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How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

(applehelpwriter.com)
1037 points 8bitben | 4 comments | 09 Sep 16 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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new299 ◴[09 Sep 16 16:49 UTC] No.12463925[source]▶
Dropbox circumventing security restrictions (albeit for legit reasons) is particularly worrying because they have board members who support warrentless surveillance.

In my mind Dropbox became a company not worth supporting when Rice joined Dropbox's board (http://www.drop-dropbox.com/). Personally, with a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service.

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BinaryIdiot ◴[09 Sep 16 17:12 UTC] No.12464160[source]▶
Honestly they're pretty much the most expensive out of all of the storage solutions. Other than versioning they have less features than their competition as well. If they were born today I can't imagine they would have gone much of anywhere. Not sure how they're doing financially today but it seems each product they create flops.

So even outside of this surveillance stuff I don't get the point in using them.

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1. copperx ◴[09 Sep 16 18:11 UTC] No.12464694[source]▶
As far as I know, DropBox is the only service that does delta block uploads correctly and switches to LAN transfer when two synced computers are in the same network.

I know it's CS 101, but neither Google Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive do this.

Not to mention the other services have bizarre naming limits (e.g., dotfiles are forbidden on OneDrive).

Also, DropBox supports Linux officially.

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2. proactivesvcs ◴[09 Sep 16 18:44 UTC] No.12464976[source]▶
Syncthing does all of these, but doesn't have the "always available" feature where the service provider keeps a copy of everything for you. If that's not crucial, maybe Syncthing is a viable alternative.
3. fapjacks ◴[09 Sep 16 19:45 UTC] No.12465486[source]▶
Seafile does, too. OwnCloud definitely does not. Actually OwnCloud's Github issue for delta sync is a great read, if you're up for some humor.
4. jorangreef ◴[10 Sep 16 08:07 UTC] No.12468226[source]▶
"switches to LAN transfer when two synced computers are in the same network"

Dropbox LAN Sync still requires the local network to have Internet access, because it can't sync anything locally without a connection to the master Dropbox server, i.e. if your office goes offline, LAN Sync will not work.