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Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

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Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#191
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

700M, is that active users? Or does my old account I haven't touched in forever counts?

we may have different account types but they started wiping inactive accounts a while back. I never installed the client on my computer though, so that probably didn't help.

I had pictures of an abroad internship from winter 2014-15 that I was able to find last year as I was aggregating all my pictures.

But I just checked their filings, the 700M figure is indeed "registered" users, not "active" ones. Which makes a lot more sense. There are not a lot of services with 700M monthly active users out there.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#192

This is an inevitable consequence from the push to make cloud companies responsible for the content they host. Analyzing all of it can only be automated; automation will deliver weird false positives.

Anything held on anyone else's computer is a candidate for scanning or pilfering. That's why I am a fan of encrypted backups.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#193
post #58

Isn't it pointless to discuss this without knowing more about the communications that happened?

That's part of the problem itself. In most cases there ARE no communications about why an account was terminated, and it's impossible to get any unless you have enough influence to cause a messy public incident on Twitter.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#194
post #57
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have free OneDrive through my university, and I pay $99/year and I have it through work. With multiple TB available. Yet I still use Dropbox because it’s way more usable. Running the OneDrive agent is a hobby and it spikes my machine a few times a day. Running Dropbox is something that just works and has worked for 10 years without me ever noticing the sync app (a good thing). I avoid Google because I wouldn’t want…

Never had any CPU spikes from OneDrive. How much are you storing on it?

The more files you have, the more OneDrive tends to chew as a baseline. If you exceed those limits it'll just sit and chew without actually updating anymore. I want to say something like 200K files is the limit.

If you're using it for work to sync build dependencies or your build tree or similar, it's easy to accidentally end up exceeding those limits and watch it eat CPU time totally ineffectually. Ask me how I know!

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#196
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it does need to. Banning people for content they legally posses seems pretty questionable. Edit: You completely rewrote you comment after I responded, that is considered bad form on HN.

This is a reflection of a poor commenting system. I would prefer for every online commenting system, including HN's, to allow one to see the version history of a comment. As things stand right now, commenting systems are biased in favor of revisionists.

Yes, it is a community standard that exists to work around a UX issue. I would agree that an edit history and an indicator that edits have been made would probably be an improvement.

That said, in the past when HN seemed to be doing something weird, dang usually has a pretty great explanation for why, so there might be a good reason for this choice as well.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be amazed that folks even today misunderstand it to be a 'backup' instead of a sync service.

Dropbox calls it a backup service: https://www.dropbox.com/backup

The backup you can't trust!

This should be their slogan.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#198
post #104

hmmm... I largely use https://github.com/bailey27/cppcryptfs with dropbox? This would essentially eliminate any possibility of violating any terms of service as far as I can tell? I'm not too comfortable putting any files on dropbox without some sort of encryption fwiw, I've found that cppcryptfs is one of the better implementations of that sort though most (if not all) use the same library which seems to choke on ce…

And I bet doing that would also avoid what happened here -- account suspension for some unknown reason, but likely content related. If your content is encrypted, they can't drop you over it. Of course at that point you're not using all of dropbox's features, and some other rsync-style solution may well be cheaper.

https://rsync.net/ !

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing that the Internet culture that vehemently opposed DRM and created things like bit torrent so quickly lined up behind algorithmic content moderation.

IMHO, the problem started when we all jumped on Gmail, knowing that there was no support, and if it broke, we got to keep both pieces. I watched my wife's account get taken over in real time a couple years ago. Ten years of personal and financial info, now in the hands of God-knows-who for God-knows-why. I simply deleted the account from her devices, and moved on. There was nothing I could do, and no one I could comp…

>> IMHO, the problem started when we all jumped on Gmail, knowing that there was no support

Back when Gmail was invite-only, most people used Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, which would offer a base level of (I think) about 50-100MB of storage at the time. If you wanted more storage; you'd have to pay for your email service - an idea I don't think anyone born past 2000 has even heard of.

Gmail came along, and suddenly offers us 1 GB of free storage, for free. This was around a quarter the size of some people's hard drives at this point.

Of course we didn't care if there was no support!

Are you kidding? I don't think Hotmail had support, either - (maybe I'm wrong?) - even if you paid for it; but here Google was offering a substantial value for anyone using any other existing mainstream email service, immediately.

They even had STMP and IMAP support, meaning you could use whatever client you preferred. Back in the day most people used computer-side email clients and had local backups of emails anyway - so if one went missing from Google's side it wouldn't be so bad.

There's a reason Gmail is still one of Google's strongest and unusually longest-lasting product of Google's. There's less reason now - but my God, when it was introduced it was an honest-to-God mindfuck as to how they were offering such a large amount of space and features for nothing.

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