbretson5 hours ago
      Your code appears to have a bug where if the arrow keys trigger a change of direction twice in a single frame interval, it can mistakenly send the snake back on itself.
    • copper-float5 hours ago
      What an honor. I got a high score of seven.
  • janandonly5 hours ago
    Makes sense. It plays nicely with the vibe code kids who don’t know how to do GitHub or don’t know to ask their LLM about it.
  • dmd40 minutes ago
    All I ever get is "Something went wrong An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support."
  • 2 hours ago
    undefined
  • hoppp3 hours ago
    I can see this interface is for vibe coders haha

    I have been hosting static websites with cloudflare for years and finding how to do it on the UI is getting harder as they add more things and reoranize.

  • 3 hours ago
    undefined
  • throwaway815235 hours ago
    Wait, my first impression was that it points a local browser to your local browser. Now it looks like it uploads your folder to Cloudflare and temporarily serves it over the web. But is that different from what we used to do with FTP? Are there any databases or anything like basic PHP hosts supply? It's just static sites?

    Is this a product or what? What's the purpose? Is there an API?

    • joenot4434 hours ago
      A minute ago I had an HTML doc I wanted to share with a PM. It was a Claude prepared demo of a hypothetical feature. Lots of screenshots.

      I ended up just embedding them directly in the HTML as base64 and sending him a 15mb file, but hypothetically this would have been a nice solution instead.

      • qingcharles4 hours ago
        Absolutely agree. There's an insane "feature" of Claude Design which means you can only share the link to the design with other users on your account?! You can export the design, though, but then you need somewhere to quickly drop a bunch of HTML + assets. This would be perfect for that.
        • efields4 hours ago
          Trying to solve this here: https://jlnk.us

          Here's the instructions my agents have:

          > Shareable Deliverables → jlnk.us (default) The jlnk MCP server is configured machine-wide for all team agents. It publishes disposable public links: create_link(content, ttl) returns an unguessable URL anyone can open without logging in; it self-destructs after its TTL (4h/24h/72h, default 4h, max 5 MB). Also list_my_links() and delete_link(id).

          > When handing a human (Founder, CEO reviewer) something to look at — QC screenshots, prototypes, reports, before/after comparisons — default to a jlnk.us link instead of a repo file path or local path. Use 72h for Founder review, shorter when the review window is same-day.

          > Content must be ONE self-contained HTML file: inline CSS/JS, embed screenshots as base64 data URIs (![image](data:image/png;base64,...)).

          > Downscale images to stay under the 5 MB cap.

          > Links are public to anyone holding the URL. NEVER publish secrets, API keys, credentials, or private client data.

          > Links expire — they are a viewing convenience, not the system of record. Durable artifacts still go to the repo and issue attachments as usual.

          • throwaway815233 hours ago
            Sort of like a pastebin for directory structures then, hmm.
      • an hour ago
        undefined
      • pantelisk4 hours ago
        There are also solutions for sharing your homelab with others (basically tunneling from your machine->server (internet accessible) <-> client. Though, if your machine would go to sleep that whole chain would fall apart. A few good automatic solutions out there that solve the problem (no "just replace dropbox with ftp" type of argument).

        However, I see the appeal of this. Kind of surprised it hasn't happened yet to be honest.

      • efields4 hours ago
        I built a tool _just the other day_ for this exact purpose. Now my agents proactively make disposable links for me: https://jlnk.us
      • dmillar4 hours ago
        Replit is used a lot in this context. Their agent is good, but their circumvent-policies-to-get-something-in-front-of-execs-quickly is an amazing and mis-priced feature.
      • throwaway815234 hours ago
        You could just upload to a personal or other website? I sometimes do that. Is there any security or privacy (e.g. password protection) for this Cloudflare Drop site?
      • vulture9164 hours ago
        Check out Tailscale - they have TUNS + share the source files with someone else in tailnet.
  • grepsedawk3 hours ago
    This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing. It really enables less tech savvy users. It would really enable frontpage/dreamworks-like flows for some people
  • sgt5 hours ago
    Tried uploading a ZIP and got:

    "Something went wrong An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support."

    • TZubiri4 hours ago
      When contacting support:

      "Please upload a screenshot of the error by dragging a zip of the png file."

  • Cider99865 hours ago
    >Something went wrong An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support.

    I have a few qualms with this app.

  • altairprime5 hours ago
    Hah! This is exactly how I’m serving the vestigial remnant of my blogging in the early 2000s from a ZIP-backed Cloudflare Worker today. Should I rebuild my site with Drop+Claim or is it fine as-is? I kind of feel like ‘if what I have works, don’t change it’ is the best path.
  • rickcarlino4 hours ago
    Desktop operating systems should be able to run zipped web apps the way Electron apps run today. It ought to just be part of the OS.
    • ubertaco10 minutes ago
      Adobe Air, for the obscure nostalgia bomb
      • rickcarlino9 minutes ago
        I was going to mention Microsoft Active Desktop in the original comment, but I didn’t want HN to know how old I am.
    • TZubiri4 hours ago
      And if there's a form or something with a backend? Just break?
  • ChrisArchitect6 hours ago
    > No account needed. Deployment is active for 60 minutes, then expires unless you claim it.

