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Condoleezza Rice Joins Dropbox’s Board As It Names New CFO, COO

526 points by hashx 13y ago

camus2 13y ago
and Al Gore is on the board of many businesses... what's the big deal with it? because she's republican? EDIT: why am i downvoted? because i'm pointing out ex politics on both sides seat on boards or because i talked about being republican,which is not popular here?
- geekam 13y ago
  Isn't this a kind of conflict of interest? (not a snark but a real question).
  - bmelton 13y ago
    No. She currently works at Stanford. She's not presiding over any legislation or anything, nor does she hold any office I'm aware of.
- protomyth 13y ago
  Probably. Condoleezza Rice has ties to Stanford and is a good pickup for overseas advice.
  - rainmaking 13y ago
    She sure does understand how to kill foreigners, but I'm not so sure about marketing to them.
    - protomyth 12y ago
      I see we've attracted the trolls from Fark's political tab. sigh :) Care to back up your statement with some facts with sources?
- bmelton 13y ago
  I think the implication is because she's an advisor to the NSA, it does not necessarily make her the best custodian of our data. That said, the idea that she would ever be in a position to touch any user's data from the board is absurd -- however, with appropriate amounts of tin foil, if you were looking for a way in to a big-money data-sale to the NSA, you could do worse than Condy for your board.
- tomp 13y ago
  For me, the problem is her involvement with the Bush Iraq fiasco. Lying about weapons of mass destruction.
  - sigzero 13y ago
    Then you must hate everyone. Everyone in Congress believed it. Multiple countries around the world believed it too. Good luck with that attitude.
    - Karunamon 13y ago
      Believing it != directly lying about it. You can't rightly hold it against someone that they were misled.
    - tomp 13y ago
      They believe it because Bush and Rice said so. They, on the other hand, had all of the US intelligence services to provide them with data.
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      Europe didn't buy the lies. There were a lot of rallies against the war. And UK is not political part of Europe. It is more like 52'nd US state. Russia and China were meh.
    - subsection1h 13y ago
      > Everyone in Congress believed it. Wrong. http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll455.xml http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll455.xml
  - efa 13y ago
    Yeah, like those liars the Russians, the Chinese, the British, the French, ... Damn how was Bush able to brainwash the whole UN!
    - mercurial 13y ago
      The Russians, the Chinese and the French, really?
- uptown 13y ago
  Presumably, one reason a company appoints people to their board is for their judgement. Many believe Rice demonstrated exceptionally-poor judgement during her public office. Example: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/01/news/la-pn-rice-katrina-20111101 http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/01/news/la-pn-rice-katr...
- valarauca1 13y ago
  Supporters of warrentless wire tapping, and bulk anonymous data collection are in-charge of a company that wants me to trust them with my data. That destroys a lot of trust.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
    > Supporters of warrentless wire tapping, and bulk anonymous data collection are in-charge of a company that wants me to trust them with my data This is IMHO the big, relevant one. Her role in the Iraq war may be vile ( to most of us), but this is directly in conflict with the expectations of Dropbox users. What were the Dropbox decision-makers thinking?
- Pxtl 13y ago
  No, because she was a republican who was a key player in one of the worst administrations in the recent history of the US government. I don't have any problem with people who believe in small government, defense, the rule of law, and sound fiscal policy. Lying to the American public to justify a boondoggle of a war in Iraq is different. Al Gore, whatever his failings, doesn't have that kind of massive black mark on his resume.
  - cookiecaper 13y ago
    You don't want to go through all the things the Clinton administration did? People can trump up just as many silly charges against him (yes, including the deaths of "hundreds of thousands"). Hackers need to mature into the real world if they want to run grown-up companies.
    - Pxtl 13y ago
      > Hackers need to mature into the real world if they want to run grown-up companies. A talk-radio slogan when Bush was elected was that "the adults are in charge". How'd that work out for you? Really, you can't talk about being "grown-up" out of one side of your mouth while basely insulting your opponents' "maturity" out of the other side just because we disagree politically.
      - cookiecaper 13y ago
        It's not because we simply disagree politically, that's obviously fine with me, but not with anyone else in the tech community apparently. This is now the second instance in as many weeks where the tech mob is actively running out anyone who disagrees with their political views and boycotting entire companies for having the gall to hire useful people who happen to be conservative.
        SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
        > having the gall to hire useful people who happen to be conservative BS. To me it's really simple, and not about party affiliation: A strong supporter of warrantless wire tapping and bulk anonymous data collection is a terrible choice for the board of a consumer file-storage service.
nodata 13y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7563477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7563477 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7561483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7561483
higherpurpose 13y ago
