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Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fs111 4y agoThere are 0 details here. Does anyone know what the secret TOS violation is supposed to be?
- mrguyorama 4y agoI think Justin is making the statement that he has no idea what rule he violated
- Narretz 4y ago"Secret" means that the supposed account violation wasn't specified in the message from Dropbox. Possibly an automated decision. And apparently it was without warning on the first offense? Definitely need more info. And extremely worrying for me as a customer that they will take down the whole account for a single toc violation.
- slightwinder 4y agoQuite possible something hard illegal, like problematic porn or terrorism or such. I guess in case of some random hollywood-alarm being triggered, there would have been a DMCA-complain coming from that party.
- Tryk 4y agoOr a file containing the number '1' (https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-drive-flags-text-files-containing-1-as-a-copyright-infringement https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-drive-flags-text-files-con...)
- dingleberry420 4y agoNo, that's what secret means.
- ben174 4y agoThis is just drama for drama's sake at this point. There is absolutely nothing to see here.
- taesu 4y agoAre people still using dropbox? I thought other integrated service such as google drive and onedrive would have drove dropbox to the grave
- brightball 4y agoBeen using them steadily for over a decade. Their core service is still great, at least for personal use.
- dangrossman 4y ago700 million people use them, and 17 million are on a paid plan. I still use Dropbox, because I don't trust that I'd be able to reach a helpful human at Google should anything happen to my Google account.
- BbzzbB 4y ago700M, is that active users? Or does my old account I haven't touched in forever counts?
- wollsmoth 4y agowe may have different account types but they started wiping inactive accounts a while back. I never installed the client on my computer though, so that probably didn't help.
- BbzzbB 4y agoI had pictures of an abroad internship from winter 2014-15 that I was able to find last year as I was aggregating all my pictures. But I just checked their filings, the 700M figure is indeed "registered" users, not "active" ones. Which makes a lot more sense. There are not a lot of services with 700M monthly active users out there.
- danuker 4y ago
- Hitton 4y agoThis wouldn't happen with SFTP, CVS and a $5 VPS.
- hrdwdmrbl 4y agoCVS = http://cvs.nongnu.org/ http://cvs.nongnu.org/ ?
- jpalomaki 4y agoAssuming the $5 VPS provider has proper backup and recovery procedures in place.
- prepend 4y agoFor $5 they definitely should. Also assuming the sun doesn’t end in a sudden heat death event. Also assuming that my fingers aren’t removed in a thresher accident. And assuming the provider has electricity. Etc etc etc, it’s important to vet that services I pay for have SLAs and are competent.
- padobson 4y ago>Also assuming that my fingers aren’t removed in a thresher accident. This wouldn't happen with a $5 pitchfork and a stone threshing floor
- dekhn 4y agoyou left out the meteor-data-center-strike problem. Most $5 VPS don't do realtime snapshotting to an out-of-region data center with live failover.
- LinuxBender 4y agoMany of the VPS providers have a backup option. My personal preference is to have a VM at a few different VPS providers and a cron job that uses lftp to do a rsync-like replication between VPS providers using SFTP. The advantage of lftp over rsync is that I can sync between accounts that are chroot sftp-only with nearly identical capabilities of rsync. The lftp client can also break up one file into multiple TCP streams. In the event a provider terminates my account I could not care less. The files will be at multiple providers and HAProxy will automatically remove them when the content validation health checks fail.
- pstoica 4y ago
- turtledove 4y agoPeople click the upvote button at a sufficient velocity.
- ddtaylor 4y agoI'm hitting it with _extreme_ velocity and it still seems to only register as a single upvote =(
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shkkmo 4y agoAccount lockouts thread are commonly upvoted, atleast partially to raise the profile high enough to force the company to do something. I upvote them because I think they expose an important issue that we need to address.
