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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

#232
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You responded less than 60 seconds after I wrote my comment, the substance of which is unchanged. Organizing thoughts into words is a process for me, it takes a moment.

There's a "delay" option in your settings, it's in minutes I give myself 6 minutes to fluff around (or get bored of and delete) comments before they appear live for that same reason

Thanks for the tip. Apparently delayed comments don't appear on the site instantly, but do appear in the API instantly. https://i.imgur.com/ytWyvc3.png

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

#233
Everybody should check and recheck they actually own their data, github accounts, digitalocean boxes, google accounts dropbox accounts, youtube accounts, the list goes on and on. It is obvious by now that it can happen to anyone for any reason (datacenter fire too) at anytime.

Every now and then there is a similar post on hackernews.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The backup you can't trust! This should be their slogan.

> The backup you can't trust!

In isolation that’s all backups.

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

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've described is not at all an equivalent for Dropbox. There are many, many features that your stack doesn't support.

Seriously, SFTP + Syncthing + Filebrowser completely replaces Dropbox for me. Name one feature thats not present in this stack.

Syncthing makes Dropbox look downright barbarian. Especially if you combine Syncthing with Android and a NAS or home server. iOS is... not really capable of sync outside Apple ecosystem. And this is true even with Dropbox. Not an Android fanboy. Just stating the fact. I take a picture on my Android phone and I don't have to think about it. It's now on my home server, it's encrypted, it's automatically backed up, etc. I have an app that takes a backup of my phone and puts it in a single file. Literally I press a button and my entire phone is backed up via syncthing. I use KeePass. My passwords are in sync at all times, on every device. There is also KDE Connect, which I have yet to try out.

Even before Syncthing, Unison existed since 1995. Which was the true free software version of Dropbox. You never needed a bunch of hacks to get automatic sync working on Linux. Syncthing is a bit easier to configure, IMO.

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

#236
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly this story could have happened with any big cloud provider. Ideally there would be more regulation around the ability of big tech companies to shutdown your digital life through a mindless algorithm, with close to zero recourse. Unfortunately I don’t see anything happening unless someone really powerful (say a member of Congress) gets bitten by this.

The solution to this in my mind is self-hosting. Yes, right now that's the exclusive domain of tech nerds, but in theory there's no reason that an open source project can't come along and make this relatively easy for non-techies to set up for themselves (in a similar way to how, say, Squarespace made website creation easy). I think the real hurdle in adoption would be that most non-techies don't even register their…

Filecoin and IPFS?

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

#237

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.

But do they have to delete the flagged account directly? Also, can't they distinguish a spam account from a legit account based on the account history? I can't see why this is a difficult problem to solve.

Actual LOL

Have you ever tried to fight spam at scale? It’s trivial to block the 50% of obvious spam accounts, but we are at the stage of humanity where the activity of very dumb humans and the activity of very clever bots, EASILY overlap. A lot.

Bots will use proxies that use residential IPs, they will maintain session info (Cookies, User-Agents, etc) they will move the mouse and introduce jitter, their access patterns aren’t random but are engineered to work in the day night hours that match the geo-data of the IP they are using. They solve captchas, at the same rate that humans do (time, error rate)

Some human accounts look like bots. They sign up and upload a couple of files which immediately get high traffic. They use NordVPN so their public IP is shared by thousands of “known bots”, their access patterns are weird and unpredictable.

Yes, you can use machine learning to try and identify theses but then you end up with false positives and real people having problems like the poster above.

And on top of all that, bots are constantly subverting detection so whatever solution you have now won’t work next week.

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

#238
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly this story could have happened with any big cloud provider. Ideally there would be more regulation around the ability of big tech companies to shutdown your digital life through a mindless algorithm, with close to zero recourse. Unfortunately I don’t see anything happening unless someone really powerful (say a member of Congress) gets bitten by this.

The solution to this in my mind is self-hosting. Yes, right now that's the exclusive domain of tech nerds, but in theory there's no reason that an open source project can't come along and make this relatively easy for non-techies to set up for themselves (in a similar way to how, say, Squarespace made website creation easy). I think the real hurdle in adoption would be that most non-techies don't even register their…

SyncThing is actually really good. The main issue is integrations. A lot of mobile apps work with Dropbox but not with decent FOSS alternatives.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IIRC, Hotmail provided 2 MB when Gmail was released. The 1 GB amount was so large by contrast that people thought it was a joke.

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

#240
post #216
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly this story could have happened with any big cloud provider. Ideally there would be more regulation around the ability of big tech companies to shutdown your digital life through a mindless algorithm, with close to zero recourse. Unfortunately I don’t see anything happening unless someone really powerful (say a member of Congress) gets bitten by this.

I don't think it is something that needs legislation. But it definitely needs more publicity. And if there is something that will bring down "big tech", I think that's it. "cloud providers" should be treated like something that can fail. We already don't trust hard drives, that's why we have RAID, we don't even trust RAID arrays, that's why we have backups, and we don't trust the place where backups are stored, that'…

>> "cloud providers" should be treated like something that can fail. We already don't trust hard drives, that's why we have RAID

"Can fail" is certainly true, just like a hard drive can fail.

But we'd all be rightfully upset if someone at Western Digital decided to some to our home and proactively delete files from our HDD.

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