Now I have no doubts anymore about Dropbox "coming soon" to PRISM, if it's not already in it.
not_paul_graham 13y ago
Reasons this might be a great move for Dropbox: 1. It will help them secure major enterprise clients, probably the govt. or with ties to the govt. 2. Great selling point to institutional investors come IPO time. 3. Navigating foreign business opportunities. Although I'm not a fan of this move by Dropbox, it is important to note that Stanford has hired Rice as a professor as well. No one is abandoning Stanford, and the hits that Dropbox is going to take are going to be minuscule in comparison to the upside. This is just the hard reality. Rice does have a lot of experience that is relevant to Dropbox and students at Stanford and I'd just like to leave it at that because at the end of the day, connections + experiences that come from being Secretary of State trump pure meritocracy or idealism.
- brightghost 13y ago
  The difference is that harboring conflicting and controversial viewpoints is part and parcel of the mission of a University.
- zimpenfish 13y ago
  The difference is that a) I don't give any money to Stanford and b) Stanford don't have 10s of gigabytes of my data.
vdaniuk 13y ago
Sooo, will we be seeing a repeat of the Eich-like public outcry? Though I may understand the business rationale for this hire, I certainly wont trust founders, board or anyone else at Dropbox who is OK working with a person that is partially responsible for deaths of thousands(arguably hundreds of thousands) people in the Iraq war based on false premises about "WMD". Oh, and we shouldn't forget about her role in "enhanced interrogation techniques", too. EDIT: Thinking a little more about this I will be cancelling my Dropbox subscription. EDIT2: Yes, we are seeing an outcry. I am incredibly happy that coolness factor in tech is now more connected to ethical behavior of its top management and board members.
- valarauca1 13y ago
  Your forgetting she's not only on the record supporting anonymous bulk data collection, AND warrentless wiretapping. She was a key figure of the administration that created such legislation to start with.
  - vdaniuk 13y ago
    Oh, right, forgot about that. What the fuck is going at Dropbox? How did they even come to the conclusion that this is a good idea? I don't understand the business rationale anymore for Dropbox anymore.
    - valarauca1 13y ago
      Well she is a prominent figure in America. Just not for a lot of good reasons. The bet is likely that future government business she could bring is larger then the major exodus of people who supported them early on.
      - vdaniuk 13y ago
        Yeah, that may be their calculation. I don't think this will sit well with german users or french users, for example though. Could really hurt their international b2c business.
gnu8 13y ago
The problem with Rice is that she is a malevolent liar. She's unfit for any leadership position, public or private.
- cantbecool 13y ago
  Instead of simply saying a hit and run statement, offer some additional details.
  - markburns 13y ago
    This is more than slightly off topic but... Whilst I agree with the sentiment of the comment you replied to, at first I read your comment, then felt a negative reaction towards your reply. My (very much initial) thought process was to try and think of a rebuttal to your request for some details. Just taking a few moments to think (and whilst I still think that the original post is probably correct), it's funny just how easy it is to fall into an emotional reaction and justification pattern of communication. It's hard to admit, but I'm almost certainly emotionally biased against people that I think (whether rightly or wrongly) have been directly or indirectly involved in the deaths of others. It's logically obvious that that could occur, but it's surprising that my reaction has the potential to override my (mostly logical mind) that I agree with your point and think the original commenter absolutely should provide some supporting evidence to such strong opinions. Apologies to anyone that found this to be an overly laboured and/or irrelevant point. It felt to me like an interesting bit of introspection.
  - cenhyperion 13y ago
    "The intelligence was as clear as any intelligence I've ever seen and I've been in this business a long time. ... When you had intelligence assessments that said Saddam Hussein has reconstituted his biological and chemical weapons and could reconstitute his nuclear weapon in a year if he got foreign assistance — by the end of the decade if he didn't — I've actually never seen clearer indications than that."
- 001sky 13y ago
  Shouldn't you adress this complaint to Stanford?
peterkelly 13y ago
Wow, and I thought the recent Mozilla thing was controversial... Popcorn status: Ready
- Shivetya 13y ago
  If it wasn't for message boards most of those commenting would never do a damn thing, hell with comment boards they don't have too. Its easy to be the cool, caring, and tough guy, around the internet water cooler. Angst ridden techie hipters!
- ssharp 13y ago
  I don't know how much of an effect this will actually have. It will be interesting, though. The SV mob was strong enough to affect Mozilla, but a service as huge as Dropbox might be mostly immune from the mob cries. They have lots of equity outside of the HN crowd and Rice is taking a board seat, not an executive position.
  - yardie 13y ago
    It won't have an immediate effect. But once the network effect takes hold these things pick up steam fast. Bitcoin spent 3 years in obscurity before it took off. Also if you think about it are choices of browsers are actually quite limited. You have Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari. Our choices in cloud storage provides are unlimited. Even my ISP provides the service now.
- 001sky 13y ago
  This should be stickied at the top. {As it was one of the first, and most prescient comments} Of all the things said, It also seems the least arguable.
