Speaking of alternatives, what's wrong with Resilio sync?
How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
301–310 of 435 posts
Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
#302Hi 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…
That office integration is a PITA, is there anyway to disable it?
On a Mac:
Click Dropbox Icon in the menubar -> Options (gear in bottom right) -> General -> set Dropbox badge to "Never Show"
Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very strange that after I remove Dropbox from the accessibility list you think it's ok to add it back in again. That's the reason I'll be closing my account.
Absolutely. I dropped Dropbox some time back, when it became obvious that they didn't respect the user's wishes at all. This has been a long-standing thing with them - some years back there was some stink about the forced Dropbox branding in the Finder (which we now see is related to this). Many people (including me) found it rude that it insists on adding useless widgets, badging icons and inserting crap in the Find…
For what it's worth I find the finder icons and sidebar additions to be nice touch, but I guess it would be nice to be able to disable that. The office integration on the other hand is beyond useless. The Dropbox badge mostly gets in the way of being able to scroll trough my documents and I have never used it for anything.
Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Per the original article, even root doesn't automatically have permission to modify the system.preferences.accessibility list.
I think you're wrong. It's a bit vague with all the unfamiliar systems (I have no experience with OS X), but root is mentioned in a few places: > "The allow-root property specifies whether a right should be allowed automatically if the requesting process is running with uid == 0. This defaults to false" So the agent does not (by default) make an exception for applications running with uid 0. It does not say anything…
Agree. I now see the agent it installs is suid root.
Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point you need to follow up with convincing technical details of why Dropbox needs the circumvention to counter the accusation and rebuild the damaged trust. The reason for needing Accessibility API listed in your response is pretty vague, especially for those Mac users not having Microsoft products tainting their systems. I've deleted Dropbox from my Mac for now. I'm not installing it back till there's reaso…
> why Dropbox needs the circumvention I'm not affiliated with Dropbox, but compare the UX of Dropbox (type in your admin-password and that's it) with the one of Steam (opens the System preferences and forces you to make manual changes). Both need to be allowed accessibility access for one feature or another, but only one of them provides convincing UX. For us power users, the "official" way is better, sure, but what'…
Doing it is only part of of it. Doing it behind users back without a message or warning, or a even an article on their website is the biggest problem.
Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so they implicitly have access to all your files If you can demonstrate how Apple has access to my files on an OS X installation with no iCloud configured, I will round up a massive bounty.
Open your finder. Every file that you see has just been touched by apples code. Your OS does have access to all files that you have on your computer. It manages all network connections. It exposes all information that tools such as little snitch display to you. Apple signs and provides all software updates to you. They control SPI and app sandboxing. I'm not saying that Apple does access your files. I do trust them n…
You can melt your MacBook in the oven but not your iCloud account. You're comparing apples to oranges (pun intended).
Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
#307Hi 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…
I still don't understand how this allows for accessibility circumvention dialog.
If I understood correctly, using the root permission granted by the user when the prompt for the password comes up, they hack the database containing the accessibility settings, and add themselves to the list.
Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plugins that give you the fancy icons for some file managers, and they still run in user-space (and as non-root).
> plugins Finder doesn't have plugins, hence the accessibility API shenanigans necessary to get the same effect.
Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
One example that comes to my mind, is that you won't be able to copy any data from keychain. In fact, no one can access protected keychain data, if any app that is not in Accessibility "listens to keyboard". http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/212622/keychain-won...
Pure speculations: Wouldn't it be possible for an app without accessibility access to just kill and relaunch another app in a wrapper? This wrapper having hooks into system APIs?
I don't see why not, but what's the point. You either in, and can do X, or not. Can you clarify, please?
Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac
#310Can anyone suggest a vetted-along-these-lines alternative (preferably open source) to Dropbox?
OwnCloud: https://owncloud.org/