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How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

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Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#391

Post by nameauser »

ptomato wrote: post #213
perfectfire wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use owncloud (and then dropbox inside it so some files are double backed up). I find it to be just fine. Have you had any problems with it?

Yes, last time I tried it, had a variety of conflict issues plus the client had some problems, performance and otherwise. If you're just using it as a backup solution (does it even keep file history?) from a single machine + mobile/web access, it may well work acceptably.

Being curious. What is "a variety of conflict issues"? Also could you perhaps expand on "the client had some problems"? Which client? I know an official Windows client exists as well as an Android client (this latter I use), but all communications are via HTTP (DAV for file transfers / calendar / etc. & REST for admin stuff), which means that a specific client is not necessary.

Personally, I use KDE's file manager (Dolphin). Plus a curl-cased Bash script for when I need to upload an arbitrary file from one of my home computers via my phone (SSH from phone to computer, sometimes over sat link, run "~/bin/upload.sh /some/file").

I manage my own ownCloud servers (one personal, one company), but hosted options are available.

And yes, it does keep file history (optional, enabled by default), as well as encrypted storage (optional, disabled by default).

Neither the client, nor the server even, require any administrative access.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#392

Post by snarshad »

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…

Regardless of the password issue, if you are legitimately working with Apple to get the granular access to implement the useful features you want, why would you in the meantime subvert Apple security mechanisms (by using a sql vulnerability - this already more than qualifies you as malware IMO) to sneak the features in rather than asking the user to grant the accessibility permission?? No, this is more than a "my bad," this is deceit and violating.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#393

Post by ptomato »

nameauser wrote: post #391
ptomato wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, last time I tried it, had a variety of conflict issues plus the client had some problems, performance and otherwise. If you're just using it as a backup solution (does it even keep file history?) from a single machine + mobile/web access, it may well work acceptably.

Being curious. What is "a variety of conflict issues"? Also could you perhaps expand on "the client had some problems"? Which client? I know an official Windows client exists as well as an Android client (this latter I use), but all communications are via HTTP (DAV for file transfers / calendar / etc. & REST for admin stuff), which means that a specific client is not necessary. Personally, I use KDE's file manager (D…

I honestly am not sure, it was quite some time ago. I recall being quite unhappy with something about how it handled a sync conflict but I'm not sure of the specifics.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#394

Post by gnicholas »

ikurei wrote: post #378
gnicholas wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I uninstalled the desktop client because of this exact issue. I just drag/drop via the web interface now. Might not work for some people, but it suits me fine.

If you think they are so nefarious a company, why do you trust them with your files?

Didn't say they were nefarious—just that their software hogs resources at times when it has no business doing so (i.e., when I'm not reading from or writing to my Dropbox folder).

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#395

Post by teacup50 »

ptomato wrote: post #376
teacup50 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last comment is ironic, given that Dropbox would literally not exist today without the runtime patching of the Finder. There was no other way to do what they did. The only reason Apple added API was because Dropbox came up with an idea that demonstrated the need for such an API to exist.

Their only feature which necessitated that, as far as I know, was the sync status badge display which is hardly necessary to the product.

Seamless "filesystem integration" -- which includes the Finder badging -- was central to what made Dropbox a novel product.

It's also a very useful feature that served people well.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#396

Post by dredmorbius »

mcbits wrote: post #343
dredmorbius wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wrapping is all-but-inevitable given dynamic display widths. What would your preference be? Smaller fonts for headers?

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#397

Post by ptomato »

teacup50 wrote: post #395
ptomato wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their only feature which necessitated that, as far as I know, was the sync status badge display which is hardly necessary to the product.

Seamless "filesystem integration" -- which includes the Finder badging -- was central to what made Dropbox a novel product. It's also a very useful feature that served people well.

Their filesystem integration would have been just as seamless without the badging. I admit the badging is a useful feature, and certainly made Dropbox better but by no means is it core to the product.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#398

Post by hollerith »

My Dropbox story: after I upgraded from Mountain Lion to El Capitan, the sidebar in the Finder went buggy (no way to remove a folder from the sidebar without restarting the Finder). After I started arranging for this next command line to run at the start of every OSX session, the bug went away: `killall -9 garcon`. This garcon identifies itself in Activity Monitor as "Dropbox Finder Integration".

Needless to say, I never asked or gave consent for Dropbox to integrate with the Finder (and sync still seems to continue to work after I disabled it).

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#399

Post by mcbits »

dredmorbius wrote: post #396
mcbits wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wrapping is all-but-inevitable given dynamic display widths. What would your preference be? Smaller fonts for headers?

It's the bottom border that looks off when wrapping. Since the headings are already distinguished by whitespace, size, weight, and color, the border doesn't really add anything. Overall, the page is not conveying a hierarchy to me at all. It looks very disjointed.

My preference would be to remove the borders/underlines, also remove the bold, and make the margins equal above and below the h3+ headings. If I were to actually use more than three headings, I'd probably do something completely different at the deepest levels (e.g. inline the headings or indent the whole text).

But I think we agree that it's worth some effort to fix up the browser's default styles. It's too bad they can't all just switch to something like Firefox's reader view without breaking the web.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#400

Post by dredmorbius »

mcbits wrote: post #399
dredmorbius wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrapping is all-but-inevitable given dynamic display widths. What would your preference be? Smaller fonts for headers?

It's the bottom border that looks off when wrapping. Since the headings are already distinguished by whitespace, size, weight, and color, the border doesn't really add anything. Overall, the page is not conveying a hierarchy to me at all. It looks very disjointed. My preference would be to remove the borders/underlines, also remove the bold, and make the margins equal above and below the h3+ headings. If I were to ac…

So, I'm really not a graphics designer, though I know what I like, what I don't like, and have a pretty good sense for what does and doesn't work well across a large range of display sizes.

This design isn't responsive other than having some reasonably sane defaults. It's derived from a more complex style that does resize headers and such as the pagesize varies. As far as niggling over header formatting ... that's getting into layout-weenie stuff and sweating the small stuff. The point is to have distinguishable headers. How you distinguish them ... is somewhat moot, though size, colour, underline, margin, typeface, etc., are some obvious dimensions. What I've given here does not, I'll posit, for the most part suck.

It may offend some sensibilities.

What I've started taking a strong liking to, actually, is using CSS numbering to create numbered sections (see https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq for an example -- I actually contributed the Reddit code, all one line of it, to enable this). It's a bit technical-documentation-ish, but tends to give a sense of place and structure within a document.

In practice, having too many levels of nesting is probably distracting. A book might have: Parts, Chapters, Sections, and possibly Subsections. That's H2 - H5 in a standard HTML hierarchy, with H1 reserved for the title.

A paper will rarely have more than Sections and Subsections -- H2 and H3 elements, plus h1 for the title. My reddit styling and docs tend to reflect this.

I will use more detailed breakouts when I'm outlining stuff, though I'll make pains to try to flatten the structure reasonably as I can. I'm often digging in the weeds myself, in complex topics, and achieving a workable structure is a considerable effort.

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