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Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

blogs.dropbox.com

41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jmancuso@expandrive.com if you want to reconnect, sorry if I've missed an email in the past.

Looking back that's the e-mail one of the messages went to. It was actually a reply to your seemingly automated messages saying "...please don't hesitate to shoot me an email..." and my reply didn't seem to generate any response. But poof, into thin air it all went. I'm a bit biased here because it just drives me nuts when all these companies pretend to play nice publicly by answering comments (like mine! thank you,…

fair enough. Shoot me an email if you're still interested

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#42
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume a party as large as Dropbox can request Apple to extend the APIs where necessary? As large? Dropbox is like a fly to Apple. Not to mention competitors. And they haven't budged for much larger parties. So, unless it's something that Apple intends to do anyway, Dropbox's request will don't have much success.

Just a data point: Fastmail got them to implement/support push for Fastmail on iOS (no, it's not just IMAP IDLE).

Sure, and occasionally the add stuff and consult with Mac software houses and indie devs (or musicians and editors for their Pro stuff) on what to add etc.

But that's not the same as building a bunch of APIs for a competitor.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#43

If you want to try out a FUSE-style Dropbox filesystem, I write one. It's available on Mac, Windows and soon Linux. [shameless plug] http://www.expandrive.com The bit I don't quite understand about Project infinite is that you still have to manually decide what gets sync'd or not. It's also not a network volume, so things like virus scanners or search indexers can just page in-data? And if you want to offload data, y…

I've been an expandrive user for over 5 years now, thanks for the great product!

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#44
post #30
post #2

Thanks to dropbox inifit I discovered Infinit.sh - http://infinit.sh/ which I got really excited about. I wonder what is their experience with using FUSE and DOKANY..

Got excited as well, even signups for news on their slack group. But nothing so far, not even access to the beta binaries.

As long as you're not on Windows, they have binaries available to try it out now-- I just went through their Getting Started guide (http://infinit.sh/get-started) on my Mac.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#45
Not really enthusiastic about file syncing moving into kernel space. I get that this is necessary for on-demand fetching of files, but I worry about stability and failure modes - I can see apps stalling and/or getting confused when file open calls fail because the network drops, etc.

Reminds me of the Coda/AFS2 days, really (those weren't as much fun as you'd think, back when we opened files over X.25 links...)

Bottom line: I hope it's configurable and that I can switch it off (preferably by default).

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he doesn't want to talk to you. I'm not stoked to see you commenting about your personal issues.

Well if he didn't want to talk to me, he might rethink sending messages to people blindly asking them to get in touch.

Fair.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#47
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume a party as large as Dropbox can request Apple to extend the APIs where necessary? As large? Dropbox is like a fly to Apple. Not to mention competitors. And they haven't budged for much larger parties. So, unless it's something that Apple intends to do anyway, Dropbox's request will don't have much success.

> So, unless it's something that Apple intends to do anyway, Dropbox's request will don't have much success. You'd think Apple would be happy to add extensions they themselves could use in the future to replace Dropbox with their own iCloud extension.

Apple already uses private APIs for iCloud, I'm sure they would love to add some more, to make Dropbox an inferior experience.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#48

As a paying Pro customer, I am a bit worried how intent they seem to be on pushing the business/enterprise products. First of all, Dropbox the web application is spammed with Dropbox Business advertising. I am already paying. And, no, my employer (a European university) is unlikely to roll out Dropbox Business. So please stop bugging me :(. Secondly, more and more features are rolled out to business users first. Why?…

I also wish they were more up front about the fact that some features of Dropbox stops working, like Camera Upload, if you transfer your account into a business plan.

I don't understand the limitations that stops it from working. I still have my images there, and when I connect my phone to my laptop using USB-cable, Dropbox syncs the images.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#49
post #29
post #21

Lest we forget: this is the company that let anyone on the internet log in to any Dropbox user account they wanted with any arbitrary value for the password. https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2011/06/yesterdays-authent...

Hi Sneak! As you're no doubt aware, people change over the years. They learn from mistakes, improve how they live their lives, and become better over time. Companies tend to be the same way, learning along the way and maturing, especially when it comes to business processes and risk-related parts of the business. It's entirely possible that the Dropbox of 2016 isn't like the Dropbox of five years ago in many concrete…

Regardless of how much they've changed, 2011 Dropbox was decidedly not two guys in a garage and their complete and total lack of security engineering diligence and multiple overlapping process failures that must have occurred to lead to that incident call every future "At Dropbox we take security seriously" into question. (See also: "goto fail".)

At some point, Dropbox clearly didn't take security seriously. They claim otherwise now. The question is now "at what point should we believe them?" It's subjective and my opinion is that the 2011 management that didn't take security seriously then probably still doesn't take it that seriously now - they've simply hired underlings to worry about it.

I have experiences with companies that have security in their DNA from day one, and I've {observed, worked with, been a customer of} a whole fuckton more who bolt it on later once time and money permit. Most of the latter do not actually care one whit about security, it's just one more "avoid existential threat x" box they have to tick as their business grows.

Google falls into the former. Dropbox and Slack and LinkedIn fall into the latter.

https://www.troyhunt.com/we-take-security-seriously-otherwis...

There is no reasonable amount of time that needs to pass until I willingly let a Dropbox or a Slack or a LinkedIn run code in my workstation's kernel. Maybe that makes me a jerk - if it does, I apologize.

PS: That's not how you spell my username.

Re: Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite

#50
post #2

Thanks to dropbox inifit I discovered Infinit.sh - http://infinit.sh/ which I got really excited about. I wonder what is their experience with using FUSE and DOKANY..

Same, i moved all my storage over to Infinit on an ongoing trial run. Funny too, because if Infinit works out, i'll be canceling my Dropbox plan.
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