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Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

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Re: Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

#71

Post by angry_octet »

acdha wrote: post #62
konceptz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. Though this is not a phone app and Dropbox does have a history of mistakes causing data loss. I assume it's true because: "If you don’t want Dropbox Update to run on your computer, you can uninstall the Dropbox application. You can still access your files on dropbox.com and using the Dropbox mobile apps."

> Though this is not a phone app and Dropbox does have a history of mistakes causing data loss. A history of random forum posters making huge assertions which inevitably turn out to be significantly overstated. It's trendy in certain circles to complain about Dropbox and the hype factor makes it easy to forget that for every person repeating anecdotes on HN there are a million normal people who use the service withou…

As one of those 'random forum posters' aka Dropbox Customers who has lost data, I don't think it would be over stating it that I was fucking pissed off that my data was gone. I didn't really give a shit that other people were using the service without issues.

Its not rocket science to understand that a cloud data storage company is (a) going to have bugs, hence (b) data will be lost, and (c) customers will be dissatisfied.

The only saving grace for Dropbox is that the Google Drive windows client is a totally catastrophic data destroying pile of rubbish, and the Azure/Onedrive system is so microsofty and has no linux client either.

Re: Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

#72

Post by hashhar »

victorhooi wrote: post #39
eps wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of them doing that in mandatory fashion is unacceptable. I might be OK with running this bit of their code on my computer, but it's not an open bar for dropping anything executable onto my machine at will.

If it's unacceptable, why would you use the Google Chrome browser? It's open-source (Chromium project) - just compile it yourself? Once you've run somebody else's binary, you're already conferring significant trust on them. And I might be biased, but the Chrome team has shown themselves to be very vigilant with security, and generally on-the-ball on all of these things. (Memory issues aside...although I'm not going t…

VSCode, Atom, Firefox etc. do this but they all provide sane and easy methods to disable the behaviour. It's as simple as unchecking a box (or toggling a string in VSCode). It's not mandatory in those products unlike Chrome and Dropbox (AFAIK) now.

Re: Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

#73

Post by hashhar »

thanksgiving wrote: post #55
victorhooi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's unacceptable, why would you use the Google Chrome browser? It's open-source (Chromium project) - just compile it yourself? Once you've run somebody else's binary, you're already conferring significant trust on them. And I might be biased, but the Chrome team has shown themselves to be very vigilant with security, and generally on-the-ball on all of these things. (Memory issues aside...although I'm not going t…

> VS Code from Microsoft does this - I think it's awesome! =) My impression was that at least in Debian based systems (Ubuntu and others), it updates with apt now?

Yes. It uses apt but do you realise that you didn't install it using APT? You used plain dpkg but it now registers itself with APT (I think using something similar to a PPA) so that you can autoupdate.

EDIT: Sorry if this sounded accusative. Wasn't meant that way.

Would be fun trying to autoupdate deb packages though.

Re: Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

#74

Post by hemancuso »

When exactly did HN transition from from fawning over one of the best YC success stories to being upset with nearly everything Dropbox does?

The number of extremely negative comments here here about using a second process [just like Chrome, Creative Cloud and countless others] to auto-update is really surprising. I can understand people not being thrilled with a kernel extension being installed, but most of those comments there seem misguided or uninformed.

The obvious transition point [to me, it seems] was when they put Condi on the board. HN opinion on nearly everything Dropbox does has really soured since then.

Re: Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

#75

Post by JustSomeNobody »

thanksgiving wrote: post #54
tajen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the concern might be that we are more and more granting ownership of our machines: If NSA wants to install a spyware on targetted systems, they have a dozen autoupdate channels to do it through now. Which is good because we do nothing wrong. Apart from Youporn, where only one underage model that you didn't know about could lead you to jail. You know, accusations do wonders for your career. Apart from this cat…

> I think the concern might be that we are more and more granting ownership of our machines: If NSA wants to install a spyware on targetted systems, they have a dozen autoupdate channels to do it through now. > Which is good because we do nothing wrong. Apart from Youporn, where only one underage model that you didn't know about could lead you to jail. You know, accusations do wonders for your career. > Apart from th…

How long until we are issued tickets for speeding when we say simple things like, "I was hauling butt to get to work today!" on FB? Or have our insurance premiums jump because of it.

