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How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

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Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#341

Post by _urga »

copperx wrote: post #118
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I know, DropBox is the only service that does delta block uploads correctly and switches to LAN transfer when two synced computers are in the same network. I know it's CS 101, but neither Google Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive do this. Not to mention the other services have bizarre naming limits (e.g., dotfiles are forbidden on OneDrive). Also, DropBox supports Linux officially.

"switches to LAN transfer when two synced computers are in the same network"

Dropbox LAN Sync still requires the local network to have Internet access, because it can't sync anything locally without a connection to the master Dropbox server, i.e. if your office goes offline, LAN Sync will not work.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#342

Post by microtonal »

tdurden wrote: post #286
outworlder wrote: post #152

Ok. Now that Dropbox is shady as well as overpriced, are there any good alternatives?

Resilio Sync [1] (Formerly BitTorrent Sync) has worked well for me. [1] https://getsync.com/individuals/

Indeed. Resilio Sync is a peer to peer synchronization tool, so data is not stored in the cloud. If you want a permanent cloud peer, Resilio Sync has the option of creating encrypted read-only secrets that you can use on a cloud peer. Such a peer will participate in the swarm, but will only see ciphertext data.

The application does not ask or require root access. And they support Linux and FreeBSD as well.

SyncThing should also be mentioned. However, if you want to share folders to other people as well, Resilio Sync seems to be the best option.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#343

Post by mcbits »

dredmorbius wrote: post #311
djsumdog wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Ever so slightly more polished: https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/

That's hard on the eyes, and the headings look like links. The top-level headings look just plain broken when they wrap.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#344

Post by dgoldstein »

chris_wot wrote: post #323
xenadu02 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you see this happen, please write in to our support team; we take data integrity issues very seriously.

Also I should probably mention that we keep 1 month of version history for free users and even more history for paid users, so if the corruption is recent you should be able to undo it yourself. But please report either way.

(Full disclosure: I work for Dropbox).

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#345

Post by rarepostinlurkr »

jimmaswell wrote: post #196
xenadu02 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could this be a consequence of the built in FS APIs coming up short, as Ben put it, and forcing DropBox to do things in less efficient ways to work around the limitations?

Doesn't Apple literally have a sync solution on this platform, likely using these same APIs? FSEvents powers a lot of core functionality on macOS so it's surprising to hear it just doesn't meet Dropboxes needs.

It's cool they are moving into the kernel soon anyway, just install their kext...

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#346

Post by rarepostinlurkr »

zymhan wrote: post #125
Xylakant wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do provide the OS, so they implicitly have access to all your files at a level that dropbox would have a hard time achieving.

> 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.

What he meant to say was "code can do anything! waves hands"

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#348

Post by bahoom »

elmigranto wrote: post #135
bahoom wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is so dangerous? Any app can take screenshots , listen to keyboard entries, send keys, move the mouse pointer and upload stuff to a server without any AXApi permission. Forbidding window movement doesn't add any security at all. Anyways, all I want a simple prompt explaining what the Accessibility API does and yes/no buttons.

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...

Well, that's obviously a bug in OSX.

I'm not saying that accessibility enabled apps can't do any harm, of course they can. My point is that they can't do more damage then regular applications you run on your mac.

The only way to run third party apps in a kind of secure environment is sandboxing.

All this accessibility api lockdown stuff from Apple is just pseudo-security.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#349

Post by frik »

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…

I removed the Dropbox app from my iPad when they started to require a active GPS to upload files. [about two years ago] If you disallow GPS for that app, it disallows you to upload files. Stupid decisions!?
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