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Why was my email leaked?

forums.dropbox.com

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Re: Why was my email leaked?

#201

Post by niggler »

semanticist wrote: post #171
minm wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am offering an alternative suggestion to a person who is not happy with dropbox's customer service. He/she has the smarts to decide whether a new service is worth a try. My affiliation is irrelevant. Can u guarantee the readers who downvoted me are not affiliated with dropbox or positively biased towards dropbox. You are no different from the dropbox forum moderators.

I downvoted you. I'm not affiliated with dropbox. Your affiliation IS relevant when promoting services, because it means it's not an honest recommendation from a happy user, it's paid shilling. If you don't understand the difference - or more importantly why one of them bothers people and the other doesn't, you need to stop doing marketing or promotion really quickly. You're going to tarnish the brand of the product…

NOTE: I have no affiliation with Tonido, but I found your visceral reaction really sad.

"Your affiliation IS relevant when promoting services, because it means it's not an honest recommendation from a happy user, it's paid shilling."

That's not a fair criticism. In this case, there is an issue with dropbox, and he is pointing to a solution which obviates the problem at hand:

'Check out Tonido Cloud (http://www.tonido.com/cloud/) and host your own dropbox.'

I think the wording was poor, but reading into the website offering it is clear that the company doesn't have access to the local credentials. In this case, since the alternative doesn't suffer from the problem at hand, I think it's fair for him to mention the alternative.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#202

Post by niggler »

mbreese wrote: post #194
minm wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am offering an alternative suggestion to a person who is not happy with dropbox's customer service. He/she has the smarts to decide whether a new service is worth a try. My affiliation is irrelevant. Can u guarantee the readers who downvoted me are not affiliated with dropbox or positively biased towards dropbox. You are no different from the dropbox forum moderators.

Yes, your affiliation is quite relevant. When you are talking about something when you have a clear conflict of interest, you need to disclose it. Then at least the reader has the right context in which to make a decision. When you post w/o disclosing, you make it seem like someone from this community has found your product interesting and is suggesting others try it. Instead of working for a company and trying to dr…

tl;dr: read http://hastebin.com/raw/gefuxumubu

"your affiliation is quite relevant. When you are talking about something when you have a clear conflict of interest, you need to disclose it. Then at least the reader has the right context in which to make a decision."

I used to think the way you do. Then I entered the financial world. At this point, I've seen so many people talk up their positions without disclosing that I automatically assume everyone has a conflict of interest. Then something really strange happened: I stopped caring about the affiliations and really focused on the veracity of their statements.

I recommend you read http://hastebin.com/raw/gefuxumubu, which is a copy of the zerohedge.com conflicts of interest policy. We are all adults here, and a person's persuasion shouldn't somehow affect your ability to make a rational analysis of the arguments that a person lays out.

In this case, if you bothered to look at the offering, you would see that it indeed obviates the problem that dropbox has all of your emails: when you self-host, the accounts are stored on your servers

Note that I haven't actually tried the service, but this is based on my understanding of the offering. There may be vulnerabilities in their implementation. Who knows. But to immediately dismiss a remark because of a conflict of interest doesn't change the fact that the argument may be factually correct and germane.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#203

Post by snikolic »

Scramblejams wrote: post #153
benhalllondon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Chris seems a bit of prick: "Just the fact that you listed your emails says it all."

Looks like Chris is battening down the hatches. His linked site[1] was up about an hour ago, but it redirects to a placeholder now. Also, he's deleted all but his first comment, wish I'd taken a screenshot of his other comments. Tangentially related: It drives me nuts to deal with people whose default answers are "no," "you must be doing it wrong" and so on. Particularly the moderators who insisted someone must have…

Aaaannd cue internet vigilantes: http://cjwworld.cu.cc/?p=216#comments

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#204

Post by Terretta »

agwa wrote: post #170
eli wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all fun and games until you get attacked by a spambot that tries blindly sending thousands of messages to @yourdomain.com

I use a sub-domain (e.g. @m.mydomain.com) for my catch-all and this hasn't happened to me. There are various easy ways for spammers to find out about domains, but sub-domains can remain relatively obscure.

