251–260 of 435 posts
On the Linux side, has anybody looked at what installing Dropbox does? I'm guessing it's not going to be different from what it does on a Mac, but it would be nice to know exactly...
I wonder what will happen when Apple plugs those security holes. Will Dropbox cease to run as it does now, and suddenly for instance lose important features?
This appears to be impossible in Sierra, as the relevant db has been added to SIP. I have un-granted access, and the dropbox app has not been able to re-enable it, nor has it complained (and yes, I restarted).
Hi HN — Ben from Dropbox here on the desktop client team. Wanted to clarify a few things — - Clearly we need to do a better job communicating about Dropbox’s OS integration. We ask for permissions once but don’t describe what we’re doing or why. We’ll fix that. - We only ask for privileges we actively use -- but unfortunately some of the permissions aren’t as granular as we would like. - We use accessibility APIs for…
> - We never see or store your admin password. The dialog box you see is a native OS X API (i.e. made by Apple). To clarify for others: In /Library/DropboxHelperTools, you'll find a folder for each user full of setuid tools which run as root and do various privileged things. I assume that the client is presenting the normal OS X "ask for elevated access" UI and then using that elevated access to configure and install…
Ok. Now that Dropbox is shady as well as overpriced, are there any good alternatives?
I'm looking at this: http://www.tarsnap.com/ HN has mentioned this several times in the past. I'm now looking at the prior comments about this.
I really wanted to use it and hoped it'd come out reasonably compared to alternatives, but I actually found none except buying a hard disk + raspberry pi myself and hosting it at a friend's place. That was cheaper by about a factor 2, which (at 3TB data) was too much to ignore for my student budget. This was about two years ago though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had significant issues attempting to run dropbox headless on the server for file syncing. We needed to include files from another group that was used to primarily working in Dropbox in a daily report build, and so our first go at it was to just run dropbox on that machine and pull the files directly from there. Long story short, the Dropbox client crashed periodically and would stop syncing due to issues with it…
I didn't think Dropbox was meant for use on servers. I can see reasons why you would, but it seems like mapping a drive / mounting a share / etc would be better suited for accessing files on a server.
If all you need is folder/volume sharing between two machines, samba or nfs (or something similar) works great, but as I mentioned the reason for attempting to use dropbox in that fashion was to integrate with a workflow already being used by another team.
I have given Dropbox access to my files, admins rights, and ability to run in the kernel. I'm not freaking out about the Accessibility API. setuid binaries: $ tree -p /Library/DropboxHelperTools/ /Library/DropboxHelperTools/ ├── [-r-s--x--x] DropboxHelperInstaller └── [drwxr-xr-x] Dropbox_u501 ├── [-r-s--x--x] dbaccessperm ├── [-r-s--x--x] dbfseventsd └── [-r-s--x--x] dbkextd kernel extension: $ kextstat -b com.getdr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We use OneDrive at work and it works pretty much exactly as well as I recall Dropbox working back when I used it.
When I last tried it the performance was abysmal, almost as bad as Google Drive. Also, no Linux client. I didn't use it enough to know if it has the same conflict issues as many of the other ones I tried — Microsoft may well have managed to get that right.
Hi HN — Ben from Dropbox here on the desktop client team. Wanted to clarify a few things — - Clearly we need to do a better job communicating about Dropbox’s OS integration. We ask for permissions once but don’t describe what we’re doing or why. We’ll fix that. - We only ask for privileges we actively use -- but unfortunately some of the permissions aren’t as granular as we would like. - We use accessibility APIs for…
Is it a native OS X dialog API, or native OS X authentication API? I could make a password prompt myself, and call that "being official Win32 API".
Can you show me the class where you invoke it, so I can judge for myself?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - We never see or store your admin password. The dialog box you see is a native OS X API (i.e. made by Apple). To clarify for others: In /Library/DropboxHelperTools, you'll find a folder for each user full of setuid tools which run as root and do various privileged things. I assume that the client is presenting the normal OS X "ask for elevated access" UI and then using that elevated access to configure and install…
Not from Dropbox but when you remove an app from accessibility permissions OS X will make you manually enable it again.
I have given Dropbox access to my files, admins rights, and ability to run in the kernel. I'm not freaking out about the Accessibility API. setuid binaries: $ tree -p /Library/DropboxHelperTools/ /Library/DropboxHelperTools/ ├── [-r-s--x--x] DropboxHelperInstaller └── [drwxr-xr-x] Dropbox_u501 ├── [-r-s--x--x] dbaccessperm ├── [-r-s--x--x] dbfseventsd └── [-r-s--x--x] dbkextd kernel extension: $ kextstat -b com.getdr…
Dropbox on Linux needs none of that. Sure it doesn't have the fancy icons in file managers, but it also runs in user-space without a kernel module.