Certainly the former wouldn't hold up with current laws, but how long until the laws are changed?

The more we allow our privacy to be eroded, the closer we are to having this come true.

Re: Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

#76

Post by JustSomeNobody »

victorhooi wrote: post #36
eps wrote: post #18

This is NOT about keeping everyone updated and reducing the pool of older clients. This can be done by simply denying service to outdated versions. It worked very well for AOL Messenger 20 years ago, no reason why it won't work just as well today. This is strictly about being able to install anything on users' machines at will and having a formal consent to do that. The fact that Chrome and others do that doesn't mak…

You do realise that would probably increase the amount of customer support cases raised, from confused/angry users - which is the exactly the opposite effect that Dropbox wants. For the majority of typical users of Dropbox (and HN certainly doesn't count as typical), this is a net win in every way. They get the latest bugfixes, and they don't need to worry about all this downloading installers rubbish that seems so l…

Well, I like staying current, but I DON'T like auto updates. I can't count how many times Windows broke because of auto updates. I would so much rather have a notification than just to have something update in the background and break. Nothing ever breaks at a convenient time.

Re: Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

#77

Post by mulletbum »

hemancuso wrote: post #74

When exactly did HN transition from from fawning over one of the best YC success stories to being upset with nearly everything Dropbox does? The number of extremely negative comments here here about using a second process [just like Chrome, Creative Cloud and countless others] to auto-update is really surprising. I can understand people not being thrilled with a kernel extension being installed, but most of those com…

I started looking at HN right when Dropbox announced on it.

Funny enough, I came to HN looking for something like Dropbox. I even remember when Dropbox was doing odd things that Apple had to ask them about because they didn't know how they put the check marks in.

Yet here we are, angry at Dropbox for continuing down that path of making things more and more user friendly.

Re: Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

#79

Post by greedo »

saurik wrote: post #31
derefr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is a program that has standalone functionality where the program would still do useful work without updating. The Dropbox sync service, on the other hand, is literally just the client half of Dropbox's own proprietary backend. If Dropbox makes an ABI-incompatible change to their sync protocol on the server side, the non-updated client will just break until you update. Wanting to disable updates to such a servi…

Websites are sandboxed sufficiently that they aren't supposed to be able to do anything crazy to my computer or access any of my data as new versions come out: the same is not true of Dropbox. I don't want some system automatically upgrading the code running on my computer. I want to be able to download new code for my computer and choose to install it. This means that if there's a bug introduced by the new software…

I think your trust in browser sandboxing of websites has been, and is continually being, disproved. Browser vulnerabilities are the most consistent way of compromising a remote system.

Re: Dropbox on Mac now updates itself with a process in background

#80

Post by acdha »

angry_octet wrote: post #71
acdha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Though this is not a phone app and Dropbox does have a history of mistakes causing data loss. A history of random forum posters making huge assertions which inevitably turn out to be significantly overstated. It's trendy in certain circles to complain about Dropbox and the hype factor makes it easy to forget that for every person repeating anecdotes on HN there are a million normal people who use the service withou…

As one of those 'random forum posters' aka Dropbox Customers who has lost data, I don't think it would be over stating it that I was fucking pissed off that my data was gone. I didn't really give a shit that other people were using the service without issues. Its not rocket science to understand that a cloud data storage company is (a) going to have bugs, hence (b) data will be lost, and (c) customers will be dissati…

Again, there are people who've lost data and in some of those cases it was even caused by Dropbox — as opposed to the hardware failures or human errors which are often attributed to a service like Dropbox because that's what first made the problem visible — but that's still anecdotal rather than proof of widespread problem and, going back to the topic at hand, it doesn't tell us that the answer is to avoid installing updates. For a widely deployed consumer app, a significant fraction of the work will be defensive coding to reduce the impact of problems on the client and holding back updates will actually increase someone's exposure interval.
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