- survirtual 4y agoI just posted one of my own, and I agree with your sentiment. I would like to see a future where humans achieve symbiosis with machines. Our brains acting as a limbic system to a larger sovereign machine entity. Still “you”, but more. For such a thing to work, many ideas need to change. Data ownership, sovereignty, and the core philosophy in regards to machine-human augmentation needs to be reworked in groundbreaking ways. As it stands, with megacorporations having no respect for individual access to their data on services at the whims of the corps, human machine symbiosis is about the scariest thing imaginable right now.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoOne thing that helps me think about which cloud services to use is the phrase "a stranger's house." If I'm working on something important to me... how comfortable am I leaving it in a stranger's house? If I wouldn't be comfortable doing it, I always make a local backup. This saved my ass when I inexplicably lost access to an old Google Drive account. I lost a couple days of work, rather than a couple months. I still have no idea why that account was disabled.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- logicalmonster 4y agoWould this be some automated system that looks for copyrighted works?
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoCould easily see this being the fault of his employer for using automated content ID takedowns.
- chrisseaton 4y agoHow can an automated system know the identity of users and what rights and licensing agreements they hold?
- dangrossman 4y agoIt can't. False positives are a trade-off against the administrative, legal and regulatory burdens of not having such a system on a UGC-hosting site at scale.
- shkkmo 4y agoIt seems like it does need to. Banning people for content they legally posses seems pretty questionable. Edit: You completely rewrote you comment after I responded, that is considered bad form on HN.
- dangrossman 4y agoYou responded less than 60 seconds after I wrote my comment, the substance of which is unchanged. Organizing thoughts into words is a process for me, it takes a moment.
- shkkmo 4y agoThen do the organizing and rewrite befor you submit the comment or include your updated thoughts in a way that marks them as new and leaves the original content. I often add an edit immediately after I post, but unless it is fixing a typo, I always mark the edits.
- shkkmo 4y agoYet another example of why we need a users bill of rights to give users some standardized legal recourse to discover the reasons for account bans and dispute them.
- prepend 4y agoI like bringing up the Uniform Commercial Code [0] as a template for this kind of stuff. Where there’s a common goal and groups push for legislation in each state. Sadly I’m not sure there’s a good advocacy group to push for this. Mozilla is funded by Google who definitely doesn’t want any user rights that conflict with their revenue. Maybe the EFF or FSF. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code
- shkkmo 4y agoA state by state push would be one way to make this happen, but given that online companies and their users are often in different states, this does seem like the kind of interstate commerce that could be addressed federally. I'm not hugely optimistic about this. It's possible that the pushback against tech will enable something like this to get passed, but I'm pretty sure that pushback is for purely for political points and not being done with any intent to actually change much.
- prepend 4y agoThat’s the beauty of UCC, it’s in every state. The idea is to get uniform laws in every state for the precise reasons you say.
- hs86 4y agoIf he uses it for work, and clearly, most shared links he creates are of copyrighted media content, how would this work in practice? Does Google Drive/Dropbox have some flag for "creator" accounts?
- LinuxBender 4y agoI don't have an answer for your question but from experience I can say that anecdotally most well known creators have their own infrastructure or outsourced infrastructure and legal teams. Content will not be deleted unless there are repeated egregious violations and complete refusal to remediate violations of the contract that their legal team agreed to. By contact I do not mean some thing that someone clickity-clicked their way through. I mean a contract that went back and forth between legal teams and signed/recorded by a public notary. In such cases deletions would always be done by a human. I have no idea why the Rick and Morty creators did not have such an agreement in place with Dropbox to prevent this scenario or if Dropbox even supports this model. As a funny side story, at least I think it is funny... I used to manage the backend servers for Atari. The "Internet Police" used bots to send take down notices for copyright violations and emailed us saying to take down Atari's software because it was a copyright violation. Atari was our customer. This should have been obvious as the FCrDNS had their domain name in the PTR records. I found it hilarious but also saw how that was a bit of foreshadowing as to how the internet would devolve.
- smolder 4y agoRick and Morty isn't the only thing Justin works on. Likely this was his personal account and not something used specifically for that show. There's no mention of the show in his tweet.