acjohnson55 13y ago
I hope she hasn't ever donated to any disagreeable referendum campaigns..... ....or ever been a core member of an administration that left us with two disastrous wars, an offshore gulag, the greatest economic disaster in 70 years, a record of legitimizing torture, a decline in prestige on the world stage. Oh, and a strong record or rejecting marriage equality.
- sigzero 13y ago
  All continued by the current administration and more. What was your point again?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - JabavuAdams 13y ago
      Bullshit. A lot of the world despises that administration, and it wouldn't matter whether it was Rice, Rumsfeld, or Cheney.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        stephencanon 13y ago
        Chelsea Clinton has never even stood for office, much less been part of the senior leadership of an administration that led the US into two wars of aggression and endorsed torture. I really don't see how a vaguely rational person could even begin to compare the two, regardless of political beliefs. I haven't seen anyone arguing that Bush was worse than Obama in this thread, so I don't see how that comparison has anything to do with anything either.
        001sky 13y ago
        I'm sure none of this is relevant but (a) her dad is ex POTUS of a global superpower; and/or (b) her mom was Secretary of state of that global superpower. They also have the son of the wife of the CEO but that's a little different, she was a fashion designer. Condi was (b) so they are basically the same relation to the US gov't. I think the generalization that US foreign policy has radically changed its ethics or its data-security between 2008-2011 to be a bit unsupported by the facts. If anything, as tech has improved we have all become less secure...regardless of the POTUS...because the professionals working in the NSA and the CIA are just getting more powerful. But YMMV
mathattack 13y ago
My first instinct on seeing the title was "What does someone like this (or Al Gore, or any other politician) have to offer a tech startup?" Then the article makes it more clear: "What’s interesting about bringing Rice onto Dropbox’s board is how normal it feels. Dropbox needs people with international experience to help it at once deal with foreign governments that have blocked its use — China, for example — and as it works to spread a product developed in one country to others that are culturally different." Her connections at Stanford may help, though perhaps they're not as hard to find.
- alttab 13y ago
  Oh, she's there for her skills in manipulating foreign govetnments. That makes me feel better.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    If you were a VC or investor in the company, it should give you confidence that someone is around that can give the CEO advice on managing geo-political minefields. The last thing you want is the overseas political issues that Microsoft and Google have had to deal with.
    - zimpenfish 13y ago
      Given how well she did giving advice about previous overseas political issues, I'd wager you'd want her as far away from your CEO as it was possible to get without sending him to the moon.
      - mathattack 13y ago
        Here we are getting a little out of my element, but... How well do we know that she gave bad advice, versus him not listening? I do know that her speciality was Russia, not the Middle East, but after all that time in DC I am pretty sure she's learned a lot. Sometimes you learn from political failures, just like entrepreneurial ones.
cryoshon 13y ago
Well, that's the end of my usage of Dropbox, effective immediately. I'll make sure to mention Condi's association with them in every conversation involving Dropbox, in hope of spreading knowledge about their profane selection of board members. It's a shame that they had to pick a Bush crony. These people should be in prison for malevolently misleading the public in order to start a for-profit war which killed hundreds of thousands of people.
- jamespo 13y ago
  I too am considering moving my free account to another free provider
  - hrvbr 13y ago
    hubiC works as well as Dropbox, for what I can tell from a few weeks of usage.
- antocv 13y ago
  Hey now, it would have been for nothing, all years of war and 600 000 deaths, if these people who were in charge and lead the effort, would suddenly find themselves in low-key positions in society. The top cream must stay at the top. Besides, her technical skills and understanding of IT for sure are awesome, making her the finest choice for Dropbox business.
  - JackpotDen 13y ago
    >Besides, her technical skills and understanding of IT for sure are awesome, making her the finest choice for Dropbox business. Is this sarcastic? I can't tell.
    - Infinitesimus 13y ago
      nah, totally serious /s
  - notd97843 13y ago
Nemant 13y ago
Guys you don't get it. Dropbox is going to improve the internet by finding all of the Documents of Mass Destruction. Shutting down dropbox
bane 13y ago
This is probably tied to the DB for business offering and probably a play to become the official shared files app for USG and expansion into Asia. Also Dropbox announce two more executive changes today. The company has a new CFO, Sujay Jaswa, who is being into the role internally. Also, hailing from Google is Dropbox’s new COO: Dennis Woodside. In the post announcing those changes, it reaffirmed the above, indicating that Rice will help the company with its international operations. Also check out Rice's consulting firm which has been providing consultation to DB for a while now. http://www.ricehadleygates.com/ http://www.ricehadleygates.com/ The "work" page is illuminating. - either way, this is potentially explosively bad for DB. edit I'll also refer back to a recent comment of mine about how DP can scan your files https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498457 Now extend that to China providing lists of hashes of banned files, like Falun Gong texts or whatever. If you rely on DP a lot, it's like allowing government(s) to sniff around your personal hard drive.