Hey, that's sharp.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#205

Post by ricardobeat »

niggler wrote: post #201
semanticist wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you. I'm not affiliated with dropbox. Your affiliation IS relevant when promoting services, because it means it's not an honest recommendation from a happy user, it's paid shilling. If you don't understand the difference - or more importantly why one of them bothers people and the other doesn't, you need to stop doing marketing or promotion really quickly. You're going to tarnish the brand of the product…

NOTE: I have no affiliation with Tonido, but I found your visceral reaction really sad. "Your affiliation IS relevant when promoting services, because it means it's not an honest recommendation from a happy user, it's paid shilling." That's not a fair criticism. In this case, there is an issue with dropbox, and he is pointing to a solution which obviates the problem at hand: 'Check out Tonido Cloud ( http://www.tonid…

I see your intention, but the issue is not this post alone. Take a look at minm's comment history and you'll see 90% of his posts are promoting Tonido: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=minm

I didn't downvote his post at first because it sounded like a genuine suggestion. I consider myself deceived.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#206

Post by niggler »

ricardobeat wrote: post #205
niggler wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NOTE: I have no affiliation with Tonido, but I found your visceral reaction really sad. "Your affiliation IS relevant when promoting services, because it means it's not an honest recommendation from a happy user, it's paid shilling." That's not a fair criticism. In this case, there is an issue with dropbox, and he is pointing to a solution which obviates the problem at hand: 'Check out Tonido Cloud ( http://www.tonid…

I see your intention, but the issue is not this post alone. Take a look at minm's comment history and you'll see 90% of his posts are promoting Tonido: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=minm I didn't downvote his post at first because it sounded like a genuine suggestion. I consider myself deceived.

I still think you missed my point.

The only way in which you could have been deceived is if you went into the discussion assuming no conflict of interest. Years of dealing with financial media and experts has rendered me incredibly cynical, so I focused on the author's claims (which, in this case, are true -- If the product acts as the website claims, the self-hosted solutions store credentials on your servers and not theirs.)

I recommend you read http://hastebin.com/raw/gefuxumubu, the zerohedge.com conflict of interest policy, for it drives home the key point that if you assume everyone has a conflict of interest you won't be deceived and you can focus on what was actually said

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#207

Post by jzse »

unreal37 wrote: post #188

This dropbox forum is exploding. Fascinating to watch. As an aside, who knew so many people had "dropbox only" email accounts. One guy with 10 random letters/numbers he uses only for dropbox. Wow. Is this a thing?

Email standard lets you use a random string in the adress if you type + after your "name".. For examble you have adress hehe.haha@gmail.com, and now you can give dropbox hehe.haha+dropbox@gmail.com and still get the mails that dropbox sends to the same hehe.haha@gmail.com box while "send to" still remains hehe.haha+dropbox@gmail.com.

This is the best way (that I know) to find out where your adress was leaked.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#208

Post by smrtinsert »

Volpe wrote: post #162
chmars wrote: post #115

Sean B.: Hi there, We’ve been looking into these spam reports and take them seriously. Back in July we reported that certain user email addresses had leaked and some users had received spam as a result. At this time, we have not seen anything to suggest this is a new issue, but remain vigilant given the recent wave of security incidents at other tech companies. If you’ve received spam to an email account you only use…

Why do "moderators" feel the need to weigh in then, if they have no visibility of the problem? There was nothing in that thread that requires moderation (other than the mods themselves)... so why are they even there?

probably the handle the majority of easy questions they must get. personally i give dropbox way more credit than the original poster. he comes across as argumentative instead of problem solving, that doesn't help a damn.

if he has suddenly lost faith in dropbox, there are other services that are cheaper, like box.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#209

Post by greiskul »

ph33r wrote: post #64
johnward wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternatives are there?

Google Drive, SpiderOak, SugarSync, Skydrive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Box.net.

There is no Google Drive linux client yet =/. What about the others? I use Dropbox on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and I have even used it on a personal server. I have not seen anything that can replace it.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#210

Post by hakaaaaak »

Fortunately, GMail handles almost all of my spam, so this stuff is a non-event for me. But I don't like that they may have been a security breach. Thanks to whomever HN'd this so it would get attention.
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