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Comment by zerkten | Hacker News Reader

That's why user uploads are worth some thought and consideration. File uploads normally gets treated as a nuisance by developers because it can become kind of fiddly even when it works and you are getting file upload bugs from support.

It normally isn't that much of a challenge to mitigate the issues, but other things get priorities. Companies end up leaving pivots to XSS attacks and similar bugs too.

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Google has a great service for this called Checksum. You upload a file checksum and it validates it against the database of all known bad checksums that might flag your website as unsafe. The pricing is pretty reasonable too and you can proxy file uploads through their service directly.

I'm actually not telling the truth but at what point did you realize that? And what would be the implications if Google actually did release a service like this? It feels a bit like racketeering.

Real shame if this domain got blocked because of a contraband file, eh? Just pay us and we'll make sure you don't have any problems.

Ha! You got me. I was like, wow, that sounds really useful. I'd love to sign up for that, and built my app to use it, if that were the case.

But then, I realized: 1). I'd be integrating further into Google because of a problem they created (racketeering), and 2). They seem to really dislike having paying customers (even if they made it, they'd kill it before long).

And 3), they would later update their evil-bloom-filter and all of the sudden the file you paid to get verified is now an Evil File, and they blacklist you anyway.

They actually blacklist you even faster, because of course they have in their database that you have the now-evil-file.

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