- thrdbndndn 4y agoObviously they said so in TOS, but it's pretty rare to get terminated due to copyrighted material alone. At least not until you mass-share (maybe the case here?) them.
- xnorswap 4y ago
- lol1lol 4y agoIronically Twitter feed recommends me this tweet right below Dropbox tweet https://twitter.com/ResNeXtGuesser/status/1534596133506252800?s=20 https://twitter.com/ResNeXtGuesser/status/153459613350625280...
- smoldesu 4y agoHopefully this will stop HNers from linking everyone ye olde "this is why Dropbox is better than your nerdass solution" comment, and hopefully it vindicates everyone over the years who countered that argument by asking what happens when Dropbox deletes your account apropos of nothing...
- shkkmo 4y agoUnless your "nerdass solution" involves hosting your own server, then you don't have any additional protection.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWhat sort of nerdass doesn't host their own server?
- weberer 4y agoHow about a VPS? Are providers capable of scanning your VM's memory?
- smt88 4y agoHN loathes Dropbox. Most people recommend self-hosted competitors.
- benibela 4y agoThis old nerdass solution? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- UweSchmidt 4y agoThis is an inevitable consequence from the push to make cloud companies responsible for the content they host. Analyzing all of it can only be automated; automation will deliver weird false positives.
- slfnflctd 4y agoI encountered a false positive where a pure text file made up of personal log entries was flagged by antivirus as malicious, and it started fighting me on trying to restore the file from a backup as well. Fortunately, I was eventually able to recover it, although I've forgotten how. Probably my most memorable lesson in unexpected failure modes for complex, automated software.
- bjt2n3904 4y agoAmazing that the Internet culture that vehemently opposed DRM and created things like bit torrent so quickly lined up behind algorithmic content moderation.
- bil7 4y agofans of bittorrent and fans of services with auto content moderation share at least one common factor: they are free to use. Many people are not motivated much further than keeping their hard earned cash.
- benglish11 4y agoI think that internet (that opposed drm) and this one are very different. The anti drm movement was more of a popular movement and this one is a reaction by large corporations to new legal regulations (or threats of more regulations). It’s hard to even think of those as the same “culture”
- fluoridation 4y agoYes, those two sets of people are one and the same.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hrdwdmrbl 4y agoAll TOS violations on all platforms are always secret. They will never tell you what you did. We are all one secret violation away from digital homelessness. Being booted from Dropbox is probably one of the least bad boots you can get.
- kixiQu 4y agoIsn't it pointless to discuss this without knowing more about the communications that happened?
- riffraff 4y agohey, this is the internet, a headline is enough to get your pitchforks out and battle your favorite strawman.
- barnabee 4y agoNot really. It’s unacceptable for Dropbox to know/inspect what content you’re storing, scan it for anything without you actively requesting they do so, and certainly to delete it. This behaviour and any terms of service that allow it should be illegal. The fact that it goes on constantly is a scandal.
- smaryjerry 4y agoI kind of get both sides. They shouldn’t scan personal files at all but then again Dropbox files are also shareable and is kind of like YouTube in that way. So if in this case a guy has copyrighted content, which they own the copyright for, and are sharing copies of copyrighted content, how can an algorithm know it’s not some random person. It’s much more likely not to be the copyright owner than to be it. What’s the worst part imo is that there’s no recourse, no appeal process, no one to talk to for the mistake - except it seems via twitter.
- sleepybrett 4y agoat worst they should scan files that are shared then.
- tofuahdude 4y agoWhy shouldn't they be able to know/inspect/scan the content that they are physically storing? I'm genuinely curious the logic. From my perspective, they're a company providing a service and can determine the terms upon which they'll provide it. You don't have to use them if you don't like it.
- lawgimenez 4y agoI assume they still have a local copy of it and can backup using an external drive. Because I am a Rick and Morty fan and I don't want any delays.
- netsharc 4y agoReminds me of Apple laptops with too tiny SSDs which moved stuff automatically to iCloud...
