How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

Great article, but poor conclusion. He finds that Dropbox is untrustworthy, a finding that likely surprises no one, and reaches for iCloud as the solution. Why move into another walled garden driven by corporate interests? OwnCloud or a similar self hosted solution would be better. I just use NFS and a dead simple storage server to make ~/shared available on all of my machines.

If you're going to use a Mac, you're trusting Apple already. How does using iCloud make you trust them more?

I wouldn't use a Mac, either :)

And if you're using Ubuntu, you're trusting package managers, and if you're using Gentoo, you're trusting original developers (how often do you audit source code?)

>And if you're using Ubuntu, you're trusting package managers, and if you're using Gentoo, you're trusting original developers

This is correct. Consider, however, the motivations of the people involved. Apple's motivations are to make money from you. Debian's motiviations (intentionally avoiding Ubuntu here) are to make a good user-centric system. Packages are signed by named individuals that I can personally get to know and trust, and with an accessible process - I can download their package sources and build or verify or tweak them the same way that the maintainer can, report bugs and ask questions directly to them, etc. I trust this model much more than I trust the model of a company who, at the end of the day, has a bottom line and will make compromises to ensure it remains where they need it.

Apple is very well known for using proprietary formats, adapters, you name it. Apple's cloud is also write-only, they intentionally make it difficult for you to pull data out of it and interop with other services. These decisions serve the company's interests, not yours.

>how often do you audit source code?

You would be surprised!

>> how often do you audit source code?

> You would be surprised!

How often do you audit OwnCloud's source code? (I'd describe it as "naive.")

I actually don't use OwnCloud, so never.