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Dropbox sued for June 19 Authentication Bug

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Re: Dropbox sued for June 19 Authentication Bug

#91

Post by pyre »

yaix wrote: post #81
ohyes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was hot enough to melt her genitals and cause serious disfigurement. If she had spilled it anywhere, she would have been seriously injured... The coffee was scalding hot. The temperature of the coffee was from a corporate order intended to save a few bucks on having to re-brew coffee. The McDonald's corporation was negligent. In this case, Dropbox was horribly negligent. Releasing all of the data in my Dropbox fol…

How do you heat liquid water to more than 100°C? Coffee is supposed to be just below 100°C when you brew it, or it is not good. Goes for home made or McD coffee. Whatever, maybe in some parts of the world, the laws of physics don't apply and liquid water does not lose energy though evaporation... Back on topic: Dropbox is telling everybody that they are "encrypting" stuff on their drives. How do they decrypt without…

  > "boiling water may be hot"
Most people don't equate 'boiling water' with 'coffee.' Sure you need to boil water to brew it, but I've never been handed a bubbling cup of coffee.

Re: Dropbox sued for June 19 Authentication Bug

#92

Post by pyre »

grannyg00se wrote: post #88
tomjen3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>braindead users don't get the concept of 'hot coffee' and it's your fault The coffee was served hotter than it should have been, and wastely hotter than it would have been if it had been taken from the machine at home, it was served in a cup that was so difficult to open that the customer had to put it between her legs, and when the coffee was spilled she suffered 3th degree burns to her crotch. And she only asked t…

"So difficult to open that ....between her legs" Where is the logic there? Something is difficult to open so the immediate response is to put it between your legs? And it's a hot beverage? Sorry...that's idiotic. Zero dollars. Stop wasting the court's time. It doesn't matter what McD did or did not do. You are primarily responsible for your own well being. Nobody tricked her into thinking the coffee was iced tea. Nob…

Same logic:

Sure that doctor gave you the wrong medicine, but you're responsible for your own well-being. How hard is it to Google the name of the medicine and see that it has nothing to do with your condition? How hard is it to remember that the medicine that the doctor told you he was writing a prescription for and the one that he actually wrote on the paper aren't the same? Stop wasting the court's time. Zero dollars.

Re: Dropbox sued for June 19 Authentication Bug

#94

Post by pyre »

sigzero wrote: post #67
dpatru wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't read the terms of service, but they do read the marketing copy. If the marketing copy contradicts the terms of service, the contract should be based on the marketing copy. The terms of service should not be a license to make false or misleading marketing claims.

No, it should be what you agreed to regardless of whether you were too lazy to read it or not.

Are you advocating false advertising? It's ok to mislead your customers, just so long as you cover yourself in the EULA?

Re: Dropbox sued for June 19 Authentication Bug

#96

Post by gruseom »

o1iver wrote: post #78

The number of comments supporting Dropbox in this thread astonish me. It seems like people think that such "engineering" mistakes are acceptable in the software/web industry. But let me ask you: What if a construction engineer made a little mistake (humans err right?) when building that bridge? Maybe nothing happens but believe me he will get sued and no one here would object. Sure, in the latter example people could…

You assume that the word "engineering" means the same thing in bridge building vs. software development. It doesn't. These activities are no more alike than software development is to, say, writing novels.

If you really want to compare software to bridges, imagine that humans had written the same simple program millions of times over thousands of years. We'd be pretty good at it by now. (Even that analogy, though, doesn't level the playing field. The physical world is not programmable.)

Why do people assume that it is acceptable to make mistakes in the software world, but not in the "physical" world?

We know the answer to this. It is possible to make software that has very low defect rates -- among other things, you have teams of programmers intensively review every line of code -- but these practices have drastic consequences: projects become massively more expensive, development slows to a crawl, and innovation is greatly restricted. There are only a few fields where those tradeoffs are worth it. Elsewhere, they aren't close to being economic. The net benefit of software to society would be crippled if we built it this way. Of course we never would, because any software company trying to would be out-competed into oblivion.