- ksec 4y agoSomeday, if only we could get a basic NAS that fits three 2TB HDD and retail for $199.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agocan't tell if serious or not - you can get a 2-bay Synology for less than that
- hassancf 4y agoYes diskless. Then you’ll need to buy disks
- ksec 4y agoExactly. The BOM cost of a NAS with 3 2TB needs to be under $100. Even if we could somehow have 2TB 2.5" HDD for $30 BOM, three of them would have been $90.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoHow did you arrive at that target price? I find the Synology units to be a steal for what they offer. Its very hard to undercut this with a DIY build, best you could do is plug a USB drive into the wifi router I guess.
- jherskovic 4y agoI use ResilioSync (formerly Bittorrent Sync) for my personal Dropbox-like stuff. The iOS client is sparse but functional, and it has clients for pretty much every OS I need, including arm Debian... so I have my 'not-quite-Dropbox' home on a Raspberry Pi. We also use it to cross-backup photo libraries with an avid photographer friend who lives across town. It works very, very well.
- mkl95 4y agoI wish governments imposed a support API on public cloud companies and forced them to triage requests 24/7, with the obligation to track them via open Grafana dashboards.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoGovernment usually demands that platforms delete more, not less. The influence of politics is completely unidirectional
- emeril 4y agohmmm... I largely use https://github.com/bailey27/cppcryptfs https://github.com/bailey27/cppcryptfs with dropbox? This would essentially eliminate any possibility of violating any terms of service as far as I can tell? I'm not too comfortable putting any files on dropbox without some sort of encryption fwiw, I've found that cppcryptfs is one of the better implementations of that sort though most (if not all) use the same library which seems to choke on certain files once in a while
- the_biot 4y agoAnd I bet doing that would also avoid what happened here -- account suspension for some unknown reason, but likely content related. If your content is encrypted, they can't drop you over it. Of course at that point you're not using all of dropbox's features, and some other rsync-style solution may well be cheaper.
- colechristensen 4y agohttps://rsync.net/ https://rsync.net/ !
- neurostimulant 4y agoIt's pretty great. You can even define more custom snapshots beyond the free 7 days daily snapshots. Saved my hide several times.
- bell-cot 4y agoReminds me of an incident we had with Dropbox a decade ago. They deleted some niche accounting software (custom developed by us) from our Dropbox account, plus their own log files covering those deletions. Then played ignorant. We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything. (Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a story.) EDIT: Only executables & related distribution files were on Dropbox, not any source code. We lost nothing...except our trust in Dropbox. EDIT2: Yes, as several others have kinda pointed out, this incident was a collision between (a) naive human expectations (of high-skill, high-touch, highly-invested customer service for such situations) and (b) the actual business model of any huge / cheap or free / convenient cloud provider of X (plus just "internet reality"). Sadly, I don't see that either (a) or (b) has changed in the past decade.
- Hendrikto 4y agoSurely a Dropbox upload wasn‘t the only version you had. Couldn‘t you restore easily?
- hammyhavoc 4y agoYou'd be amazed that folks even today misunderstand it to be a 'backup' instead of a sync service.
- chrisseaton 4y agoIt is a backup. Any copy of your data is a backup. It just shouldn't be the only backup (obviously, like any backup.)
- lovecg 4y agoA copy of your data that can be easily modified (whether through bugs, malice, or even just you mistakenly deleting a file and Dropbox happily deleting it everywhere for you) is not a backup. It’s definitely way better than nothing, but people relying on Dropbox as the only “backup” will be in for nasty surprises occasionally.
- rvz 4y agoIs that why something like IPFS, Skiff, etc exists to avoid this? [0] https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io [1] https://skiff.com https://skiff.com
- k__ 4y agoArDrive could be a viable alternative, because it stores data permanently.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoSounds like an opportunity for a new company that abstracts away the actual different cloud providers, provides redundancy, and provides a security abstraction layer that prevents cloud hosts from knowing what their segments of files are for.