    (https://x.com/BraydenWilmoth/status/2074894829616509358)

  • nickgray3 hours ago
    This is cool and I like it.
  • ricardobeat4 hours ago
    I remember doing this in 2006. FTP. Good times.
    • barnacs3 hours ago
      I remember making a Qt app for a friend that would upload dropped files via ftp and copy the link to the clipboard. Good old days!
  • djfobbz4 hours ago
    Yet I can't drag and drop a plain old HTML file without putting it in a folder or a ZIP file first.
    • spartanatreyuan hour ago
      You can, the file just has to be named "index.html".
  • ed_mercer3 hours ago
    Cool, just 20 years too late.
  • BoppreH4 hours ago
    Dropped a folder with a small HTML project, and after 20 seconds got "Something went wrong. An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support.".

    Note how the error has zero information.

    Looking in the network tab, a POST request to /upload returned 403 and an HTML page starting with "Sorry, you have been blocked", and to "email the site owner to let them know you were blocked".

    I'm very tired of this adversarial approach to software coupled with vague errors.

    EDIT: it was the file './git/hooks/fsmonitor-watchman.sample' created by default on git init. Maybe because it's Perl. Worse-than-useless "please try again" and "you've been blocked" for committing the sin of uploading a folder that's a git repository. Sigh...

  • ChrisArchitect6 hours ago
    Extension of the temporary accounts they needed to enable for Agents https://blog.cloudflare.com/temporary-accounts/
  • toomuchtodo4 hours ago
    Cloudflare folks: Please consider supporting WARC archives for deployment.
  • system24 hours ago
    It would be nice if we could see some information such as file size limitations, demos, link structure, management, etc. Am I expected to upload a random HTML file and see how it works?
    • Fergusonb4 hours ago
      Yep, I chucked it a file on my desktop: index.html present Max individual file size 25MB Total file count <2000 Total size less than 100MB
    • petee4 hours ago
      Yeah I'm very lost on what this is supposed to do -- "Summon your site" is quite vague. "see it live", like a demo? or is this actually published somewhere? Is it forever?

      Desktop mode doesn't show any more information either

  • bossyTeacher3 hours ago
    It could be fun to use a temporary Mediafire/Rapidshare/Megaupload service. Especially if you need to transfer something between an Android and an iPhone.
  • heipei4 hours ago
    Cloudflare is really good at launching features that facility low-friction deployment of malicious content (such as phishing) on the Internet, piggybacking on their hosting reputation and the fact that you can't easily block their ASN or domains.
    • simultsop4 hours ago
      I don't know your experience. Once I was toying around and doing a basic auth with registration and so. The weekend was over and couldn't get back to that couple of months. The worker was quarantined and marked as phishing automatically. So I believe they have something in place to prevent those you complain.
      • jszymborski4 hours ago
        Your anecdote just illustrates that their system detects legit uses as abuses, not that they have a system that effectively detects abuses.
    • cute_boi3 hours ago
      Cloudflare is also like a Chinese copycat machine. They mostly copy some successful project and sell it at cheap price.
    • Waterluvian4 hours ago
      Be the change you want to see to make the world of your dreams.

      And then sell its denizens malice protection services.

  • anonymousiam3 hours ago
    Odds are that this new feature will not suffer the same outcome as Megaupload, because of Cloudflare's close relationship with the USG.
  • nalekberov4 hours ago
    The internet will soon be flooded with even more scam landing pages.
    • cute_boi3 hours ago
      And you should be using cloudflare to protect yourself...
  • arm32an hour ago
    This definitely won't get used to host unlimited phishing sites. /s
  • sleepynoodle4 hours ago
    This is so cool.
  • S0y4 hours ago
    Cloudflare has the astonishing ability to make me hate them more as a company every new feature they launch.
    • vevoe4 hours ago
      why?
      • S0y4 hours ago
        Every new feature they've launched recently can be used to make the web more dangerous for everyone except those who use Cloudflare.
        • denismenace4 hours ago
          How would this make the web more dangerous? Its just static file hosting. Already wildly available!
          • TZubiri4 hours ago
            The argument would be that they sell the kevlar and the guns

            Kevlar:

            https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/turnstile/

            Guns:

            https://support.cloudflarewarp.com/

            To be fair, CF mainly develops defensive cybersecurity products, the extent to which their tools might be used maliciously is pretty on par with other regular tools.

            But, it just has bad optics and potential COI/Racketeering when CF is at both sides of the counter.

            To be explicit, in case it isn't obvious,Cloudflare emerged as a DDoS protection company, detecting attacks from distributed sources is part of the raison d'etre, and domains and IP addresses are a key part of that infrastructure.

            By subletting their own IP addresses for navigation with warp, and their own domains for hosting of webcontent with subdomain hosting, they are providing pooled anonimity for their customers, which is precisely what makes it very hard for defenders on the other side to implement foundational security measures like IP bans, or IP block bans, or domain bans, or Whois/RDAP domain analysis.

          • latchkey4 hours ago
            phishing
  • collabs5 hours ago
    Congratulations on launching!

    I tried uploading a git repository that I have previously successfully published on Github pages. This is a "no build" website I have built with the help of Claude. It should just work but I keep getting an error. Who can I reach out to give them steps to reproduce? The website repository is public and I feel like anyone at Cloudflare who wants to reproduce my problem can quite literally clone my repo and upload it to cloudflare drop.

    Please drop your cloudflare email address and I will reach out to you with my repository information.

    • turtlebits4 hours ago
      Or you could do some of your own troubleshooting? Uploading a git repo is different than uploading a zipped/folder, especially if your index.htm/l isn't at the root.
      • collabs2 hours ago
        Thank you for the reply. Index dot html is already at the root of the folder and it deploys just fine on GitHub pages.
    • aetherspawn2 hours ago
      Hey stranger, welcome to 2026. It’s somewhat different to what you’re used to in 2035. We do things differently here.