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How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

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Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#381

Post by ddeville »

cstejerean wrote: post #303
__jal wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can disable the Finder integration in the preferences, same for the badge.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#382

Post by nameauser »

jkmcf wrote: post #290
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…

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 have no idea what Dropbox actually is or does (I'm FOSS-only, at home and at work), I've only heard of it, so I may be way off the mark.

With that said, on the assumption that it is a way to exchange files between computers and/or share with other users, it would seem to be the case that ownCloud (nextCloud) fits the bill. You can host it yourself (as I do) or use a third party to host it for you. I have been using it for a number of years and I'm entirely happy with it.

Also, depending on your use scenario, another possible option may be https://www.stackfield.com/ a German end-to-end encrypted storage company. I believe there are others offering similar services.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#383

Post by krrrh »

pyrophane wrote: post #103
krrrh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their client just works better at syncing quickly and reliably. A huge criteria for me is how much CPU it uses in the background compared to competing solutions from Google or MS and it was often an order of magnitude less (other clients may have improved in the last year or two, I haven't checked). Another significant advantage is that they support a stable command line client for Linux.

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…

It's interesting to read this as I've had instances running on servers for years without having to be restarted. That's on Ubuntu. Maybe the binaries they distribute aren't adequately tested on other distros?

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#384

Post by jads »

angry_octet wrote: post #369
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…

You are really just digging the hole deeper at this point. This needs a mea maxima culpa. Apple really should kick you from the App Store and blacklist dropbox as malware.

I don't think Dropbox is listed on the App Store (I doubt it meets the sandboxing restrictions)

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#385

Post by [deleted] »

angry_octet wrote: post #369
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…

You are really just digging the hole deeper at this point. This needs a mea maxima culpa. Apple really should kick you from the App Store and blacklist dropbox as malware.

[deleted]

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#386

Post by orangea »

Gorbzel wrote: post #288
ThomPete wrote: post #193

Dropbox trying to find ways to push the platform is a good thing not a bad thing. If anything Apple have put so many restrictions on OSX and isn't pushing for much innovation on their side to allow people to build ever more powerful apps. I understand general security concerns but I don't understand the critique of a company like Dropbox. They are doing the user er service not a disservice by finding a balance betwee…

Dropbox is using cached root privs that it now claims it doesn't even need to force itself into full control of your machine, on the back of an accessibility exploit, actively disregards explicit user actions taken to remove it, does this all via SQL injection, and if all of the above doesn't meet the definition of malware, I don't know what does. All this from a company who recently had one of the largest credential…

> does this all via SQL injection

This isn't what SQL injection is.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#387

Post by niutech »

jkmcf wrote: post #290
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…

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.

Seafile (https://www.seafile.com) and ownCloud (https://owncloud.org) both are open source and have mobile apps. Worth checking!

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#388

Post by jsjohnst »

rarepostinlurkr wrote: post #345
jimmaswell wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I can't fathom why you think them being a kext is a good thing. I refuse to use anything anymore that needs that, every app that needs that inevitably is a source of something breaking in OS X

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#389

Post by fmajid »

electic wrote: post #282
newhouseb wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> @newhouseb, I don't have Office, so I've turned off the badge. Is Dropbox now going to leave my accessibility permissions the way I set them? Or is it going to reactivate a permission behind my back that it no longer even needs? Yep, we’re going to fix this so that if you uncheck it, we leave it unchecked. > This fiasco has probably made it more likely that Apple will further lock down the accessibility APIs, possi…

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…

Try SyncThing. It's cross-platform (written in Go), fast and secure (BitTorrent Sync style, but open-source).

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#390

Post by ninjabeans »

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…

I noticed a lot of disk activity once and fired up Process Monitor (on Windows). Dropbox.exe was going through literally all the files on my computer. That was when I uninstalled it forever.
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