9 ms·

Well, as far as I'm aware, there have been no actual implications. I think it's a perfectly reasonable summary to say that Dropbox does a bunch of weird shit to

by deong 10y ago

Well, as far as I'm aware, there have been no actual implications. I think it's a perfectly reasonable summary to say that Dropbox does a bunch of weird shit to enable features customers want that can't realistically be delivered any other way, and so far there have been no drawbacks to the approach in practice. I get the argument from the other side as well, but if you're Dropbox, you just want to make the best file-syncing application you can make, and any other choice they could have made in these situations would be worse in lots of ways. We can quibble over which set of compromises is the right set, but I doubt you'll find a single set of uniformly preferred options. To be sure, there are probably some low cost wins they could make -- making the signing status of everything more obvious, etc., but I'm not sure what your desired outcome here really is. I guess I mostly just find it annoying that people seem to think anything other than presenting my 67 year old mother with a dialog of full disclosure about kernel extensions is somehow the nefarious work of a shady company rather than a conscious design arrived at through a reasonable comparison of the options.

cat199 10y ago
Because there is no middle ground here, like, say, a sensibly labeled checkbox in the preferences, which defaults to on? As for implications: We're here talking about it. That is an implication. This is not the first time either. As for uniformly preferred: not futzing around with system level stuff without a preference or notification tends to be pretty much universal.
- geofft 10y ago
  What is a "sensibly labeled checkbox"? [x] Enable Smart Sync [x] Install Dropbox drivers required for Smart Sync What happens if I uncheck the second checkbox but not the first? Does Smart Sync just sit there and look sad? Maybe just a note under the Smart Sync thing saying "Smart Sync drivers are installed. Disable Smart Sync to remove"? Will that actually make anyone happier? Also—Dropbox is a filesystem. (Logically, the entire product is a filesystem; pedantically, traditional Dropbox might not be but Smart Sync definitely fits the definition of a network filesystem.) Traditionally on UNIX, if you're installing a third-party filesystem like AFS or Lustre or ZFS or whatever else, you're installing drivers. The fact that installing a filesystem installs both userspace software and drivers doesn't feel weird to me at all.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Traditional UNIX filesystems didn't backdoor the accessibility panel for persistence.
    - deong 10y ago
      Well, where the analogy falls down a bit is that traditional UNIX filesystems have traditionally been installed and maintained by UNIX systems administrators. My point wasn't to blindly defend everything Dropbox has done. I'm sure they've made mistakes, both in design and implementation. My point was that things like their hack of the accessibility panel are, in my opinion, overblown by the average technical reader. I think bothering the user with an accessibility panel is tedious "Charlie work" that I'd prefer be avoided. I understand why it works the way it does, and I understand the theoretical risk the OS is trying to mitigate. But I'm already trusting Dropbox with my data. It's silly for the OS to treat them like some unknown piece of malware, it's just that the OS isn't a generally intelligent agent able to make accurate determinations of that sort. I get all that. It doesn't change the fact that I as the user of my computer just want Dropbox to do whatever it needs to do to work. I'm capable of doing the accessibility dance that most applications require, but not everyone is, and I think it's a reasonable position for Dropbox to take that if users are signing up and downloading our app, then implicitly they trust us to check the accessibility box. Is that an objectively acceptable argument? No, but all I'm arguing is that it's reasonable. It doesn't imply maliciousness that that's the argument that won the day inside Dropbox.
      - tedunangst 10y ago
        I think at least some people object more to the less than forthright disclosure of what they're doing than the technical tricks. If they had a blog post "behind the scenes at dropbox kext headquarters" that'd be fine. It's the coverup, not the crime.
        maccam94 10y ago
        You mean like https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/going-deeper-with-project-infinite/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/going-deeper-with-pro...

by deong 10y ago

cat199 10y ago

Because there is no middle ground here, like, say, a sensibly labeled checkbox in the preferences, which defaults to on? As for implications: We're here talking about it. That is an implication. This is not the first time either. As for uniformly preferred: not futzing around with system level stuff without a preference or notification tends to be pretty much universal.

geofft 10y ago
What is a "sensibly labeled checkbox"? [x] Enable Smart Sync [x] Install Dropbox drivers required for Smart Sync What happens if I uncheck the second checkbox but not the first? Does Smart Sync just sit there and look sad? Maybe just a note under the Smart Sync thing saying "Smart Sync drivers are installed. Disable Smart Sync to remove"? Will that actually make anyone happier? Also—Dropbox is a filesystem. (Logically, the entire product is a filesystem; pedantically, traditional Dropbox might not be but Smart Sync definitely fits the definition of a network filesystem.) Traditionally on UNIX, if you're installing a third-party filesystem like AFS or Lustre or ZFS or whatever else, you're installing drivers. The fact that installing a filesystem installs both userspace software and drivers doesn't feel weird to me at all.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Traditional UNIX filesystems didn't backdoor the accessibility panel for persistence.
  - deong 10y ago
    Well, where the analogy falls down a bit is that traditional UNIX filesystems have traditionally been installed and maintained by UNIX systems administrators. My point wasn't to blindly defend everything Dropbox has done. I'm sure they've made mistakes, both in design and implementation. My point was that things like their hack of the accessibility panel are, in my opinion, overblown by the average technical reader. I think bothering the user with an accessibility panel is tedious "Charlie work" that I'd prefer be avoided. I understand why it works the way it does, and I understand the theoretical risk the OS is trying to mitigate. But I'm already trusting Dropbox with my data. It's silly for the OS to treat them like some unknown piece of malware, it's just that the OS isn't a generally intelligent agent able to make accurate determinations of that sort. I get all that. It doesn't change the fact that I as the user of my computer just want Dropbox to do whatever it needs to do to work. I'm capable of doing the accessibility dance that most applications require, but not everyone is, and I think it's a reasonable position for Dropbox to take that if users are signing up and downloading our app, then implicitly they trust us to check the accessibility box. Is that an objectively acceptable argument? No, but all I'm arguing is that it's reasonable. It doesn't imply maliciousness that that's the argument that won the day inside Dropbox.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      I think at least some people object more to the less than forthright disclosure of what they're doing than the technical tricks. If they had a blog post "behind the scenes at dropbox kext headquarters" that'd be fine. It's the coverup, not the crime.
      - maccam94 10y ago
        You mean like https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/going-deeper-with-project-infinite/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/going-deeper-with-pro...