Comment by cft

5 years ago

Why isn't Dropbox blacklisted? Too big?

Dropbox actually provides an unique domain for each and every user - and separates the UGC from the web front code and Dropbox own assets that way - that's where the files you preview/download are actually coming from. I have no doubt a fair number of those is blacklisted.

  • unique TLD? that should be very costly?

    or does GSB not ban the entire TLD when a subdomain has malicious content?

    Would be great if our overlords at least publish the overzealous rules we need to abide by.

    • Dropbox DL and Preview urls take a form of https://uc[26 character hex string].dl.dropboxusercontent.com/... and https://uc[26 character hex string].preview.dropboxusercontent.com/... - it does not have to be a separate TLD to avoid being blocked, but it has to be differentiated.

      This is the same reason why the block of the TFA company did not cause an outage of everyone using CloudFront - GSB does not block full TLDs if it can be shown content is distinct. Same for anyone using S3, Azure equivalents and so on.

      4 replies →

    • My Google-fu is failing me right now, but there is a list of domains like dropboxusercontent.com that are treated as pseudo second-level domains for purposes like this.

      e.g. u1234.dropboxusercontent.com is treated as a unique domain just like u1234-dropboxusercontent.com would be.

      Edit: here we go, from another comment - the Public Suffix List: https://publicsuffix.org/