Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

Thanks for the sarcastic response, but I'm already familiar with that page.

What I'm more interested in is what HN users like and dislike and recommend, as opposed to a bunch of features charted into a table with nothing valuable in terms of reliability, usability and actual security.

Lately, I've been leaning towards Jungle Disk for file syncing & some S3 solution for cloud backups.

Agreed. I don't mind that he asked nicely and the file was taken down. I DO mind that a DMCA was issued.

drew from dropbox here. i hope you guys can give us the benefit of the doubt: when something pops up that encourages people to turn dropbox into the next rapidshare or equivalent (the title on HN was suggesting it could be the successor to torrents), you can imagine how that could ruin the service for everyone -- illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. the internet graveyard is filled with services that didn't take this approach.

so, when something like this gets called to our attention, we have to do something about it. note that this isn't even by choice -- if we don't take action, then we look like we are tacitly encouraging it. the point is not to censor or "kill" it (which is obviously impossible and would be idiotic for us to try to do), but we sent kindly worded emails to the author and other people who posted it to take it down for the good of the community so that we don't encourage an army of pirates to flock to dropbox, and they voluntarily did so.

there were no legal threats or any other shenanigans to the author or people hosting -- we just want to spend all our time building a great product and not on cat-and-mouse games with people who try to turn dropbox into an illegal file sharing service against our wishes. (for what it's worth, dropship doesn't even work anymore -- we've fixed the deduplication behavior serverside to prevent "injection" of files you don't actually have, for a variety of reasons.)

that said, when we disabled public sharing of that file by hash, it auto-generated an email saying we had received a DMCA takedown notice to the OP, which was incorrect and not what we intended to do, so i apologize to dan that this happened.

(*edited the last paragraph: we didn't send a takedown notice, we sent a note saying that we received a DMCA takedown notice, which was also in error)

AIM used to ask for a cryptographic checksum of a randomly chosen byte range of the AIM executable. The Gaim (now Pidgin) developers had to set up a server that would return checksums on demand. This doesn't meet your requirement of the verifier needing a small key.

Given that Dropbox apparently has no qualms about perjuring themselves in order to stop Dropship (or, as discussed in an earlier thread, lying about their security measures in order to defraud their customers), they could probably also take retaliatory action beyond just denying service to the user. Here are some possible retaliatory actions they could take:

* they could publish the user's private files, or simply look through them for the user's credit card numbers.

* they could sell the above data to the highest bidder.

* they could use it to attempt to impersonate the user to their bank in order to empty their bank account.

* they could randomly corrupt the user's data. (This might require a backdoor in the client software.)

* they could wait for an unusual volume of requests from the user (perhaps indicating that the user was trying to restore from backup) before terminating the user's account without warning.

* they could carefully comb through the user's files looking for evidence of any crime (illegal drug use, underage drinking, copyright infringement, possessing seditious literature, importing obscene material, defaming Islam, apostasy, embezzlement, tax evasion, whatever is the biggest no-no in their locale) and anonymously tip off the appropriate authorities.

* they could insert faked evidence of such crimes into the user's files, and then tip off the appropriate authorities.

Perhaps potential Dropbox users ought to be wary. This is a second data point in the company's history of seriously unethical behavior; one hopes they wouldn't engage in any tactics like the above in a dispute with a former user, if their extremely polite requests failed, but my experience is that people who behave unethically in medium-large ways often behave unethically in larger ways as well.

Caveat utilitor.

No, that's the problem... they haven't stopped their own servers from helping at all, because anyone with the hash can still access the file, which is the whole basis of how Dropship works.

If Dropbox doesn't want Dropship to work, I think they should spend time actually updating their code to remove this exposure, rather than trying to get the code erased from the internet.