As for Dropbox, when I see programmers jump all over other programmers for making a mistake, even a big mistake (or series of mistakes compounded), I think schadenfreude. People who engage in such gleeful condemnation are making an implicit claim to their own perfection. I'd think twice about doing that.

Re: Dropbox sued for June 19 Authentication Bug

#97

Post by lambada »

pyre wrote: post #92
grannyg00se wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So difficult to open that ....between her legs" Where is the logic there? Something is difficult to open so the immediate response is to put it between your legs? And it's a hot beverage? Sorry...that's idiotic. Zero dollars. Stop wasting the court's time. It doesn't matter what McD did or did not do. You are primarily responsible for your own well being. Nobody tricked her into thinking the coffee was iced tea. Nob…

Same logic: Sure that doctor gave you the wrong medicine, but you're responsible for your own well-being. How hard is it to Google the name of the medicine and see that it has nothing to do with your condition? How hard is it to remember that the medicine that the doctor told you he was writing a prescription for and the one that he actually wrote on the paper aren't the same? Stop wasting the court's time. Zero doll…

Not the same logic at all. Being given the wrong medicine is entirely different due to the relationship between patient and doctor. That is a relationship defined by the position of trust the doctor has. It is a privileged relationship. And a Doctor is known to have years of training and experience behind his belt.

The relationship between a customer and a minimum-wage worker employee is entirely different. You don't expect them to have the years of training and experience behind them to help ensure everything runs smoothly.

Re: Dropbox sued for June 19 Authentication Bug

#98

Post by invisible »

rakkhi wrote: post #13
gyardley wrote: post #12

Any company with even a small amount of success will be sued for any public mistake, whether it violates the law or not - especially if you're open and transparent about what happened and why. Class-action trolls, like patent trolls, are just another business risk.

Sure they were transparent? They didn't say what the bug was, how it was introduced, what they are doing to stop it happening again. They didn't email all their customers immediately.

I think it is unfair for them to be required to email their entire userbase when maybe 0.1% were POSSIBLY affected.

They emailed the people that logged in during that time and anyone that had a shared folder with anyone that logged in during that time. That seems pretty fair to me.

Re: Dropbox sued for June 19 Authentication Bug

#99

Post by joesb »

pyre wrote: post #91
yaix wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you heat liquid water to more than 100°C? Coffee is supposed to be just below 100°C when you brew it, or it is not good. Goes for home made or McD coffee. Whatever, maybe in some parts of the world, the laws of physics don't apply and liquid water does not lose energy though evaporation... Back on topic: Dropbox is telling everybody that they are "encrypting" stuff on their drives. How do they decrypt without…

> "boiling water may be hot" Most people don't equate 'boiling water' with 'coffee.' Sure you need to boil water to brew it, but I've never been handed a bubbling cup of coffee.

> "hot coffee may be hot"

Re: Dropbox sued for June 19 Authentication Bug

#100

Post by sorbus »

dpatru wrote: post #58
tzury wrote: post #37

According to the TOS, which all drop box users claimed of "reading and agreeing with" he's got no case ($100 at most) see https://www.dropbox.com/terms#terms Cloud brings risks, one shall be aware of it, and do the math of advantages/disadvantages. I will keep my dropbox account, despite that incident, and know deep in my heart that such glitch can happen to me as well, no matter how well my develop/test/deploy routi…

Most people don't read the terms of service, but they do read the marketing copy. If the marketing copy contradicts the terms of service, the contract should be based on the marketing copy. The terms of service should not be a license to make false or misleading marketing claims.

If the marketing copy said something like "if we screw up, you can sue us" while the TOS says "we can't be held liable if we screw up", then that might be relevant. However, I've never seen dropbox say anything like that in their advertising, so there doesn't seem to be any contradiction.
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