- Cenk 13y ago
  > and expansion into Asia. Well, that’s certainly something Condi know something about.
gboone42 13y ago
I hear Box has weapons of mass destruction.
bachback 13y ago
"sudo apt-get remove dropbox", never to return. it seems obvious that most US tech companies have not at all realized that they are a global business, and the implications of the Snowden summer.
BjornW 13y ago
As a non US person I don't get why she would be beneficial for (as not_paul_graham states) "navigating foreign business opportunities." My first thoughts, as a person living in the EU are exactly opposite.
Eric_WVGG 13y ago
1 year of Dropbox == 1 "Transporter Sync personal cloud" I guess this is the push I needed.
veidr 13y ago
Brandon Eich isn't cool. You know what's cool? (BRANDON EICH * BRANDON EICH)
pointernil 13y ago
"On a similar Note: Rumsfeld joined the Board of Twitter" -- NO he did not. And I really hope he does not. Onion-News-Network please take over ;)
rglover 13y ago
What in the hell is going on?
beaker52 13y ago
We assumed the best pre-PRISM and we got PRISM'd. Dropbox, I'm out. I love Dropbox, it's my favourite service that I use regularly. However, I cannot trust Dropbox with the privacy of my data now.
Cenk 13y ago
http://i.imgur.com/pVbWMqn.png http://i.imgur.com/pVbWMqn.png
wellboy 13y ago
Finally, Dropbox is also an NSA company. Took them quite a while...
tegeek 13y ago
I ve just removed Dropbox from my life. Here are two alternates. https://www.copy.com/home/ https://www.copy.com/home/ https://hubic.com/ https://hubic.com/
donatj 13y ago
Do any Dropbox alternatives support Mac resource forks? That's the biggest reason I stick with them, as even Google Drive doesn't.
- jonstewart 13y ago
  Is there any Mac software that actually uses resource forks these days???
  - donatj 13y ago
    Finder. Tags / Colors / File comments are stored in resource forks. I tag a lot of my work with things like "done" and "in progress" etc. It's really important to my workflow.
    - jonstewart 13y ago
      Oh. Huh. Didn't realize that.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    Everything? Aren't file associations on OS X still stored in the resource fork? I remember trying to move some designers to a NFS share off of a netatalk fileserver and they flipped out when neither they nor their Mac knew what to open files in.
    - jonstewart 12y ago
      netatalk, hooboy, that brings back memories. Classic MacOS X stored the type and creator codes in the resource fork. Early versions of MacOS X discouraged this, but preserved and respected the codes if they were present. 10.6 Snow Leopard killed them off with the UTI (an unfortunate acronym) framework. http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/09/22/inside-snow-leopards-uti-apple-fixes-the-creator-code/ http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/09/22/inside-snow-leopard...
- peerbreed 13y ago
  You may want to look into Owncloud. It's opensource. You can run it from your own server or host it elsewhere. They do have clients for MAC and IOS. I'm not a MAC user personally, but I do believe they support MAC resource forks. You can also access your information through any web browser as well. I've been running it off my personal server for a while now. I am completely satisfied with the software. http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/
muyuu 13y ago
You guys ever heard of rsync? It's awesome.
- jonstewart 13y ago
  +1. Extra-credit if you've heard of cron.
  - zimpenfish 13y ago
    With 16 rounds of ROT13 encryption for safety?
    - muyuu 13y ago
      With your own computers and your own encryption in place. Without sending your stuff straight to the NSA.
  - gtremper 13y ago
    I don't want cronyism in my data storage.
- mmagin 13y ago
  Can you please explain how I should use this to: 1) Sync the 1Password iPhone app with the desktop app 2) Share cute cat photos with my wife (who uses Windows, and who is not computer-clueless, but is rather commandline-adverse.)
  - muyuu 13y ago
    Keep on using Dropbox. If you use all that proprietary, anti-privacy rubbish then you can assume they can access to all your information anyway. On the bright side, I wouldn't worry too much about the NSA browsing through your cat pics. Or if you're willing to put in some work you can try something like this https://fak3r.com/2009/09/14/howto-build-your-own-open-source-dropbox-clone/ https://fak3r.com/2009/09/14/howto-build-your-own-open-sourc...
rootuid 13y ago
I'm more outraged by Condi's appointment than Brendan Eich's appointment to Mozilla. Condi preached death and torture, Eich supported bigotry. I'm sure however that nobody really give a f and the status quo will be maintained.
- sanbor 13y ago
  IMHO it doesn't make sense to compare Brendan and Condoleezza. Brendan expressed his vote democratically (different opinions are the base of democracy, right?), while Condoleezza had a charge of power in the State, she was an active executor.
Cbasedlifeform 13y ago
As it happens I was just looking at DB alternatives that would be more secure. The news that they have hired Condi the war criminal Rice to join their board is the clincher. Bye bye DB.
Diederich 13y ago
My family will be migrated from Dropbox by next week.
flexie 13y ago
I don't understand - is that because Dropbox wants to make it more clear to the world that there is a free flow of information from Dropbox to the US government?
DominikR 13y ago
I'd just like to know what the hell they were thinking when they gave her the job since I don't believe that many US citizens have fond memories of her. Couldn't she just get herself a job in the Oil/Gas industry or at some company that creates weapons of mass destruction like everyone else does after they leave a government position.
