61–70 of 124 posts
If i do all of these how do i share documents or search for information on the web? What ever the alternative is going to have the same issues as Dropbox, Facebook or Google. I cannot build my own versions of these!
I won't be getting rid of Dropbox, Google services, or Facebook anytime soon. I disagree with government spying, and would like to see major reform, but (disagreeing with Snowden) I actually have nothing to hide. I'm not excusing the companies that provide data to governments, but I like the services they provide. They solve problems I want solved, so I will continue to use them. Edit: Why all the down votes? If you…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dropbox is mentioned in the PRISM slide deck as being a desired participant, not an actual participant. I worked at Dropbox when those slides were released, and none of us on the operations team knew what it could possibly be talking about. Every company that wants to continue to operate in the US has to comply with US government orders, that is just a fact of life. No one in the technology industry is super excited…
> Every company that wants to continue to operate in the US has to comply with US government orders, that is just a fact of life. No one in the technology industry is super excited about going to jail or having their equipment seized I understand this and it is not contrary to my point. I'm actually trying to point out that the companies Snowden mentions have been specifically mentioned by NSA slides/documents and I…
I haven't been at Dropbox for a year now, but for most of the time I was there I was one of only two SREs that ran the production infrastructure. I knew every piece of server hardware in every datacenter, and what services ran on them. It was my job to qualify and deploy hardware, do the systems level automation, and run the user facing frontends. There is literally no way that something like PRISM could be put in place without my knowledge except by what would amount to sabotage.
Keep in mind that while Dropbox is large for a startup, it only recently surpassed 1,000 employees (150 when I joined). The vast majority of those people are in customer service, and the number of people with access to production is likely still well under 100. For the first five years of the company's life there was one datacenter manager and network engineer (the same person), one SRE up until I was hired, and so on. In operations, we did more with less.
However, this shouldn't make you feel like your data in Dropbox is guaranteed to be safe from prying government eyes. Dropbox can and does comply with government requests -- every company operating in the US does so, or they would not be operating anymore.
I agree with your distaste towards Condoleezza Rice joining the board. It doesn't look good, but I also doubt that she has any day-to-day authority or responsibilities whatsoever.
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Right, but the Snowden revelations showed that the FISA court was/is? a rubber stamp circle without any real due process - and in fact they can search the data and afterwards make a request via the FISA court. The data is also collected and stored and processed by algorithms without any court oversight, it is just when they want a contractor to look through the data manually that the minimal paperwork is involved. It…
"The data is also collected and stored and processed by algorithms without any court oversight." This is false. PRISM doesn't get any data that wasn't specifically requested with a court order. It sounds like your understanding is still based on Greenwald's original reporting, which has since been shown to be inaccurate.
He was outright lying when he said that. [1] I would be interesting in how you know PRISM does not "collect" information for further "review" later?
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/27...
I use DropBox and Google Drive a lot, but I have scripts to encrypt data into ZIP files for anything that needs to be protected. It really is not much of a hassle. I have a SpiderOak account, but don't use it as often. Speaking of protecting data: I am surprised at how many companies seem to keep their software in private repositories on github and bitbucket. That seems like a security hole, if software if the core o…
I use DropBox and Google Drive a lot, but I have scripts to encrypt data into ZIP files for anything that needs to be protected. It really is not much of a hassle. I have a SpiderOak account, but don't use it as often. Speaking of protecting data: I am surprised at how many companies seem to keep their software in private repositories on github and bitbucket. That seems like a security hole, if software if the core o…
When I started using DropBox, I made an encrypted directory (using EncFS) for the stuff I cared about keeping private. This keeps the real-time sync element of DropBox, and avoids needing to reupload all of the encrypted files whenever one changes (although it does prevent incremental updates on individual files). As an added bonus, these files are now encrypted on my machine as well.
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> You could build your own dropbox. It's not that complex. It would be incredibly complex to build your own Dropbox. Maybe it wouldn't be "complex" to use rsync to automatically copy files over to some other drive if that's all you wanted, but Dropbox does way more than that and I don't plan on dropping Dropbox for some half baked solution that requires more effort to set up, maintenance and ends up in lost data beca…
http://owncloud.org/ You don't have to write your own Dropbox. You just have to host one. And even beside the question of government surveillance there is the advantage that it is under your control, not somebody else's. File sharing is so generic that the lockin opportunity is less than it is in other domains (like social networking) but there still can be advantage to being the owner and not merely a renter.
And beyond just being a subset of the features, it doesn't have Dropbox's ecosystem. Can you auto-sync your Oreilly Media books automatically with own cloud right from the Oreilly website? Does 1Password automatically sync with it? Is there a screen sharing app that automatically pushes to owncloud? Does it have a push API? IFTTT support? I, and others, use all these with Dropbox and it probably doesn't make sense to give them up because the NSA is the boogeyman FUD.
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Dropbox was revealed as a participant of the PRISM program: anything you store there is searchable. The same is true of Facebook and Google and Yahoo, Apple, all cell phone carriers, all internet carriers and other cloud storage companies including Skydrive/Onedrive.
Dropbox is mentioned in the PRISM slide deck as being a desired participant, not an actual participant. I worked at Dropbox when those slides were released, and none of us on the operations team knew what it could possibly be talking about. Every company that wants to continue to operate in the US has to comply with US government orders, that is just a fact of life. No one in the technology industry is super excited…
I use DropBox and Google Drive a lot, but I have scripts to encrypt data into ZIP files for anything that needs to be protected. It really is not much of a hassle. I have a SpiderOak account, but don't use it as often. Speaking of protecting data: I am surprised at how many companies seem to keep their software in private repositories on github and bitbucket. That seems like a security hole, if software if the core o…
More secure than open source projects. Many of them use public repositories on GitHub and Bitbucket!
I use DropBox and Google Drive a lot, but I have scripts to encrypt data into ZIP files for anything that needs to be protected. It really is not much of a hassle. I have a SpiderOak account, but don't use it as often. Speaking of protecting data: I am surprised at how many companies seem to keep their software in private repositories on github and bitbucket. That seems like a security hole, if software if the core o…
When I started using DropBox, I made an encrypted directory (using EncFS) for the stuff I cared about keeping private. This keeps the real-time sync element of DropBox, and avoids needing to reupload all of the encrypted files whenever one changes (although it does prevent incremental updates on individual files). As an added bonus, these files are now encrypted on my machine as well.