- 323 4y agoThen it will be that company which deletes your files because you broke their ToS :)
- lostgame 4y agoAnd when that service is abused for piracy, CP, and other illegal files; it will start the ball rolling that inevitably drags it down legally to the level that DropBox is at.
- rightbyte 4y agoThe storage providers should just charge 3USD per year from a card. I guess that prevents like 99.99% of spam and CP problems.
- colin_mccabe 4y agoSomeone did that and called it MEGA
- danpalmer 4y ago> secret TOS violation This is unfortunately a legal issue and no company big enough to have good lawyers will ever want to tell a customer why they're being banned as it exposes them to too much legal risk. If there's a solution to this, it's probably to give companies some sort of protection from legal action resulting from incorrect application of their TOS. That's far from ideal itself, but it would at least remove some of the downside to honesty from companies on this sort of issue. I can't blame Dropbox (or any other company who does this) given the potential downsides they face.
- hatware 4y agoNot sure why, but I'd expect someone as smart as Roiland to know better. Convenience isn't worth the unknowns, it never was.
- dakial1 4y agoThat's why I bought a NAS and now have a 3-2-1 backup solution.
- case 4y agoThis is the way.
- Hates_ 4y agoWhat do you use for keeping files synced between different machines like Dropbox/OneDrive/GDrive does?
- colechristensen 4y agoI often mount filesystems with samba or iscsi, no syncing necessary.
- temp8964 4y agoSynology has its own sync apps. You can also use NAS to host NextCloud, which has sync apps too.
- neurostimulant 4y agoIf you want dropbox-like experience, NextCloud can mount external storage (WebDAV, SMB, SFTP, S3, or even another NextCloud instance). Just mount your NAS there and install NextCloud apps on your devices to access them. Some NAS even allow you to deploy NextCloud directly on that machine.
- chaostheory 4y agoThis is the reason I have three copies of important files on three separate services. It’s still more convenient than hosting my own.
- lostgame 4y agoCan I take a moment to recommend 'OwnCloud'? ( https://owncloud.com https://owncloud.com ) I may be out of the loop, but my experience with it has been great. It's a (mostly?) open-source, self-hosted DropBox(ish) clone - with a great UI, web browser support as well as native MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS apps. (I figure there's probably some sort of Linux client as well? I'd have no idea.) I'm shocked that Adult Swim isn't using something like this internally to work around this very issue. I'm sure they send copyrighted clips of shit to each other all the time for reference material. They've never run into this issue before? Even once? Lesson learned - depend as little as possible on services you can extremely easy replicate on your own. When my free DropBox storage ran out years ago, I installed OwnCloud and have never even thought about cloud storage since. It 'just works'.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoI use a similar thing called Seafile on "my own" VPS and love it, syncing to local ZFS NAS with autosnapshots and regular-ish offline and "offsite" backups (two big external drives, swapped whenever I visit family a few states over). Self-hosting FTW. I'm sure owncloud and nextcloud are easier and more complete these days so that'd probably be my choice if I were doing it from scratch. I also do self-hosted CalDAV (radicale) for contacts and calendar, and self-hosted email (dovecot/postfix/spamassassin).
- neurostimulant 4y agoNextCloud is a popular fork of OwnCloud by its original developer, and doesn't seem to gate features on their self-hosted version.
- lostgame 4y agoHey, thanks so kindly for bringing that to my attention! I'll probably migrate my system to NextCloud. :)
- neurostimulant 4y agoAlso, there is native support for nextcloud in mainstream linux desktop out of the box now (gnome), which covers contacts, calendar and files data.
- rasz 4y agoProbably stored 'Doc and Mharti' on there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngN7eJUQyXk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngN7eJUQyXk
- npc12345 4y agorsync (and web3 in the future) are the solutions to this.
- ur-whale 4y ago> rsync (and web3 in the future) are the solutions to this. and some encryption so that whomever hosts the data cant peep at it.
