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Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

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Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#131

Post by wycx »

I use dropbox with Zotero almost every day. You can get them to play together relatively easily, using Dropbox for syncing pdfs, and your Zotero account for syncing the references. This was my initial motivation for using Zotero, as other reference managers, such as Mendeley, which made not using Mendeley's storage very difficult.

It is very convenient to be able to add references at work, then come home to find it all up to date on my home PC.

Dropbox integration with the camera on my phone is something I also use a lot. Take a photo of something in the lab, it is waiting for me on my PC by the time I am back at my desk.

The only thing that I really find lacking is a linux armhf cli client...

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#132

Post by xor1 »

1_2__3 wrote: post #22
chollida1 wrote: post #2

I talked to a friend just before Christmas whose firm made a good portion of their returns on the insight that VC firms, IPO participants and the market in general all have gaps in how they evaluate the worth of a company and the fact that this gap has grown significantly in the past 5 years. Previously, companies went public much sooner and you could expect a match, not an exact one, but in the same ball park, betwe…

I've gone through 6 startup IPOs since 1999 in the valley, and have watched as it went from a way to reward employees to a whole lot of voodoo bullshit. I'm a little stunned when I see people still talking about the startups they work for and possibly making it big - that doesn't happen anymore. You are being lied to.

Unless you are extremely close with the founders.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#134

Post by petters »

raiyu wrote: post #38

The fact that Dropbox's revenue is well above Box's if the rumors in the article are true is a great positive sign. As is being cash flow positive which would indicate that if they are burning cash it isn't at the rate of 2x revenue that Box has been a victim of. However, the vision they are selling will not come to pass. That of them being a collaborative platform. Google docs, slack, and a myriad of other tools hav…

I agree that it will be very, very difficult for Dropbox to become a collaborative platform.

They wanted to become a platform for photos earlier (with Carousel), but that failed.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#135

Post by jpalomaki »

new299 wrote: post #99

I'm slightly shocked that tech-types who in general seem to be against mass state sponsored surveillance continue to support Dropbox. Dropbox appointed Condoleezza Rice to their board. Rice supports warrentless surveillance [1]. They've made no moves to encrypt data service side. I hope their IPO fails spectacularly so that support of warrentless surveillance does not become the norm in tech companies. [1] Condoleezz…

Adding secure client side encryption would quite much limit any new services they could add. No indexing on server side, no web based document editing. Deduplication would become either impossible or much more difficult. This might also cause problems on the user experience side, for example password resets would not work - if you forget password, data is gone for ever. Organizational accounts and file sharing would be harder to implement. In order to really prevent snooping, they would also have to take away the pretty well working auto update system (otherwise they could just push an update that sends your password to them).

I think this is just a business decision. Dropbox does not want to be the simple bit-pipe that is used to sync stuff between your computers. They want to provide more advanced services, because they believe that is where the money is.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#136

Post by petters »

new299 wrote: post #113
ternaryoperator wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they've made no moves to encrypt data service side From their website[0]: "Dropbox file data is stored in discrete file blocks that are fragmented and encrypted using 256-bit AES." [0] https://www.dropbox.com/security

It's very clear from that page that the data is sometimes transmitted unencrypted. It's also clear that if it's encrypted server-side it's encrypted with a key known to dropbox (which in my opinion makes the encryption meaningless). So, technically it's possible that my statement was slightly misleading. It may be encrypted. But the conclusion is, they have access to all your data. It would be available under warrent…

Yeah, I think it would be too expensive for Dropbox to truly encrypt the data. Because then decuplication would not be possible.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#137

Post by new299 »

jpalomaki wrote: post #135
new299 wrote: post #99

I'm slightly shocked that tech-types who in general seem to be against mass state sponsored surveillance continue to support Dropbox. Dropbox appointed Condoleezza Rice to their board. Rice supports warrentless surveillance [1]. They've made no moves to encrypt data service side. I hope their IPO fails spectacularly so that support of warrentless surveillance does not become the norm in tech companies. [1] Condoleezz…

Adding secure client side encryption would quite much limit any new services they could add. No indexing on server side, no web based document editing. Deduplication would become either impossible or much more difficult. This might also cause problems on the user experience side, for example password resets would not work - if you forget password, data is gone for ever. Organizational accounts and file sharing would…

I would agree that I think this is mostly a business decision. And it seems to be the same business decision that almost every player in this space has made.

But it relies on the user trusting the vendor with their data. The user can't audit Dropboxes internal systems. They can't rely on the fact that security researchers will audit the client, and ensure that data is transmitted securely.

So it comes down to trust. I can't really see how I can trust dropbox when they think having board members who advocate warrantless surveillance is reasonable.

They chose a board member who is in favor of providing their users data, without the need for a warrant.

In contrast, Apple have made a stand against government access to their users data outside of legal requirements. Their service has similar issues, but I'd be more likely to place my trust in Apple than Dropbox because they have some track record of fighting back.

Ideally, what I'd like to see is optional client-side encryption that was externally audited. Unfortunately I think it's a feature that most users don't see as critical.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#138

Post by ulfw »

automatwon wrote: post #116

My primary use case for Dropbox, actually, is getting videos onto my iPhone. You can't simply drag and drop a video file into the phone as a mass storage device. With ITunes, the sync feature purportedly sync the video to the device, and consumes space accordingly, but there's no way to access the video on the device. It's actually way faster for me to upload a video to Dropbox from my computer, and download the vide…

This drives me crazy too and it is embarassing that on iOS after ten versions we still can't easily add a video media file easily. When I am short on time or not on my personal Mac I airdrop a video file to the iPhone/iPad. Sadly it ends up in the PHOTOS sphere, not the Videos app/internal directory. So the play controls are odd and it does not continue playing when exiting out. But it works. Kind of.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#139

Post by new299 »

petters wrote: post #136
new299 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very clear from that page that the data is sometimes transmitted unencrypted. It's also clear that if it's encrypted server-side it's encrypted with a key known to dropbox (which in my opinion makes the encryption meaningless). So, technically it's possible that my statement was slightly misleading. It may be encrypted. But the conclusion is, they have access to all your data. It would be available under warrent…

Yeah, I think it would be too expensive for Dropbox to truly encrypt the data. Because then decuplication would not be possible.

It would certainly be interesting to know how much space is saved through deduplication.

However, my guess is that it's very unlikely to make the difference between a viable and a non-viable company. Particularly as they had a viable business when storing data on S3 [1]. I'd expect the cost savings of moving from S3 to their own hosted storage to be far greater than those earned through deduplication.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#140

Post by sksksk »

automatwon wrote: post #116

My primary use case for Dropbox, actually, is getting videos onto my iPhone. You can't simply drag and drop a video file into the phone as a mass storage device. With ITunes, the sync feature purportedly sync the video to the device, and consumes space accordingly, but there's no way to access the video on the device. It's actually way faster for me to upload a video to Dropbox from my computer, and download the vide…

If you're using a Mac, you can now AirDrop from your mac to iPhone
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