CalRobert 13y ago
OwnCloud, while not perfect, is really easy to set up. I had it running on a Droplet from Digital Ocean in about 20 minutes, and a Raspberry Pi in about 40 (note - it's a bit resource heavy for a Pi)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
med_abidi 13y ago
I'm dropping Dropbox forever.
rdtsc 13y ago
Why? What does she bring to the table?
- rainmaking 13y ago
  My best guess is they have been trying to get lucrative government contracts for a long time.
myth_drannon 13y ago
It's time for Ubuntu to re-evaluate its decision to shut down Ubuntu One
charismaticfoo 13y ago
How is Condoleeza Rice joining Dropbox, make Dropbox vulnerable in the hands of big brother than it already is? I do think it is a bit of an over reaction to move out of Dropbox solely because of this reason. In these days of Prism, we should assume that most of our private stuff is available for surveillance, unless we are ready to pay for a trusted fully encrypted (without de-deplication) sharing service.
ptbello 13y ago
https://www.dropbox.com/account/delete https://www.dropbox.com/account/delete Reason: Other Care to elaborate: Condoleezza Rice
- subsection1h 13y ago
  This is the most actionable comment in this discussion. Thank you.
apenney 13y ago
I cancelled both my accounts over this. It'll be a personal pain, as everything on my ipad hooks in nicely to dropbox, but it's worth it in order to not support one of the Bush era war criminals.
bovermyer 13y ago
Well goddammit. And here I was, about to completely switch from OneDrive+Google Drive to Dropbox. Now I have to pull everything out of Dropbox and put it... somewhere. Google Drive, maybe. Sigh. I hate leaving negative comments like this, but I really can see no positive light to this development.
EC1 13y ago
Very sad. I just deleted everything from my Dropbox and my account, sent them an email saying "I do not do business with war criminals." Good luck Dropbox, I hope you un-fuckup somehow.
matthewmacleod 13y ago
So I've been wanting to migrate away from Dropbox and onto a self-hosted solution for a while anyway, and I guess this would be a good opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any good open-source solutions at the moment. I'm not looking for a fancy web interface or anything, just a simple sync between devices, with a usable API for building apps. In particular, rsync etc. doesn't really offer this interface, and I'm really not convinced by the usability of e.g. OwnCloud. Any solutions I might be missing? Or is this something I have to build myself?
- pedrocr 13y ago
  As far as I know the current contenders are git-annex[1], syncthing[2] and clearskies[3]. They're all still very green. git-annex is technologically farthest along but is still very unpolished for the basic "sync this dir" functionality to be reliable/friendly. Clearskies is still at proof-of-concept stage, defining the protocol and implementing the first clients. syncthing is probably the best bet right now, but I haven't tested it yet. [1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/ [2] https://github.com/calmh/syncthing https://github.com/calmh/syncthing [3] https://github.com/jewel/clearskies-ruby https://github.com/jewel/clearskies-ruby
- vjz 13y ago
  I've been using ownCloud for over a year and it works great. The only issue is that it is not as convenient as Dropbox. It needs a server to host it, which is not free; and the server requires maintenance, security patches (see: heartbleed), upgrades, etc.
- jancborchardt 12y ago
  Simple syncing is what ownCloud does. Of course technically a server is inbetween, so it’s not directly between devices. LAN sync is requested sometimes, but currently not a priority. Please do let us know about the things you miss – on our issue tracker at http://github.com/owncloud/core/issues http://github.com/owncloud/core/issues And if you use IRC you’re welcome in #owncloud-dev (freenode). And be sure that we have a lot of improvements lined up for ownCloud 7 which will come out in a few weeks. EDIT: Also, if you have specific feedback on ownCloud’s usability and design let me know, I work on that.
JabavuAdams 13y ago
Ok, if I cancel my Dropbox subscriptions, I'd like to maintain some level of consistency. Assuming that I have a great disdain for the architects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which other tech companies should I consider boycotting? To avoid a combinatorial explosion, I'd limit myself to executives or boards pulled from state, military, and intelligence roles in the last three administrations. Oh, and McNamara. Fuck that guy.
- cwal37 13y ago
  I don't know off the top of my head, but I think your best bet is to probably just check the wikipedia pages of major figures. If there haven't been updates in the past year or two, do some pointed google searches for news articles on board or COO/CFO/CEO appointments.
rainmaking 13y ago
Well, this certainly puts all the hysteria about Brendan Eich in perspective.
ekianjo 13y ago
> Rice is a famous figure, known in almost equal parts for her ferocious intelligence, and controversial role in the Bush administration, which included comments on alleged weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was thought at the time to possess. TC needs to correct that last sentence: "weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was KNOWN NOT TO possess" would be more correct in light of what actually occurred behind the scenes.
- streptomycin 13y ago
  I would say it was more like "weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was HOPED TO possess". The Bush administration had a bit of circumstantial evidence that they sold to the world as definitive evidence, but they didn't actually know that there were no WMDs.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Correct me if my memory is failing, but they had several UN inspectors go to Iraq who found nothing and Tony Blair had his aides fabricate some false evidence that was later used by Powell to declare "hey, we found 'em, now let's nuk'em". When you need to fabricate evidence, you do it because you lack of actual one in the first place.