- daenz 4y ago>secret TOS violation Given the source (a comedian), this part sounds like hyperbole, not evidence of an actual "secret TOS"
- katmannthree 4y agoDropbox doesn't have any functioning contact points. I cancelled my yearly subscription a month ago the day after it renewed, they cancelled my premium benefits immediately but never send the $120 refund that the cancellation page said I'd get. Tried contacting them from their website contact page, nothing. Tried tweeting at their support account, nothing. I'm half tempted to try to get my bank to do a chargeback. It's sad, I used to really like dropbox but now they just suck.
- _jal 4y agoI've gotten much quicker with chargebacks in this situation. Companies that go out of their way to insulate themselves from their customers leave you little other alternative. Dropbox is acting no different than any other scammer here, and there's a limit to how much time I'm going to waste on being polite. Somehow it is always a "mistake", and somehow those "mistakes" always involve money flows in the same direction.
- djbusby 4y agoDo the charge-back! There is no other course if you want that money back.
- remram 4y agoThis is also exactly what it's for, getting your money back for services not provided after attempts to contact support fail.
- InitialLastName 4y ago> I'm half tempted to try to get my bank to do a chargeback. Do it. I guarantee Dropbox cares far more about their relationship with the credit card processors than it does about their relationship with you (who just terminated your relationship with them), so maybe if enough people do chargebacks to resolve their problems it will incentivize them to make their system work correctly.
- mullen 4y ago
- ur-whale 4y agolocalhost ftw !
- djbusby 4y agoNever would have happened if you just used FTP like Brandon said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- batuhandirek 4y agoDo you have this in your bookmarks? Super cool you could just pull this off of your memory and have a link to it!
- djbusby 4y agoHN search. I knew the terms. I remember upvoting that comment when it posted. I still don't use Dropbox. (sshfs backed on a zfs server (hosted by rsync.net))
- _xoo 4y agoOn a recent story there was a similar reference to this comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31432573#31432743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31432573#31432743
- xeromal 4y agoThis is a pretty popular post to link to when it comes to feedback for a new app you're building. Another fun one is the slashdot posts when the first ipod came out.
- undersuit 4y agoThere is someone suggesting in the Twitter thread to use an FTP server too.
- rkuykendall-com 4y agohttps://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i... > No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
- throwaway23234 4y agoSounds like Microsoft's Onedrive is the way to go.
- smaryjerry 4y agoOneDrive is just not as simple as DropBox. Dropbox you know what you get, an online file system that syncs to your computer. OneDrive always asks to backup local files when that’s not what I want it for and doesn’t have an intuitive interface that just works. It’s too integrated with other Microsoft products.
- cosmin800 4y agoEverybody should check and recheck they actually own their data, github accounts, digitalocean boxes, google accounts dropbox accounts, youtube accounts, the list goes on and on. It is obvious by now that it can happen to anyone for any reason (datacenter fire too) at anytime. Every now and then there is a similar post on hackernews.
- chasd00 4y agoyeah i feel like the best thing to do these days is just setup a server, encrypt your files, and use scp. ...like we were doing in the 90s
- sydbarrett74 4y ago
- noasaservice 4y agoDropbox, quite frankly, sucks. I had an account there. Didnt use it much. Then I had a friend share a few videos for me to check for quality and content. They were on paid and I wasn't. The simple act of "sharing from their account" put *my* account over storage quota. I couldn't do ANYTHING with my account, including downloading any of the videos. Basically my only option was to pay them for more "storage", even though my friend paid. They're effectively infinitely double-dipping for what amounts to a link. I abandoned the account after that crap.
