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Dropbox is in your Office

blog.dropbox.com

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161–170 of 211 posts

Re: Dropbox is in your Office

#161

Post by rodgerd »

diminoten wrote: post #107
cstross wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The show-stoppers are "... promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones". Suppose I use Google Drive to store my current project, a big-ass novel that's going to see simultaneous publication by major publishers in a number of markets around the world. Google could in principle give it away for free to new sign-ups for their service as a promotional goodie. Or "develop new ones" ... well, we already h…

> Google could in principle give it away for free to new sign-ups for their service as a promotional goodie. No they couldn't, because other parts of their ToS explicitly let you retain control over your copyright. You'd sue them, and win. Also, they'd lose all their customers and probably shut down the Google Drive program entirely. Maybe we should just try and find a lawyer to interpret this impartially (something…

Yeah, Google would never just, I don't know, start republishing a bunch of books and, when authors or their representitaves complain, say, "see you in court." That's inconcievable!

Re: Dropbox is in your Office

#162

Post by chmars »

Dropbox isn't in my office although I really like Dropbox. However, legal compliance is important in an office environment and Dropbox simply does not provide the necessary data privacy to store business secrets or staff records.

Sorry, Dropbox.

(Yeah, alternatives are a problem: Wuala is dying and Spideroak isn't much better easier. Tresorit might be a future alternative but in spite of having their current version published as 2.x, they have still some way to go …)

Re: Dropbox is in your Office

#163

Post by MichaelGG »

bithush wrote: post #113
lentil_soup wrote: post #68

I stopped using Dropbox after the whole Condoleezza Rice thing and have been using a mix of Google Drive and OneDrive and I must say I like them a lot better. They do the same (and more if you use other Google Apps) and prices are cheaper. Are there any benefits to using Dropbox? Are there any other real alternatives you could recommend to give them a try?.

Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box. They are all the same when it comes to your privacy to be honest. I wouldn't "trust" any of them with very private things. I use them for convenience of stuff I want easy access to/share with family but don't want to just stick up in the public internet for all to see.

Dropbox lied about their access to your documents. Dropbox disabled password authentication for their entire system for a bit, by accident. I'd say that makes them worse than competitors. The whole Ms Rice thing might also make it worse for some people.

We should be using Tarsnap. If only they had a windows client (which I use as a hypervisor, as it has better power and driver support on laptops).

Re: Dropbox is in your Office

#164

Post by killerpopiller »

bithush wrote: post #113
lentil_soup wrote: post #68

I stopped using Dropbox after the whole Condoleezza Rice thing and have been using a mix of Google Drive and OneDrive and I must say I like them a lot better. They do the same (and more if you use other Google Apps) and prices are cheaper. Are there any benefits to using Dropbox? Are there any other real alternatives you could recommend to give them a try?.

Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box. They are all the same when it comes to your privacy to be honest. I wouldn't "trust" any of them with very private things. I use them for convenience of stuff I want easy access to/share with family but don't want to just stick up in the public internet for all to see.

privacy and secrecy are one problem with those, but why do I have to manually put relevant files in special-sync folders?

btsync makes more sense to me

Re: Dropbox is in your Office

#165

Post by diminoten »

rodgerd wrote: post #161
diminoten wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google could in principle give it away for free to new sign-ups for their service as a promotional goodie. No they couldn't, because other parts of their ToS explicitly let you retain control over your copyright. You'd sue them, and win. Also, they'd lose all their customers and probably shut down the Google Drive program entirely. Maybe we should just try and find a lawyer to interpret this impartially (something…

Yeah, Google would never just, I don't know, start republishing a bunch of books and, when authors or their representitaves complain, say, "see you in court." That's inconcievable!

You really think Google would take an unpublished manuscript from someone's GDrive and put it in their bookstore?

Re: Dropbox is in your Office

#166

Post by wstrange »

microtonal wrote: post #148
dhimes wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, they'd lose all their customers and probably shut down the Google Drive program entirely While I agree with your thesis on the whole, I am sad to say that this probably won't happen. People will just think, "Well, I'm not writing a novel so this doesn't affect me" and keep on using it. My interpretation of what they are trying to say is that they may need to modify stuff by wrapping headers on it and so on to m…

My interpretation of what they are trying to say is that they may need to modify stuff by wrapping headers on it and so on to make it work with their systems, Or: we make tape backups of data and tapes a shipped to some storage and we cannot guarantee that your data is immediately erased from all our infrastructure (including types) the moment after you delete it.

There is a youtube video from a google engineer that talks about their backup.

Your data is (supposedly) encrypted with your private key. They can't guarantee that all copies are deleted, but they can (at least in theory) delete the key to make the data inaccessible. Whether you believe them or not is a different story...

Re: Dropbox is in your Office

#167

Post by diminoten »

jellicle wrote: post #153
diminoten wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google could in principle give it away for free to new sign-ups for their service as a promotional goodie. No they couldn't, because other parts of their ToS explicitly let you retain control over your copyright. You'd sue them, and win. Also, they'd lose all their customers and probably shut down the Google Drive program entirely. Maybe we should just try and find a lawyer to interpret this impartially (something…

> No they couldn't Of course they could, because you gave them a license to do so. Facebook and Google do this explicitly already: they use your images and written content, which you presumably have the original copyright on, to sell their products and services (customized ads and the like). They haven't done it with Stross' novel yet, but the legal issues are the same. http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/11/you-make-ads-b…

> Of course they could, because you gave them a license to do so.

No you didn't. Like I said, they explicitly say you retain copyright control. That trumps any implied loss of copyright control.

Re: Dropbox is in your Office

#168

Post by MichaelGG »

marcosdumay wrote: post #137
jbigelow76 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office is THE cash cow, OneDrive is (probably) a loss leader. Anything that can be done to ensure Office's continued near ubiquity, reduce usage friction, and shore up beach heads against competitors looking for an area to drive a wedge in will be done.

Well, that's really a new Microsoft. Just a short while ago, anything that could be done to make their products more integrated, and increase lock-in would be done. It didn't really matter if the benefited product made money or not. (For a very visible blow, look at the Windows Phone and Windows 8.) It's great to see that changing.

OneDrive on Windows 8+ requires you to use an MS Account for your entire Windows session. So I'd have to pick a short password and do smart card support to use it. That's some pretty lame and obvious forced integration.

Re: Dropbox is in your Office

#170

Post by josteink »

lentil_soup wrote: post #68

I stopped using Dropbox after the whole Condoleezza Rice thing and have been using a mix of Google Drive and OneDrive and I must say I like them a lot better. They do the same (and more if you use other Google Apps) and prices are cheaper. Are there any benefits to using Dropbox? Are there any other real alternatives you could recommend to give them a try?.

I stopped using Dropbox ... and have been using a mix of Google Drive and OneDrive and I must say I like them a lot better.

For a somewhat less platform-independent definition of better. Neither of those has Linux-clients, which for some people is a no-go.

Which means I'll stick to Dropbox for a good while more.

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