Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
71–80 of 158 posts
Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
#72This article does not prove "steals everything" claim. Very shallow work for "Information Security Specialist". The reason Dropbox accesses files all over the drive may be that FS events driver generates events for every file accessed by every program, and Dropbox has to read their metadata for some reason (e.g. to check if their full path is under one of synced folders). He should elaborate by checking if Dropbox is…
Or maybe not. Your speculation is as good as mine. Or the op. Or everyone else. The point was Dropbox is accessing files outside the folder, something I would not want or expect. "It is incredibly hard for me to believe that Dropbox has sneakily transferred >1TB" Did they transfer hashes? name+type+size for fingerprinting? Searching for credit numbers or SSNs? Who knows. I don't. And don't do evil is no longer the ba…
They could look for bitcoin wallet files, thats what typical malware does nowadays. Could theorethically only takes the infection of one computer to strike it rich.
Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
#73snowden warned us not to use dropbox.
Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
#74Independently of whether DB reads/uploads all the files or not, I've arrived at a difficult position about Dropbox: I'm looking for alternatives. No, it's unrelated with politics or pricing; it's just that in many cases Dropbox sucks . Why? Well, I mostly don't care about all the new features (mobile, Carousel, etc.). What I care the most is that i) it syncs files and ii) acts as a quasi-backup. However, I see the sa…
Seafile is really easy to self-host nowadays, basically extract and run: http://manual.seafile.com/deploy/using_sqlite.html
Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unison was the first thing I tried after moving away from DropBox. The main problem I had with it was that both machines involved in the syncing had to be running which made moving from laptop to desktop not as seamless as I would have liked. Still the syncing process was flawless. I had better results using Seafile, http://seafile.com/en/home/ , their free account was sufficient for my needs and worked great. You ca…
You'll have that problem with anything you don't run yourself so that seems like an unfair complaint. Can't this sync desktop server and laptop server?
I ran unison for a while but the conflict resolution was unfortunately lacking. It repeatedly stopped sync'ing properly until I intervened manually.
A few months ago I switched to csync[1], which looks better so far.
Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
#76I just had a quick look at dropbox with ProcMon, and I learned that 1) when I created a new text file on my desktop, it was not read by Dropbox 2) when I created a new text file in my dropbox folder, it was immideately read by Dropbox 3) I have to find some sync tool that doesn't feel the need to enumerate my network interfaces 3 times every second, when nothing is actually changing.
Have you heard/tried Bittorrent sync? It's P2P, doesn't put your files on their server. Very fast for transferring locally between your phone and computer for example. You have to keep your computer running if you want your files accesible anytime though.
thanks, but no. http://www.cso.com.au/article/560026/bittorrent-dismisses-se...
Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
#77inotify_add_watch(29, "/root/Dropbox", IN_MODIFY|IN_ATTRIB|IN_CLOSE_WRITE|IN_MOVED_FROM|IN_MOVED_TO|IN_CREATE|IN_DELETE|IN_DELETE_SELF|IN_MOVE_SELF) = 1
Dropbox's call to inotify_add_watch [1] is properly scoped so this is either a platform problem (but it looks like Windows' analogous API [3] allows only one directory to be monitored), sloppy development on Windows, or something else. I ran Dropbox under a Docker container under strace and grepped strace's logs for inotify and got this [2]. At least on Linux, it's impossible for Dropbox to receive any notifications about new files outside the Dropbox folder.
[1]: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/inotify_add_watch.2.htm...
[2]: http://pastie.org/9995412
[3]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364417(VS.85).asp...
Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
#78They are probably doing statistics about our files not syncing the entire drive. Which is not cool either
You are making a conjecture, assuming it's true, and then chastising them for it. That's a bit hasty, no?
Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
#79I didn't really think about it before, but I now feel very uncomfortable that Dropbox has copies of my unencrypted files. I would feel much better if the files were encrypted before being synched. Is there a service that does this?
I don't want Dropbox to be able to see the contents of my file system at their end.
Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?
#80They are probably doing statistics about our files not syncing the entire drive. Which is not cool either
You are making a conjecture, assuming it's true, and then chastising them for it. That's a bit hasty, no?
He is saying that even if they are doing it for benign reasons, it still goes against reasonable user expectations. What's "hasty" about it?