Using the address in a public Dropbox folder to find other files also shared

Disclaimer: Because this post mentions the complementary health magazine 'What Doctors Don't Tell You' I feel it is incumbent upon me to state that: I am not medically trained, I am not paid by any pharmaceutical company nor do I have any stocks or shares in them or their subsidiaries. I am not a 'member' of either Sense About Science or Nightingale Collaboration - largely because they don't have members though I enjoy reading the output of both and am supportive of them.

I'm supportive of people / patients getting hold of good quality health-related information and I accept that things are not perfect in medicine. One thing you can do to put pressure on 'big pharma' to share their trial data (all of it, not just the stuff that makes their drugs look good) is to sign the AllTrials petition http://www.alltrials.net/

---

Whenever I see a web address that links to some controversial information I am often thinking 'what else can I find from this site'. Typically I might take the root domain (eg http://www.wddty.com as opposed to http://www.wddty.com/page1.html) and use Google to search for specific phrases (eg site:www.wddty.com cancer or inurl:wddty cancer - note that the second one would also bring up http://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/post_about_wddty!).

I'll also search for the root domain and see what else shows up, or I might put the address in the browser address bar and prune it a bit ('URL hacking') to see what else I can find within subdomains and folders etc.

I have noticed that What Doctors Don't Tell You are using a public Dropbox folder to share their responses to criticism, for example their most recent 'The WDDTY wars' complaining that they were misrepresented in The Times can be found at
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/165637094/The%20WDDTY%20wars.html

The number 165637094 appears to be a constant and if I search for the pruned address on Google:

"dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/165637094/"

then I get this page of results, including several articles - note that all of these are articles placed (presumably by WDDTY staff) into a public Dropbox folder and shared publicly on Facebook or elsewhere. I have not hacked into their files to find anything, I don't know how to do that, nor do I want to.

What did I find? Not much :)

• Our Word: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/165637094/our%20word.html - a recent press release
• Ageing well (pt 1): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/165637094/Ageing%20well%20Part%20One.pdf - which includes "Homeopathy: According to WDDTY columnist Dr Harald Gaier, there are several effective homeopathic remedies for varicose veins, including H. virginiana (witch hazel), Aristolochia clematis, Paeonia officinalis, Viburnum opulus and Ruta graveolens."
  
  The obvious thing to try here is to replace the word One in the address with Two, but sadly this file doesn't exist.
  
• What the Times didn't tell you: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/165637094/what%20the%20times%20didn%27t%20tell%20you.html - another press release
• The WDDTY wars: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/165637094/The%20WDDTY%20wars.html - press release
• Latest news (16 May 2013): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/165637094/wddty%20e-news%2015%20may.html - this includes a (dead) link to WDDTY's Vaccination Bible  
• Healing foods: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/165637094/Healing%20Foods.pdf which suggests you might like to "Add some watercress to your lunchtime salad if you have breast cancer, as it may stop the tumours from progressing", which seems a bit overconfident
• Subscribe before we are banned: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/165637094/subscribe%20before%20we%20are%20banned.html

Why?
It's worth being aware that if you share stuff on your public dropbox people can use information in the link to find other stuff you've shared publicly - that you might have forgotten you've shared. This shouldn't be a surprise, obviously, since you've shared it... y'know... publicly, but it can be useful in chasing up other information.

How to solve this
If you'd rather people don't have access to a file then simply move it out of the public Dropbox folder and wait for Google cache to catch up.
If you want to save a copy of a file you think might suddenly be deleted I recommend either downloading it (if it's a PDF, you can occasionally do this from Google cache) or Freezepage if it's a webpage.

How to enjoy media files on iPhone without using iTunes (and using Dropbox instead)

I have to assume this works for most smartphones and tablets.

You will need

• a free Dropbox account* 
• an iPhone or similar
• the Dropbox iPhone app installed on your iPhone
• wifi connectivity

*or you can use my referrer link and give me extra space which is always nice
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTQwMDAxMDQ5?src=global9 - note that this shares your email address with me, so think about your own privacy too, possibly it shares my email address with you as well!

Instructions

• Save the media file into your Dropbox folder on your computer
• open up the Dropbox app on your iPhone, navigate to the file and play it
  (you'll need the wifi to synchronise with the Dropbox server and to maintain playback - however if you favourite the file you can probably listen to it offline).

I've been listening to mp3s on my iPhone via Dropbox since November 2010 as I find it easier to handle files via Dropbox than iTunes. I just save them in Dropbox and when I open the iPhone app there they are and they play fine.