    - streptomycin 13y ago
      Saddam didn't let the UN inspectors look everywhere they wanted to, so that wasn't conclusive (in retrospect, this was an incredibly stupid thing for Saddam to do... maybe he wanted to bluff that maybe he did have WMDs to make himself appear more powerful than he actually was, not thinking that the US would actually invade?). IIRC Powell's "evidence" (and some other evidence too) came from Curveball, not from the UK. It was very shaky evidence, but it wasn't known to be completely false. And even if it was, there was still the hope that Saddam had some kind of WMDs that we didn't know about. I'm veering off into speculation now, but I think their thought process was... We gave him WMDs in the 80s and he used them in the 80s. What were the odds he really got rid of them all and hasn't tried to acquire more? I think everyone in the Bush administration just assumed that to be the case, so they weren't worried that the actual intelligence was incredibly suspect and possibly even fabricated. They already "knew" Saddam was guilty, they just needed to get the authority to take him out, and then they would be greeted as liberators and find copious evidence of all of Saddam's WMDs and evil deeds.
marshray 13y ago
Say what you want about politics, that lady is sharp as a tack (and a concert pianist too).
- HNaTTY 13y ago
  Yes, she is smart, and witty, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, and I still deleted my Dropbox account today.
tokenizer 13y ago
https://www.dropbox.com/help/41/en https://www.dropbox.com/help/41/en
izzydata 13y ago
Why is dropbox doing this exactly? What can she possibly do to help them?
embro 13y ago
I signed up for Wuala about a month ago. Wasn't ready to make the switch but... It's time to make it happen.
zos 13y ago
DROPBOMBS
donatj 13y ago
The overreaction and moral indignation of HN of late is irritating to say the least.
macinjosh 13y ago
Shout out to BitTorrent Sync as a great alternative to Dropbox for some. Open and distributed so its already 2x better than dropbox. http://www.bittorrent.com/sync http://www.bittorrent.com/sync
- josephagoss 13y ago
  I use this as my main sync software. However the code is still closed and backdoors could easily exist.
cheshire137 13y ago
Dammit, I just got excited yesterday about Mailbox coming to Android.
canistr 13y ago
What's fascinating about the comments is that, had Condoleezza Rice been appointed Commissioner of the NFL, would people have said "I'm giving up the NFL forever"? Obviously this question should only apply to NFL fans who also make this claim about dropping DropBox as a service.
eneifert 13y ago
If I wanted political rants I would go back to reddit. Come on Hacker News, you're better than this.
elwell 13y ago
It should be noted that her consulting firm [0] has been advising Dropbox for the last year. [0] - http://www.ricehadleygates.com/ http://www.ricehadleygates.com/
general_failure 13y ago
I am a bit ignorant here. What makes Rice a good candidate for the board? Because she has good tie ups with political big wigs of other countries?
dllthomas 13y ago
This seems like a thread that would benefit from that "pending" feature...
znowi 13y ago
That's unfortunate and I, too, will be closing my account with Dropbox. Moving to SpiderOak. I realize, though, that neither me nor thousand others will change the Dropbox policy. They most likely anticipated the public outcry over Rice and considered it not a threat. They play in the big league now, increasingly catering to the enterprise world. And those guys are not particularly worried about privacy issues. They rather cooperate, like the PRISM companies. It's not the first nor last time a nice, user-friendly startup turned "evil" over a certain threshold of growth. If you happen to find a large influential company that stayed true to its original promise to their users - cherish it with all your heart. They are a very rare kind.
jellicle 13y ago
I find this board appointment alarming for what it signals. We know that the NSA et al. are always seeking access to new sources of electronic data. It is beyond doubt that they have considered how to get access to Dropbox user data, and almost certainly beyond doubt that they have approached Dropbox about it. To me, this appointment signals that Dropbox wants to reach a negotiated settlement with the NSA over their access to Dropbox user data. They hire someone who knows all the key players and issues, to negotiate on their behalf. Presumably Ms. Rice will be instructed something like: "We're getting a lot of pressure from the NSA. If the public knows we are giving away their data, there will be a shitstorm, it'll cost us a lot of business. So, you have to make sure NSA access to our data is somewhat limited, there's some kind of plausible legal authority, a court order or something, make sure they pay us for our efforts in copying the data over to the NSA, that sort of thing. Set it up so we can put all the blame on the NSA if anything leaks, and claim we were mandated to comply by law. Okay?" And then Ms. Rice will be dispatched to undertake that negotiation. So, if the NSA doesn't yet have a pipeline from Dropbox to that datacenter in Utah, they will soon.
- AJ007 13y ago
  When the PRISM story broke, the Guardian reported that Dropbox was listed as planned to be added http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-... There are two perspectives for this one -- #1 Dropbox wants an insider to help them be on the receiving end of better decisions related to non-consensual government surveillance #2 Dropbox wants better information themselves on non-consensual government surveillance From a PR perspective, this looks bad both to both Americans and international Dropbox users. It does not instill confidence in Dropbox. Dropbox is a dominant platform right now but it certainly does not have to be the dominant platform. Any non-US company doing sensitive work is being negligent to their investors using platforms which enable easy spying (remember, the controversy in the US is about the NSA spying on American citizens, there is no legal barrier nor likely will there ever be one for spying on foreigners. The NSA has a blank check to do what they want if you are from abroad.)
