Turn off Rapidshare contextual menu item?

[PhilMac]

I don't use Rapidshare, and I don't like having my contextual menu littered with commands I'll never use. Would you please add an option to turn this off?

Apart from the UI issue, I feel as though advertising for Rapidshare is being forced on me. There are several other sharing services I might use if I had a need for such a thing — and, for that matter, I might use my own server space. What is so special about Rapidhsare that it ought to be a CM item for every single user of Speed Download?

Lastly, the inability to remove this CM item is a security concern. If I do get a Rapidshare account, I will be very unlikely to provide my account credentials to SD, because it would be too easy to slip while choosing among CM items and accidentally upload something sensitive!

[mettarefuge]

I couldn't agree more! I was working with my contextual menus and accidently selected Send "Desktop" to RapidShare and to my horror, Speed Download began uploading everything on my desktop to RapidShare, which at the time I didn't even know what it was or that it existed. I think I got SD to stop in time, but I'm petrified that I accidently upload to the world personal files.

I'm totally freaked right now, and am considering disabling SD permanently.

PLEASE allow me to remove this dangerous feature from SD!

[PhilMac]

I'm petrified that I accidently upload to the world personal files.

Well, it's really weird, because I use Growl, and when I tested out sending a file via the CM plugin, SD itself reported nothing at all — there wasn't even anything in the log. But Growl popped up shortly after I tried to send the file to tell me that the upload to RapidShare was complete. Without Growl, I'd never have known anything had actually happened — so it is possible that some of your files have been uploaded.

To be sure that Growl was correct, I installed Little Snitch, which reports on all network connection attempts by application. I tried a small file, and observed several connections to RapidShare taking place briefly. (Oddly, the first connection was not to RapidShare but to Yazsoft.) Again, Growl reported success, while SD itself gave zero indication that anything had taken place. I then chose a much larger file to upload — and, sure enough, I saw that SD was sending a correspondingly large amount of information to RapidShare. (This time, there was no initial connection made to YazSoft.)

The good news for you is that, every time RapidShare receives a file, it puts a random eight-digit "File ID" in the file's URL so that no one can guess what the URL is: people have to be told by the user. Now, people who have Collector and Premium are provided with a list on the RapidShare site of all the files they've uploaded and their URLs. In this case, I think it's inconvenient that SD doesn't report the URL itself, forcing these people to go to the webpage (from where they could have done the upload, making the CM plugin sort of pointless). Needless to say, for people who don't have those kind of accounts, this lack of functionality is not inconvenient but simply insane, because they have no way to know how to get at their files after uploading them!

After ninety days, RapidShare deletes files that have never been accessed, and I don't think anyone is going to find your files by chance. As their FAQ puts it:

The file ID has 8 digits. It offers 108 = 100 million possible character combinations. If your filename is 10 characters long, there are 3910 = 8.140.406.085.191.601 or 8 quadrillion possible character combinations.
If a person wants to guess the download links, he/she has to find out both combinations. In our example, he/she would have to choose the correct filename from 108 * 3910 =8,140,406,085,191,601 or around 8 quadrillion possible character combinations.

I suppose you could write RapidShare with the time of day it happened and your IP, explaining what happened and asking them to delete anything that was actually uploaded. But it seems to me that, even if something was uploaded, the general public basically has no chance of ever seeing it.

For my part, I've made a rule in Little Snitch to prevent SD from ever contacting RapidShare; and I'll be complaining to Yazsoft support directly (at <info@yazsoft.com>) and giving them a link to this post.

The shoddy and, as you said, dangerous implementation of this feature is perplexing coming from YazSoft, who seem to be very attentive to the quality and feature-set of their product. It must have slipped under the radar, but — if enough people draw it to their attention — I think they'll deal with it.

[Johnny]

We are looking into making the RS CMM option a setting you can turn off/on.

As for the connections to the Yazsoft server, the only thing this does is version checking. Version number to version number, nothing more. Further, the version checking mechanism doesn't even send anything to our servers but rather downloads info with regards to the latest version and checks it with the one you have.

[PhilMac]

We are looking into making the RS CMM option a setting you can turn off/on.

As for the connections to the Yazsoft server, the only thing this does is version checking. Version number to version number, nothing more. Further, the version checking mechanism doesn't even send anything to our servers but rather downloads info with regards to the latest version and checks it with the one you have.

Thanks for that information. I hope you are able to do this soon. (It would also be nice if, eventually, you were able to get SD to report the URL for uploaded files.)

[ctawn]

i came here because my whole context menu was populated with about 10 entries for upload to rapidshare and i didn't know what it was. thank god for google. i quit path finder and restarted and it was fine (I had just installed a CM item before that). but still -- nothing should install CM entries without options.

[Johnny]

The latest version of SD lets you turn off RapidShare integration. It's in the preferences, in the RAPIDSHARE section.

[Desruptor]

It's in the preferences, in the RAPIDSHARE section.

This preference entry doesn't influence the contextual menu at all. System restarts & uninstallation of SD (and installation after restart) - I tried everything. Nothing solved the problem.

Any ideas?

[Johnny]

If you're on Snow Leopard, you need to turn it off from the Mac OS X Services

[Pyrofallout]

If you're on Snow Leopard, you need to turn it off from the Mac OS X Services

Can you please give a bit more detail on this? I unchecked the box in the Rapidshare section of preferences in Speed Download but the context menu option is still there.