Yesterday I was rather pleased to discover that it also works for video files and I managed to play a 700mb .avi file as well as a 176mb .wmv file (it's the same programme but the larger one is nearer to broadcast quality).

Not surprisingly the first time I tried to play the larger file it kept cutting out every 10 seconds and seemed to be not working very well at all but a bit of patience was all that was needed. The iPhone did something to it to 'optimise it for mobile playback' no idea what but about 10 minutes later it played all the way through.

Dropbox's own help pages have a list of files that will play including music and video:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/80/en and they also have a more advanced page for trickier filetypes and how to convert them https://www.dropbox.com/help/83/en (they suggest Handbrake - I've only used Zamzar and Real Player).

Media filetypes that I've successfully played on my iPhone via Dropbox

• .avi
• .flv
• .m4a (these are meant for iTunes, but work fine)
• .mp3
• .wmv 

Music files listed on Dropbox help files that should work: .mp3, .aiff, .m4a, .wav
Video files listed on their help files that should work: .mov, .mp4, .m4v

Filetypes that I've not had much luck with

• .m4r - ring tones, but these can be converted to .mp3 files via http://www.zamzar.com (I've just tried it, works fine)

How to share your Twitter archive via your public Dropbox

This is a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, and it worked instantly. I'm still investigating the 'ethics' side of sharing all four plus years of my tweets publicly - not that I've said anything terribly exciting but I might need to think about the people I've intereacted with*. So I'm not sharing the link to my tweets quite yet.

You will need

• a Twitter account, obviously
• a Dropbox account, or similar sort of shared file area that lets you share files publicly
  https://www.dropbox.com
  or https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTQwMDAxMDQ5 - this is my referrer link

1. Think about tweets you've sent and whether there's anything in there that might embarrass your friends, let alone yourself. Just because you can now share your past tweet history it doesn't mean that you should.

Download
2. If you've not downloaded your Twitter archive you'll need to do that first. Go to your Settings page or if you're logged in just click https://twitter.com/settings/account, scroll down the page until you see the 'Request your archive' link, click that and wait for an email to arrive. Once it arrives click on the link to download a zipped file of your tweets and accessory information (making them look nice on screen and searchable). Unzip the file.

Further details on downloading and playing with your Twitter archive can be found here.

2.5. Double click on index.html and your offline Twitter archive will open. You can search your old tweets and see what's there, or browse by clicking on the month in the panel on the right. Each tweet gives you the option to view the 'live' version on Twitter - where you can delete it if you wish, or copy its URL / embed it into blog posts or Storify etc.

Make available to others
3. Move the 'tweets' folder into your Public folder in Dropbox.
Might as well move all of the folder contents but I may work out which are the minimum essential files to move - to be honest the readme.txt file doesn't really participate in accessing your tweets

4. [Optional] You can rename the tweets folder if you want, not really essential. You can also rename the index.html file - again not essential but if lots of people are sharing their Twitter archives in this way then it doesn't hurt to stick your Twitter name in the address.

Share public link so others can see and search your tweets
6. Right-click / or Ctrl+Click for Mac (not cmd click) on whatever you've now called your index.html to bring up the menu, click on the Dropbox menu option and then 'Copy Public Link' which is now copied to your clipboard and can be pasted in a tweet or blog post or wherever you want to put it.

It will look a bit like: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12345678/tweets_folder_name/your_name.html#

Once you've shared the link don't change the name of the file on Dropbox - or if you do you'll need to reshare the new link.

*A tweet is not an island. When you click on it to expand or 'view conversation' you can see the discussions that have gone on around it. Of course all these conversations probably happened in the public sphere (given that any tweet sent from a not-locked account is public) but I think it is a little different when you suddenly make the pointers to tweets that are several months or years old more easily available again. That's not to say historic tweets have been particularly well hidden - topsy.com can find all sorts of old stuff.

I don't know if tweets sent four years ago by someone who's since made their account private will now inherit their new privacy status (or vice versa) but I want to find out a little more about it before unleashing all my tweets, and manual RTs of other people's tweets (which will persist even if they've deleted the original) etc.

It would be interesting if I knew how to make this password protected, then could share just with mates and researchers. Don't think that option is available at the level of Dropbox but I'm sure there's a way around it.

Random observations
I wonder if people will have their Twitter archives subpoenaed - it's suddenly become possible for everyone with an account to gain access to all of their previous tweets (including the option to find and delete tweets from much further back than the default 3,200 that you can scroll back through). Presumably far easier to get them from an individual than from Twitter, though I am not a lawyer.

How to read PDFs, and other docs, offline on an iPhone using Dropbox

Shortened link for this post is http://is.gd/hlKJC

Note - there are other ways to do this, I just happen to have used this one to save files to my iPhone. 


