51–60 of 105 posts
"This is, by necessity, a system-wide process." This is, by design, a fucking huge defect of the underlying system calls. Give the OS a list of folders to watch. Dropbox should not even get a callback for a file it's not is supposed to watch.
This is a fine post, but all I can think about this situation is "or, you could just reverse the Dropbox client and find out for sure". Speculation about Dropbox stealing files seems premised on the idea that you can't know what the client is doing. But that's not even close to true. People reverse much, much harder targets than Dropbox for fun. If any version of Dropbox published to its user base ever did anything l…
I would be very surprised if a workplace name like Dropbox has never been reverse engineered by a bored hacker on a lazy weekend. Surprised and disappointed.
For examples see pyrasite, code.interact, etc.
If you specifically want to know what files Dropbox reads there are easy ways to observe this, like strace.
This is a fine post, but all I can think about this situation is "or, you could just reverse the Dropbox client and find out for sure". Speculation about Dropbox stealing files seems premised on the idea that you can't know what the client is doing. But that's not even close to true. People reverse much, much harder targets than Dropbox for fun. If any version of Dropbox published to its user base ever did anything l…
Full analysis here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9139657
Read their TOS and compare it to Google Drive's TOS. The insane rights the Google TOS grants to Google are why it costs ~ 1/2 as much. It is also an indicator that Dropbox is less shady. They don't grant themselves rights to do anything with your data outside of the normal things you need them to do to offer the dropbox service for your use. Unlike Google, which could for instance, use your personal photos of your ki…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To calculate the hash, it needs to read the whole file, which this post claims it isn't doing.
Not really, one could get a unique enough hash by reading the first lets say 10,000 bytes of each file, and it would be faster than hashing the whole file edit: here i was bored enough > http://pastebin.com/NJEvnG1d
I think in the end I just started taking the data from the end of the file, but if you're going with subsets, it's probably better to use a pseudo-randomly selected subset rather than a sequential subset. It doesn't have to be a different pseudo-random subset for each file, but I imagine there's an ideal noise profile in the sampling (maybe white noise is best).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Dropbox for Linux runs just fine as a user-mode program. Besides, Dropbox does much nastier stuff than look at your files; it bloody hooks into your shell (Finder/Explorer) and manipulates the icons. It could decide to replace an .exe icon with the icon for a Word Document, for example.
Read their TOS and compare it to Google Drive's TOS. The insane rights the Google TOS grants to Google are why it costs ~ 1/2 as much. It is also an indicator that Dropbox is less shady. They don't grant themselves rights to do anything with your data outside of the normal things you need them to do to offer the dropbox service for your use. Unlike Google, which could for instance, use your personal photos of your ki…
I think you're misunderstanding the TOS. I do not think Google is subsidizing their storage costs by abusing your private photos.
The cycle of security is this: 1. Security experts see a security hole and note that it could only be used by a widely trusted company or government. 2. People note that it's also possible that it's not happening, and claim that the widely trusted company or government would never use the security hole. 3. It is discovered that the widely trusted company or government has been using the security hole.
Read their TOS and compare it to Google Drive's TOS. The insane rights the Google TOS grants to Google are why it costs ~ 1/2 as much. It is also an indicator that Dropbox is less shady. They don't grant themselves rights to do anything with your data outside of the normal things you need them to do to offer the dropbox service for your use. Unlike Google, which could for instance, use your personal photos of your ki…
The cycle of security is this: 1. Security experts see a security hole and note that it could only be used by a widely trusted company or government. 2. People note that it's also possible that it's not happening, and claim that the widely trusted company or government would never use the security hole. 3. It is discovered that the widely trusted company or government has been using the security hole.
"Touches files it doesn't have to" is not a security hole.