Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

applehelpwriter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 435 posts

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#401

Post by tjl »

fmajid wrote: post #389
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…

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

I use it, but there's no iOS solution so I can't use it for a number of things.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#402

Post by tjl »

SSLy wrote: post #258
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). Is it a native OS X dialog API, or native OS X authentication API? I could make a password prompt myself, and call that "being official Win32 API". Can you show me the class where you invoke it, so I can judge for myself?

It's a standard OS X authentication API. The overview of the authorization stuff is discussed in:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Securi...

If you look under "Authorization Services Tasks" you'll see there's details about calling a privileged installer.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#403

Post by tjl »

jads wrote: post #384
angry_octet wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Upgrading your privileges is against sandboxing rules, so no it can't be sandboxed.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#404

Post by angry_octet »

jads wrote: post #384
angry_octet wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I meant the IOS App Store, not the Mac App Store. But this does highlight why Mac App Store app restrictions exist.

Re blacklisting, I'm referring to Apple's Xprotect (https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/topic/xprotect/).

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#405

Post by chris_wot »

dgoldstein wrote: post #344
chris_wot wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I'm a huge fan of Dropbox and I pay a monthly fee. I probably don't need to as my data needs aren't huge, but you guys are frankly the first people I've used that did this sort of thing properly and I believe you are worth paying a subscription fee to.

I'll log a ticket :-) might need to reproduce the issue first. Pretty awesome that you have employees who respond to posts on HN incidentally, that automatically increases my loyalty to a company several notches!

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#406

Post by andrewprock »

nxc18 wrote: post #374
gwbas1c wrote: post #285

I work Syncplicity, a Dropbox competitor and investigated building a feature that is similar to the Dropbox badge. (We call it the App Tab. Basically, it's UI that tacks onto Office that tells you that someone else is editing the same document.) We've had requests for this feature for years. I can't stress how much customers request this feature; it's put a lot of egg on our face that Dropbox beat us to it. In order…

Or maybe, just maybe, the PM doesn't care about having to "hack" into Mac, because most Dropbox customers just don't care and would rather the service they are paying for is functional. Just a thought.

Nobody cares about security, until they have a security problem.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#407

Post by elcritch »

SyneRyder wrote: post #377
rarepostinlurkr wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Is Apple's sync reliable though? There was an episode of MacBreak Weekly last week where both Adam Engst & Andy Ihnatko urged people not to enable the new Sierra sync system, and talked about instances of data loss caused by Apple's various sync features. The segment begins here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgE1c-YTEpE&t=65m02s I thought it was common knowledge that Apple's own sync (nevermind the APIs they provi…

That and what I take to be the iCloud / System Indexing daemon's (like `mdfind`) kill my battery life. The other's reports of poor Dropbox performance baffles me a bit as it never seems to give me issues, but iCloud/Google Drive both have both had big performance penalties on 3 various macs I've tried them on.

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#408

Post by killerpopiller »

niutech wrote: post #387
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.

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

for synching between devices I use BT-Sync, now Sync.. closed source but reliable as a background daemon not needing intervention

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#409

Post by killerpopiller »

tjl wrote: post #401
fmajid wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I use it, but there's no iOS solution so I can't use it for a number of things.

BT-Sync is the original of syncthing with iOS-support but considered bad because its closed source and comercial

I like it though

Re: How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

#410

Post by SyneRyder »

elcritch wrote: post #407
SyneRyder wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Apple's sync reliable though? There was an episode of MacBreak Weekly last week where both Adam Engst & Andy Ihnatko urged people not to enable the new Sierra sync system, and talked about instances of data loss caused by Apple's various sync features. The segment begins here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgE1c-YTEpE&t=65m02s I thought it was common knowledge that Apple's own sync (nevermind the APIs they provi…

That and what I take to be the iCloud / System Indexing daemon's (like `mdfind`) kill my battery life. The other's reports of poor Dropbox performance baffles me a bit as it never seems to give me issues, but iCloud/Google Drive both have both had big performance penalties on 3 various macs I've tried them on.

That's also my experience - I tried using OneDrive & Bitcasa at various times, and found they used far more battery than Dropbox ever did. I'd consider switching from Dropbox, but the competitors seem inferior to me (and Dropbox has more universal support).
Post reply on HN