Ryel 13y ago
Can someone post up Dropbox alternatives? Particularly any service that is blessed by, or maybe created by a HN user?
dombili 13y ago
I only had 4 small encrypted files on my Dropbox account, so the decision to close my account was a no brainer. I'm not even angry at them for selecting a war criminal as a board member but she supports the NSA and warrantless wiretappings. This is such a stupid decision for so many reasons. But I'm not surprised, because we deserve companies like Dropbox who doesn't care about their users private data, because we've been prioritizing convenience over security for years. Well, not anymore. Good riddance. My problem with this is that even though Condi Rice is a war criminal, no one will say so in the media (some will, those that public don't really listen/read). But it was easy to bash Eich (and rightfully so) because marriage equality sells. Don't expect Dropbox to back off from their decision because only a small group of people will boycott them.
Zenst 13y ago
She is an intellegent person, so could somebody explain too me why so many deem this a bad move without mentioning the War,WMDs,NSA or some political bias? I'm all ears.
- muyuu 13y ago
  Well, she voted for unwarranted government surveillance. So there's that. Not that anybody sane should be using dropbox to store any sensitive/private information.
  - Zenst 13y ago
    That I can apprecieate, but that was in her political role and would be like working for company X and promoting company X's interest and products in many ways. But yes your spot on about what you should store in the cloud and how. That does nail it but still leaves the unfetted tramplement of rights issue leaving a bad taste for the customer base. So I get that. Was just hard to cut thru everything as so many tangents going on that it was hard to get to the real issue at hand, which has people up in arms. Thank you.
thrillgore 13y ago
I'm with the peanut gallery on this one. Fuck Dropbox.
boston1999 13y ago
Why would they choose her while there are so many other more qualified people for the board of a technology company!
- rainmaking 13y ago
  I would suspect something along the lines of mandatory dropbox usage in the DMV to the tunes of 15 bucks a pop.
arbuge 13y ago
There is also the argument to be made that Condi is unlikely to add much value to a tech company like Dropbox in reality, which means Dropbox is autopunishing itself here. And if the opposite is true, and she will add alot of value, then who can blame Dropbox for making this call?
boondox 13y ago
Was thinking of running my own server/Dropbox replacement for awhile now. This news is just the kick my rear needed to put my plans in gear.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
javindo 13y ago
It's a shame to see such a thing happening to a YC project, but I suppose they're all grown up now and responsible for their own decisions.
TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
What the fuck is this left-wing McCarthyism! Fuck this shit. I hope Hacker News doesn't fall for this garbage ass new trend. The Mozilla affair was bad enough. This bullshit is going too far. I'm a libertarian leaning Democrat BTW, if you need to peg me in a hole.
27182818284 13y ago
Partisanship aside, I am super bullish about Dropbox, and have been since they were getdropbox.com. I think they have wonderful leadership and I've never had a single problem with their service. I've used both the paid version and the free model. I think they have amazing secret stuff planned for the next couple of years. Even with all that said, I'm very confused. Does she have a personal connection with some of the founding team or something? I can't remember Rice ever expressing much care for tech while in the White House (unlike Al Gore's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway) and even then Al Gore joined Apple, not Box.com or Google Drive. Even if she had gone with Google, Microsoft, Oracle, or IBM, it would have made more sense to me.
lexcorvus 13y ago
"Tech-company boards should have more women and [underrepresented] people of color!" —The Mob, yesterday "But not someone whose politics we don't like!" —The Mob, today
dang 13y ago
Because this article contains very little information, the Rice/Dropbox story was posted to HN yesterday, and the current thread has gone both far off topic (relitigating the Bush years) and uncivil, we're going to demote this post. I'm going to lighten the penalty on the other major Rice/Dropbox post, though, because although political causes are usually off-topic for HN, that story is at least new and the thread hasn't degenerated as badly. Please note that when we say something is off topic for Hacker News, we do not mean that the topic is unimportant.
nsxwolf 13y ago
Rice's views on internet privacy, in light of her support of bulk data collection, are legitimate concerns for her appointment to the board of a company like DropBox. The war criminal stuff, though, is just pointless. We're all war criminals for supporting this or that candidate. It's just more shades of Eich, grist for purists, but irrelevant to a decision to continue using or boycotting DropBox.
duncan_bayne 13y ago
People still use Dropbox, after they pre-emptively screwed Boxopus? http://web.archive.org/web/20130116123236/http://blog.boxopus.com/2012/06/25/dropbox-disconnects-us/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130116123236/http://blog.boxopu...