- dontbenebby 4y agoDropbox ghosted me a while back, I guess they don't need advice on matters like this, so I'll just show up in the comments. Shouldn't the files remain on the hard drive even if Dropbox deleted their end? I switched to Spider oak for a while, but more because I wanted encryption at rest, I didn't have an issue with them beyond not adding that feature. I then moved to just backing up locally and alternating between two USB hard drives, one of which was stored in a safe deposit box at my credit union, because a one time fee for a hard drive or three encrypted using Veracrypt (then Truecrypt? Memory is fuzzy) plus a safe deposit box is simpler and cheaper. I like to keep things offline, and it was interesting when a bank I talked to about opening one in my new city was... oddly obstructionist about that ask. (Has anyone else told a bank you're an aspiring journalist, would like to purchase a small safe deposit box to hold your birth certificate, passport, and a backup of your files, then tried to have a will drawn up to designate someone who would receive the contents of the box in the event of your death, then had someone break into your apartment and very obviously look into your notebooks? I still don't have a good answer for that fundemental problem that devices can be hacked, but physical security is hard. Anyways, sorry to go on a tangent, but it doesn't surprise me that maybe Justin did something very bad, and they just want to end the relationship and not interact anymore, but I won't get specific in a public forum. Dropbox itself was kind of buggy for me, sometimes it'd fail at whatever their implementation of rsync did, and start filling my hard drive with multiple copies of my Dropbox folder, at best filling it up -- I suspect their shit code is one reason I kept having to have Applecare to keep replacing my hard drive. That or the assholes who kept blasting me with malware... I suspect it was the same set of people who were skimming credit cards from Mother Bear's and uploading them to the dark web, if any of the feds who cyberstalk me are bored this morning ;-)
- billpg 4y agoNever mind. I heard you can just use an SFTP server and rsync to get the same experience. (I've been on HN how long? I'm old.)
- mdmglr 4y agoIt's concerning that Dropbox is scanning user data. I understand the benefits of doing that (CSAM/copyright). One of the selling points of Dropbox is offsite backup and if they can delete data at anytime then its obvious to me Dropbox is no good. I personally don't use Dropbox. But if I did I wonder if something like gocryptfs [1] can be integrated with the Dropbox folder. [1] https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs
- hndamien 4y agoPerhaps decentralized cloud services are looking better now?
- DeathMetal3000 4y agoE2ee services are the only sane hosted solution. I use sync.com and find it works as well as Dropbox. There are other ones but I haven’t tried them.
- gullevek 4y agoEven with this and even with not updating their client for macOS anymore they are still better than Google Drive and One Drive. OneDrive for example: you can't delete a file into the trash anymore. It gets just deleted, like a force delete. So if you are offline or OneDrive is not running or the file has not yet been uploaded to OneDrive, that file is GONE. MS response: use the online trash. It worked until they updated to the new 12.3 macOS sync system (icloud can delete to trash, so I fully blame this on MS). Also if one file does not sync for whatever reason ALL syncs are stopped until this conflict is resolved. GoogleDrive. If in drive stream mode (which i think is the default) it is mounted as a volume, so it is not "there" when you login, so any files opened from there will not open until GoogleDrive is mounted. Also saving to this Volume mounted google drive with some apps will trash the file. MySQL Workbench trashed files very very often. You need to restore from the google drive backup in this case. If you switch to all files always local it is like Dropbox and works, unless you want to upload symlinks or something with characters that don't match googles like and then you have missing files. At least other files will sync. I also have no idea if they actually support macOS 12.3 file sync type fully ... iCloud: Works ... except that what you see in the finder is not what you actually have in the Terminal because it is a mix of actual files and data folders from applications. Sharing is a pain between users. I also don't think it works well on non Apple systems.
- shreyshnaccount 4y agoThe number of people who apparently "can't believe this" and suggesting Google in the twitter thread is beyond belief. I thought we had already learnt not to trust them
- helloworld11 4y agoWhy anyone would deliberately use a sync or backup provider that openly reads your data and pries into the very meat of what you store with them is beyond me. Even if it's an algorithm doing this instead of a human makes it no less disgustnig to tolerate. It's as flatly insulting that these companies think this okay and many users don't mind as having someone rifle through your personal diaries and documents in your house just because they come to do housekeeping. Alternatives easily exist, and im not even talking about self hosting. There are plenty of zero knowledge sync and backup services and if you're really stuck on using Crapbox or Google Dreck, you can use any one of a number of encryption services for your data first, so that these bigcos can't snoop worth a shit and randomly punish you for what they find.