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Free .mac-style storage


Swad

You remember back in the day when everything on the Internet was free (circa 1994-1998)? My local library offered free internet and email access through telnet – it was glorious. Ah, Web 0.9.23.6 Beta.

 

These days we’ve got the so-called Web 2.0 which is supposed to relive those days with tons of more free stuff, along with gradients sprinkled everywhere and HUGE buttons thrown in.

 

So, in my eternal quest for free stuff, I ran across this "hack" for OS X and immediately fell in love. You can now use box.net (very Web 2.0) just like you use .mac… except box.net gives you a gig of space for free and more space if you invite friends to sign up (with a link like the one I just used... although this post isn't about me getting invitations). All you have to do is sign up, set up a DAV on your Mac, give it your login name (for the secure connection) and you're ready to go. UneasySilence has some screenshots.

 

You can access all your files online, share them with friends, and there’s even a Windows based client for cross-OS sharing. I signed up yesterday and have been very impressed so far... and the price is certainly right. :)

 

Gotta love free stuff. Especially when it’s storage space!

 

Edit: If you're going to sign up, use one of the invitation links further down in the thread so that others (that need it) can get upgraded to 5 GB. Feel free to post your own code once signed up.


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Yes, it is.

 

 

Sweet. Not bad.

 

This is going to sound a deplorable thing, but: I just experimented a bit and found that you can get as many friend referrals as you want if you mask your IP and keep signing up for new accounts, using your own invitation link. Since Box.net doesn't send validation codes to the e-mail you enter, you can make everything up. When you're done, just restore your old IP or mask to a different one before you login to your own account. You need to change it because if Box.net sees that your IP matches one of your recently invited friends, then that referral becomes invalid.

 

I know it's sneaky, but I have 15 invited "friends" now. :P

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colonels1020, i see the source code on his web page

 

Yes, the source code for the main application is on sourceforge, and I have downloaded and recompiled that. The app works great exept for it not being able to login to Gmail. The reason for this is because there is a plugin file, "GMailCommunicator.plugin", that will not change over from PowerPC to Intel because it is a separate project. I have tried compiling it many times, but it stays PPC. To make it Intel, I would need it's specific source code and then compile that for Intel. Then I could put that file into gDisk and then it would work correctly.

 

In the mean time, you can use it under Rosetta until I get the source code for GMailCommunicator.plugin

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Signed up. Logged in through Webdav. Cannot see the files that I upload.

 

Anyone else with this problem? Is it a permissions thing?

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Box.net seems SLOW. Plus it does not seem to be compatible with Mac OS X's WebDAV.. Files are invisible on both PowerPC and Intel versions of 10.4.6

 

It works with Transmit and other WebDAV Clients, but then you might as well use FTP. If you are sharing files, simply FTP them to your www/ folder of your website and then email the http:// link to your friend.

 

I give box.net 2 out of 5 stars. Box.net needs work. Web 2.0 apps? I'll wait for Web 2.0.1

 

GT

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If you're needing to drop a file quickly via transmit, you can use the drag-and-drop transit widget. Always nice to speed things up a little bit...

 

I'll be keeping my eyes and ears out for a better solution. :D

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I made a request for an iPhoto plugin like the one for Flickr and got a positive response from the box team. It's added to the "potential development list" whatever that means for Mac users.

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Thanks for posting this, guys, I've had a box.net account for a while but no easy way to access it. I tried that German one, but it was kind of slow and took a bit of guesswork to register (given that the entire site is in another language), and is much faster (though still not fast in general.)

 

Here's my referral link, link. Thanks muchly.

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I am not sure if this will help, but I ran across this a couple of months ago. It would be awesome if we could get this whole "fake .mac" thing worked out. Link Oh yeah, and if anyone would like to use my referel link here it is: Link

 

Thanks,

Andrew

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Just to let you know...

Spymac has a new offer: use Club for 30 days free, then if you invite 5 people, you get another 6 months free of charge. That is 3GB of POP/IMAP email + 3GB hosting space.

It's almost as good as Box.net....

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Dammit, it's now 10 friends for a free upgrade!!!

 

All right, my link

 

Well, I guess I could make another account just for music that I have on here. And another just for my iPhoto library. And another for the nearly 500 MB of porn. Maybe this isn't a bad thing.

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