Dropbox links only work over SSL

Paul T.52

I made this method for getting a Dropbox link to some media I wanted to stream from Dropbox..

public String getLinkUrl(String path) throws DropboxException {
    DropboxAPI<AndroidAuthSession> dropboxAPI = DropboxManager.getInstance().getApi();
    DropboxAPI.DropboxLink dropboxMediaLink = dropboxAPI.media(path, false);

    return dropboxMediaLink.url;
}

This stopped working all of a sudden in the last few days but if I set the ssl flag to true in this line..

DropboxAPI.DropboxLink dropboxMediaLink = dropboxAPI.media(path, true);

It now works when setting SSL to true.
It would be good to understand why it no longer works without SSL though

Greg-DB

Thanks for the report. The servers for dl.dropboxusercontent.com are not currently listening on port 80, meaning that http:// requests won't work. We're looking into whether or not we can re-enable that, but for the sake of security we highly recommend switching to using https:// only.

In the Android Core SDK media function, this means passing true as the ssl parameter.

For reference, in the interest of user security, we stopped serving content over http a long time ago, and redirected requests from http to https after that, so it is likely that any clients you're using are already able to handle https links.