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ptpb / pb

pb is a formerly-lightweight pastebin and url shortener
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Question: Private paste vs Non-private paste #255

Closed hermanzdosilovic closed 3 years ago

hermanzdosilovic commented 3 years ago

Hi,

can you please briefly explain the difference between private pastes and non-private pastes?

What is advantage and disadvantage of using private pastes?

Thank you.

BR, Herman

buhman commented 3 years ago

"private" just means that it has a longer URL.

Advantage: it is (significantly) harder to guess a "private" URL

Disadvantage: it is (significantly) harder to memorize/type a "private" URL. For example, sometimes I would use ptpb.pw to transfer a file to a machine that I can't easily copy-paste the URL to. In this case I would have used a non-private paste.

buhman commented 3 years ago

The original thinking behind "private" pastes was also that your paste would never "collide" with any other paste, whereas this is more likely with a non-"private" paste. This private paste non-collision property is as unlikely as a full sha1 collision.

In both cases, when two pastes have a shared sha1 prefix [1] or full digest [2], the less-recent paste is shadowed by the more recent paste.

[1] for non-private pastes [2] for private pastes

buhman commented 3 years ago

In summary, the feature is useful, but perhaps not named well.

hermanzdosilovic commented 3 years ago

Thank you @buhman for your answer. :)