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A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

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Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#41
post #29

I don't use Dropbox so I am wondering, is this fundamentally different from storing everything in S3? Is it like a single S3 bucket? Or multiple buckets on the same account?

Dropbox is essentially just a cloud synced folder. Anyone who had the shared login credentials had access to the entire production server and fragments of it could be left on any computers that were synced to it. Anyone could also delete or modify anything and it would propagate the changes to everyone else's copies with very little logging or version control. You can restore a previous version of the file, but it is…

Is it shared credentials even for business accounts? Surely they must have some kind of team based shared access option for that?

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't make it past the first block of text. I wonder if people who write like that realize how it makes them look? I'd never hire them.

Personally I found this piece pretty fun to read. The guy is ventilating some stress through prose, not applying to work with you.

I enjoyed it too. It reminds me of The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. Both were written in very similar style.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#43
post #40

That was a cool nightmare scenario story, but holy mother of mercy was it ever tedious to read! I can tolerate some bad grammar, but somehow the combination of incorrect articles, words auto-spellchecked to something completely different, run-on sentences, and lack of punctuation, made it a real chore to read through without getting lost...

The author is probably a non native English speaker

It actually reads to me like the author is definitely a native English speaker.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#44

Is this a problem with tech? I imagine the users who decided to put sensitive data on dropbox are personally liable? Legal might have work to do? But i fail to see the tech challenge?

As an employee, you are shielded from all civil liability and some criminal liability. Sure you may be named in a lawsuit but it’s because you represent the llc/Corp and your only responsibility is to forward the documents to your upper management/legal department.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#45
post #5

I remember as a freshman in college using Dropbox as version control for a 4-person group project. Even then it was a hurdle. Even with everyone sitting in the same room literally saying "okay I'm working on X nobody touch that file for a couple minutes". Jesus.

I was imagining (wishful thinking, I'm sure) that they were pushing to a Git repo hosted on Dropbox, which actually works remarkably well.

No, he said that they had someone to manually download the last version of each file. If they were really using git hosted over Dropbox they could have simply cloned the repo.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#46

That was a cool nightmare scenario story, but holy mother of mercy was it ever tedious to read! I can tolerate some bad grammar, but somehow the combination of incorrect articles, words auto-spellchecked to something completely different, run-on sentences, and lack of punctuation, made it a real chore to read through without getting lost...

What. Personally I really enjoyed the writing.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#47
When Danske Bank aquired Sampo Bank in Estland, Danske Bank spend one million hours on moving and lifting Sampo Bank's IT into Danske Bank's systems.

That didn't work out.

And we all know what happened then.

When the board and ceo want's to aquired a business, IT is just something they believe can follow along easily.

Most developers are straight up lazy and uprofessional to do a job, and mixing in security is just scary as hell.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#48
post #13

> 5. Audit has some explaining todo. Yes, that's a total fuck up on their side as well. That an incompetent company dies while doing stupid stunts like that is understandable and how the market filters out stupidity. That another company looks at it and thinks "Oh that looks fine", that's a total failure at their work.

What "audit" are we talking about here, though?

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't make it past the first block of text. I wonder if people who write like that realize how it makes them look? I'd never hire them.

Personally I found this piece pretty fun to read. The guy is ventilating some stress through prose, not applying to work with you.

I don't doubt that there's an interesting story in there. I tried to hang in long enough to find out. I can only take so much, though.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#50
post #4
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My assumption, given the storage requirements for laptops, is that the actual database is 2-3TB is size and that the rest is archived snapshots of the DB.

Assuming that this database has been building up over the past decade, I'm in awe over how much money they must have spent on Laptop's in the early part of this decade.

i had trouble understanding the laptop part of the story. You can’t sync 450 terabytes to a 4terabytes laptop anyway. So why the big storage ?
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