301–310 of 381 posts
Isn't it pointless to discuss this without knowing more about the communications that happened?
Not really. It’s unacceptable for Dropbox to know/inspect what content you’re storing, scan it for anything without you actively requesting they do so, and certainly to delete it. This behaviour and any terms of service that allow it should be illegal. The fact that it goes on constantly is a scandal.
Reminds me of an incident we had with Dropbox a decade ago. They deleted some niche accounting software (custom developed by us) from our Dropbox account, plus their own log files covering those deletions. Then played ignorant. We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything. (Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a…
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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.
This chilling effect is already going on. I'm writing a science-fiction thriller and took most of my notes off Google Drive out of fear that they would misconstrue them as political extremism. If AI is being used for content moderation then this only raises the likelihood that a false positive is identified, devoid of any context, and I lose my entire Google account to an uncontactable bureaucracy. I made a Nextcloud…
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The main issue is you can accidentally nuke your own source directory and it's possible to do so in non-obvious ways. This has happened to me a few times (though thankfully had backups elsewhere).
SyncThing comes with a built-in feature to keep the last n versions of files around[1], for added peace of mind. https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html
Reminds me of an incident we had with Dropbox a decade ago. They deleted some niche accounting software (custom developed by us) from our Dropbox account, plus their own log files covering those deletions. Then played ignorant. We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything. (Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a…
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.
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Why shouldn't they be able to know/inspect/scan the content that they are physically storing? I'm genuinely curious the logic. From my perspective, they're a company providing a service and can determine the terms upon which they'll provide it. You don't have to use them if you don't like it.
Right to privacy. Companies have never had carte blanche to create any terms they like. Many types of contractual agreement are illegal or unenforceable. Your landlord can’t just turn up and start rifling through your stuff, and the owner of your rented disk space shouldn’t be allowed to do the digital equivalent.
Another analogy might be a long term storage locker. You, the customer, place your belongings in the locker, and return a month later to find it empty. All your stuff was destroyed by the storage facility, because they found pirated movies among your belongings!
Never would have happened if you just used FTP like Brandon said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Do you have this in your bookmarks? Super cool you could just pull this off of your memory and have a link to it!
Can I take a moment to recommend 'OwnCloud'? ( https://owncloud.com ) I may be out of the loop, but my experience with it has been great. It's a (mostly?) open-source, self-hosted DropBox(ish) clone - with a great UI, web browser support as well as native MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS apps. (I figure there's probably some sort of Linux client as well? I'd have no idea.) I'm shocked that Adult Swim isn't using somet…
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>> 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…
Unsurprisingly, after funding the initial round of Google investment, the DoD would come back not much later to eavesdrop on the email and uploads delivered to gmail into that storage.
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> whoever Justin is pirating content from Wow, you've made a huge assumption here.
He's not the legal owner of the content he creates.