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How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

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Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#321

Post by josteink »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #55
new299 wrote: post #29

Dropbox circumventing security restrictions (albeit for legit reasons) is particularly worrying because they have board members who support warrentless surveillance. In my mind Dropbox became a company not worth supporting when Rice joined Dropbox's board ( http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ ). Personally, with a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the securi…

Honestly they're pretty much the most expensive out of all of the storage solutions. Other than versioning they have less features than their competition as well. If they were born today I can't imagine they would have gone much of anywhere. Not sure how they're doing financially today but it seems each product they create flops. So even outside of this surveillance stuff I don't get the point in using them.

> So even outside of this surveillance stuff I don't get the point in using them.

It's the only service with decent cross platform support, and by that I mean first class Linux support is a 100% requirement.

And Dropbox is among the only ones with Linux support.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#322

Post by ptomato »

lucb1e wrote: post #254
vermontdevil wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If anything is overpriced, tarsnap is -- or was, last time I compared prices. Also picodollars are a bit opaque. 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 w…

That's probably the first time anyone's ever complained about tarsnap being too expensive, honestly. 'tptacek & 'patio11 bang on a lot about it being too cheap, and they're right. tarsnap costs a pretty minimal amount over the underlying S3 storage, but I'm sure if you don't really care about 99.999999999% durability a hard drive on a pi is great too.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#323

Post by chris_wot »

xenadu02 wrote: post #136
newhouseb wrote: post #121

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…

Can you also tell us why Dropbox eats lots of CPU cycles anytime there is any filesystem activity? If I unzip a large archive in /tmp, Dropbox is eating 60% of my CPU. If I open the new Xcode for the first time (and the system verifies all the signatures) Dropbox is eating 100% of one CPU. It really seems like the Dropbox client is monitoring the entire filesystem (all FSEvents) instead of just the dropbox syncing fo…

Yeah, I'm more curious as to why Dropbox corrupted a few of my PDFs. Has been happening for years for a variety of people.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#324

Post by PhantomGremlin »

wlkr wrote: post #315
jkmcf wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear what you find. My research has shown that Dropbox is mostly the only sync service supported in mobile apps. iCloud is next. After that it's very rare to see any other integration. I'd love to see Box or someone else encourage popular apps to support their sync platforms, but I doubt it will happen. I blame Apple for not supporting easy 3rd party integrations.

I switched from Dropbox to Mega a few years ago and they now have mobile apps, sync clients for multiple operating systems and decent browser extensions in addition to a more generous storage allowance. There is also the added benefit of encryption. So far I remain impressed with their service.

I switched from Dropbox to Mega

Really?

FWIW Kim Dotcom, the founder of Mega, has distanced himself from it, saying the company had "suffered from a hostile takeover by a Chinese investor who is wanted in China for fraud"[1]

So yeah, don't trust Dropbox. Instead trust some shady Chinese characters. Can you name one of them? In comparison, note that Ben Newhouse, a Dropbox employee, is actually posting in this discussion.

There is also the added benefit of encryption

Without full source code to said encryption, all you have to go on is "trust us".

Forced to choose between the two, I know who I'd trust, and it wouldn't be Mega. YMMV.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_(service)

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#325

Post by fredsir »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #287
electic wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, after the last year and a half, anything that wants root access, that is not open source, is out. Now, being open source does not make that automatically safe but it is a step in the right direction. Dropbox, MS Office, etc, are closed source tools that puts too much at stake. Granted my team is small, but we just uninstalled dropbox today. Going to use the web interface and look for another solution in the…

Mac OS X is a mostly closed source operating system so I don't understand why you are drawing the line with third parties.

I suspect many would like to run something more open than OS X/macOS, but because of the alternatives, it's just not viable for business purposes not to, according to what their needs are. I know that is the situation for me.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#326

Post by pkamb »

brentdax wrote: post #236
newhouseb wrote: post #121

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…

> more likely that Apple will further lock down the accessibility APIs, possibly even making them unavailable without an Apple-issued, potentially App Store-only entitlement.

Please feel free to duplicate my radar! Accessibility and Productivity/Utility app developers would love a Sandbox entitlement.

rdar://13570189 - Sandbox entitlement for Accessibility API to allow apps for the disabled

The Accessibility toolkit has always been off limits to Sandboxed apps, and no entitlement exists. This seems unlikely to change. It's unfortunate, as this keeps many good and useful apps out of the Mac App Store.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#327

Post by joelkesler »

xenadu02 wrote: post #136
newhouseb wrote: post #121

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…

Can you also tell us why Dropbox eats lots of CPU cycles anytime there is any filesystem activity? If I unzip a large archive in /tmp, Dropbox is eating 60% of my CPU. If I open the new Xcode for the first time (and the system verifies all the signatures) Dropbox is eating 100% of one CPU. It really seems like the Dropbox client is monitoring the entire filesystem (all FSEvents) instead of just the dropbox syncing fo…

Same problem. When working with or moving files in folders other than the dropbox folder, I still find the dropbox application taking up large amounts of CPU. Dropbox also, in the last few months, has been messing up my spotlight database and causing mdworker and fontd to use all available cpu.

Then I start getting console messages like this: mds (Error) FMW: WE ARE DROPPING FMW EVENTS!

All disappears after disabling Dropbox (and rebuilding caches and the spotlight database)

Behaviour seen on multiple macs I own.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#328

Post by therein »

elmigranto wrote: post #146
newhouseb wrote: post #121

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 use elevated access for where the built-in FS APIs come up short. Can you please provide an example of such shortcomings and accessibility APIs that are better?

Setting the icon of a folder. Seriously. That's what they are using it for.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#329

Post by pkamb »

I didn't see it linked, so here's the Stack Overflow thread that documents some of these sqlite3 hacks for enabling access for assistive devices programmatically.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17693408/enable-access-fo...

I love the first comment on the question:

> No, there is no way to circumvent the need for visiting this screen. It is one of the operating system's base protections. Any way that is found to circumvent this will almost certainly be patched out. – Jul 17 '13

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#330

Post by kuschku »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #324
wlkr wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Dropbox to Mega a few years ago and they now have mobile apps, sync clients for multiple operating systems and decent browser extensions in addition to a more generous storage allowance. There is also the added benefit of encryption. So far I remain impressed with their service.

I switched from Dropbox to Mega Really? FWIW Kim Dotcom, the founder of Mega, has distanced himself from it, saying the company had "suffered from a hostile takeover by a Chinese investor who is wanted in China for fraud" [1] So yeah, don't trust Dropbox. Instead trust some shady Chinese characters. Can you name one of them? In comparison, note that Ben Newhouse, a Dropbox employee, is actually posting in this discus…

Luckily, there's third party clients that are open source for Mega.

And they're actually usable.

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