I was inspired to dig out the draft text of this post after reading a Facebook status update from my friend David Bradley aka @sciencebase recommending the service. As far as I'm aware Dropbox works perfectly on an iPad although I don't have one of those so can't confirm.
 
General guide to using Dropbox While I can't pretend to understand the minutiae of cloud computing Dropbox is an example of this sort of thing. With a free account (which gives you 2GB of storage space) you can access your files via the internet from any networked computer. But, and this is important, your files are also stored as a local copy on your own machine - you just need an internet connection to synchronise them with the online version.

On downloading the Dropbox software (I don't think it's very big) it will create for you a Dropbox folder within your own file architecture (you can choose where it goes) and you can start putting files in there. I have Dropbox downloaded onto my home and work computer and the files that I tweak on those computers appear, miraculously ready-tweaked, when I get into work and vice versa. If your internet connection isn't working and you make changes to a file it will remain on the computer on which you edited it, but it will be unsyncrhonised with your other Dropbox.

You can tell the health status of each file and folder as there's a little green tick next to any file / folder which is up to date and syncrhonised, there's a rotating blue icon to indicate one that's being updated and when you open a file to work on it will have a red cross next to it (you need to save and close for it to update). So if you want to try this go to http://www.dropbox.com/ (they have a video there you can watch to tell you more about the service), create an account and sign up.

And now a word from our sponsors :)
Anyone can sign up for free 2GB but if you know someone who already has an account ask them for their 'referrer link' which can net you an extra 250mb - @sciencebase's referrer link is https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTgzNTg5MDk (Disclaimer: he isn't actually sponsoring me, I just like that phrase - my referrer link's at the end of the blog I'm just giving him top billing as he inspired me to update my post).

'MakeUseOf' have written a free guide but I confess I've not actually looked at it as I'm very familiar with Dropbox, but here it is http://sciencebase.tradepub.com/free/w_make17/prgm.cgi
Edit: Originally I mistakenly said that David had written this but he let me know that it was another company so have edited the above sentence.

You'll need an email address and a (self-created) password to log in - once you've installed the software you won't need to log in to use your files on your computer(s), only if you want to use the web interface. The web version is good - you can upload and delete files (but to edit them you'd have to download, delete and re-add so better to use your Dropbox folder for that).

A very easy way to sign up, if you don't want to start from scratch, is to ask one of your friends to send you an invite to share a folder with them - this will lead you through the process quite nicely.

Dropbox on the iPhone The iPhone Dropbox app is free from the appstore so all you need to do is download it and log in. Your files will then synchronise and you can read them online. It can open most things - I think it used to struggle with .rtf but that may have been fixed now. Most of mine are .txt, .doc, .ppt and it handles them fine. I can't remember if it cares whether it's .doc or .docx so you might want to double check.

For me, the big bonus is that you can open any file while connected to the internet and favourite it (using the star icon at the bottom of the iPhone screen). This means that if you need to access it in a low signal area you'll be able to. In the settings section (available from the app's start screen) you can set the size of your local storage (mine's 200MB but you can go up to 1GB). If you download the free PlainText app you can sync it (the default is a single PlainText folder but you can tweak it to sync with all your folders) and you can create new .txt documents on your iPhone - ie you can type something on your iPhone and then pick it up at your desk or at home. Nifty.

EDIT: I read a comment on one of Ben Goldacre's (secondary) blog posts which highlighted that this also works for .mp3 files etc. etc. Of course it does, why didn't I think of that??!!

What happens when you exceed your storage space? I once did this - don't forget that if you share Dropbox folders with other people then all of the contents you share adds towards your 2GB limit and it soon adds up. No files were deleted but I couldn't save any edits or add new files until I moved or deleted some older files. My only annoyance with Dropbox is that it didn't tell me there was a problem until I was at 2.5GB and had it mentioned it sooner I'd have pruned some files with less stress. But all was fine, but it's not a bad idea to check periodically what percentage of your allowance you're using.

Be aware though, that if you delete a file on your computer it isn't permanently deleted - this is often a good thing if you delete in error as you can undo this. As far as I can tell, 'deleted' files may actually contribute to your storage space - you can log in to your web account and choose the option to show deleted files, you'll see them in grey. You're then given the option to delete these permanently. Deleting files is a two-step process which, in the long run, I think is no bad thing - but useful to be aware of in case your storage starts to rack up.

I've been using Dropbox since January 2010 and am very pleased with it - I am not affiliated with them or anything dodgy like that :) ...and my referral link is https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTQwMDAxMDQ5