MICROSOFT SKYDRIVE CHANGES HASHING SCHEME::BOO SKYDRIVE!!

WHAT IS WITH Microsoft and just CHANGING Things.

They recently changed their hashing scheme on SkyDrive so that links were rewritten. I’m SO glad I’ve been using esnips and NOT skydrive (i’m not even linking there.. who knows, it may change) for anything on here.

They changed it so the URLs get COMPLETELY rewritten. The URL went from:

http://n61ofw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pXBOTt7tQ5TePwcrFto_lrQ_qD5D_RZiP9TZpOINsRJ7omqZLzyVPG5osK3Zk73AIIV9-hicdVOEyB6WtNpJCaw/myfile.txt

http://n61ofw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pMRpZHLOl6gwTmcXcdqiVu1DnwOdXF5XNM9rJfD4PCBXdCK35hNK5qeZzb-SV91Sn6odVUj_97CXE18b8VFiwBw/myfile.txt

The lower url is the new one.

CAN YOU BELIEVE THEY DID THAT? I can’t. They just broke.. well over a MILLION links on the web if they did this to everybody. I can’t BELIEVE they did that. It sends me reeling. I’d NEVER use SkyDRive now, knowing that this is something they MIGHT just arbitrarily decide to do in the future.

5 Comments

  1. Hi Bobobobo,

    I work on SkyDrive, and I’m sorry to hear about your frustration with the service.

    Unfortunately if you were directly linking to files on SkyDrive, you were using the service in an unsupported way. We do not guarantee that direct links to files stored in SkyDrive will not change over time. The change you are describing isn’t something “we arbitrarily decided to do”; rather, it is a function of the way our system works.

    When you want to link to a file on SkyDrive, the way to do so and make sure your links don’t break is to link to the file’s “self” page (the address that includes self.aspx) or to use the “Embed” feature. If you use Windows Live Writer to embed photos from SkyDrive into your blog posts, those URIs will also not change.

    Again, I’m sorry that this functionality caught you by surprise. Feel free to get in touch if you have any additional questions, and I hope you’ll give SkyDrive another shot in the future.

  2. but.. but.. semantic web.. and Uniform Resource Identifiers, and .. and.. borken links.. don’t you guys pay attention to these things at all??

    c’mon. its just so fundamentally wrong

  3. Couldn’t agree more, bobobobo – a link is a link is a link, your provider should not just CHANGE things. Perhaps the workaround to this aspx link could be described more fully – but, Hey-sus Marimba, an 89 character location description? That, too, is absolutely nuts.

  4. Direct links to files on SkyDrive are temporary, and do change. This is for a reason. SkyDrive is not meant to be used in this way.

    However, I’ve posted a solution to this problem.

    So it’s easy to create permanent direct URLs (permalinks) to files on SkyDrive. In the example on my blog post, I use SkyDrive to stream video.

    Example:-

    http://www.timacheson.com/Blog/2009/oct/hosting_video_and_web_apps_on_skydrive

    More details (the latest comment, 26 Oct 2009):-

    http://www.timacheson.com/Blog/2009/oct/hosting_video_and_web_apps_on_skydrive#comment144


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