526 points by hashx 13y ago

and Al Gore is on the board of many businesses... what's the big deal with it? because she's republican? EDIT: why am i downvoted? because i'm pointing out ex politics on both sides seat on boards or because i talked about being republican,which is not popular here?

geekam 13y ago
Isn't this a kind of conflict of interest? (not a snark but a real question).
- bmelton 13y ago
  No. She currently works at Stanford. She's not presiding over any legislation or anything, nor does she hold any office I'm aware of.
protomyth 13y ago
Probably. Condoleezza Rice has ties to Stanford and is a good pickup for overseas advice.
- rainmaking 13y ago
  She sure does understand how to kill foreigners, but I'm not so sure about marketing to them.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    I see we've attracted the trolls from Fark's political tab. sigh :) Care to back up your statement with some facts with sources?
bmelton 13y ago
I think the implication is because she's an advisor to the NSA, it does not necessarily make her the best custodian of our data. That said, the idea that she would ever be in a position to touch any user's data from the board is absurd -- however, with appropriate amounts of tin foil, if you were looking for a way in to a big-money data-sale to the NSA, you could do worse than Condy for your board.
tomp 13y ago
For me, the problem is her involvement with the Bush Iraq fiasco. Lying about weapons of mass destruction.
- sigzero 13y ago
  Then you must hate everyone. Everyone in Congress believed it. Multiple countries around the world believed it too. Good luck with that attitude.
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    Believing it != directly lying about it. You can't rightly hold it against someone that they were misled.
  - tomp 13y ago
    They believe it because Bush and Rice said so. They, on the other hand, had all of the US intelligence services to provide them with data.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Europe didn't buy the lies. There were a lot of rallies against the war. And UK is not political part of Europe. It is more like 52'nd US state. Russia and China were meh.
  - subsection1h 13y ago
    > Everyone in Congress believed it. Wrong. http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll455.xml http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll455.xml
- efa 13y ago
  Yeah, like those liars the Russians, the Chinese, the British, the French, ... Damn how was Bush able to brainwash the whole UN!
  - mercurial 13y ago
    The Russians, the Chinese and the French, really?
uptown 13y ago
Presumably, one reason a company appoints people to their board is for their judgement. Many believe Rice demonstrated exceptionally-poor judgement during her public office. Example: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/01/news/la-pn-rice-katrina-20111101 http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/01/news/la-pn-rice-katr...
valarauca1 13y ago
Supporters of warrentless wire tapping, and bulk anonymous data collection are in-charge of a company that wants me to trust them with my data. That destroys a lot of trust.
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  > Supporters of warrentless wire tapping, and bulk anonymous data collection are in-charge of a company that wants me to trust them with my data This is IMHO the big, relevant one. Her role in the Iraq war may be vile ( to most of us), but this is directly in conflict with the expectations of Dropbox users. What were the Dropbox decision-makers thinking?
Pxtl 13y ago
No, because she was a republican who was a key player in one of the worst administrations in the recent history of the US government. I don't have any problem with people who believe in small government, defense, the rule of law, and sound fiscal policy. Lying to the American public to justify a boondoggle of a war in Iraq is different. Al Gore, whatever his failings, doesn't have that kind of massive black mark on his resume.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  You don't want to go through all the things the Clinton administration did? People can trump up just as many silly charges against him (yes, including the deaths of "hundreds of thousands"). Hackers need to mature into the real world if they want to run grown-up companies.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    > Hackers need to mature into the real world if they want to run grown-up companies. A talk-radio slogan when Bush was elected was that "the adults are in charge". How'd that work out for you? Really, you can't talk about being "grown-up" out of one side of your mouth while basely insulting your opponents' "maturity" out of the other side just because we disagree politically.
    - cookiecaper 13y ago
      It's not because we simply disagree politically, that's obviously fine with me, but not with anyone else in the tech community apparently. This is now the second instance in as many weeks where the tech mob is actively running out anyone who disagrees with their political views and boycotting entire companies for having the gall to hire useful people who happen to be conservative.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
        > having the gall to hire useful people who happen to be conservative BS. To me it's really simple, and not about party affiliation: A strong supporter of warrantless wire tapping and bulk anonymous data collection is a terrible choice for the board of a consumer file-storage service.

nodata 13y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7563477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7563477 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7561483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7561483

higherpurpose 13y ago

Now I have no doubts anymore about Dropbox "coming soon" to PRISM, if it's not already in it.

not_paul_graham 13y ago

Reasons this might be a great move for Dropbox: 1. It will help them secure major enterprise clients, probably the govt. or with ties to the govt. 2. Great selling point to institutional investors come IPO time. 3. Navigating foreign business opportunities. Although I'm not a fan of this move by Dropbox, it is important to note that Stanford has hired Rice as a professor as well. No one is abandoning Stanford, and the hits that Dropbox is going to take are going to be minuscule in comparison to the upside. This is just the hard reality. Rice does have a lot of experience that is relevant to Dropbox and students at Stanford and I'd just like to leave it at that because at the end of the day, connections + experiences that come from being Secretary of State trump pure meritocracy or idealism.

brightghost 13y ago
The difference is that harboring conflicting and controversial viewpoints is part and parcel of the mission of a University.
zimpenfish 13y ago
The difference is that a) I don't give any money to Stanford and b) Stanford don't have 10s of gigabytes of my data.

vdaniuk 13y ago

Sooo, will we be seeing a repeat of the Eich-like public outcry? Though I may understand the business rationale for this hire, I certainly wont trust founders, board or anyone else at Dropbox who is OK working with a person that is partially responsible for deaths of thousands(arguably hundreds of thousands) people in the Iraq war based on false premises about "WMD". Oh, and we shouldn't forget about her role in "enhanced interrogation techniques", too. EDIT: Thinking a little more about this I will be cancelling my Dropbox subscription. EDIT2: Yes, we are seeing an outcry. I am incredibly happy that coolness factor in tech is now more connected to ethical behavior of its top management and board members.

valarauca1 13y ago
Your forgetting she's not only on the record supporting anonymous bulk data collection, AND warrentless wiretapping. She was a key figure of the administration that created such legislation to start with.
- vdaniuk 13y ago
  Oh, right, forgot about that. What the fuck is going at Dropbox? How did they even come to the conclusion that this is a good idea? I don't understand the business rationale anymore for Dropbox anymore.
  - valarauca1 13y ago
    Well she is a prominent figure in America. Just not for a lot of good reasons. The bet is likely that future government business she could bring is larger then the major exodus of people who supported them early on.
    - vdaniuk 13y ago
      Yeah, that may be their calculation. I don't think this will sit well with german users or french users, for example though. Could really hurt their international b2c business.

gnu8 13y ago

The problem with Rice is that she is a malevolent liar. She's unfit for any leadership position, public or private.

cantbecool 13y ago
Instead of simply saying a hit and run statement, offer some additional details.
- markburns 13y ago
  This is more than slightly off topic but... Whilst I agree with the sentiment of the comment you replied to, at first I read your comment, then felt a negative reaction towards your reply. My (very much initial) thought process was to try and think of a rebuttal to your request for some details. Just taking a few moments to think (and whilst I still think that the original post is probably correct), it's funny just how easy it is to fall into an emotional reaction and justification pattern of communication. It's hard to admit, but I'm almost certainly emotionally biased against people that I think (whether rightly or wrongly) have been directly or indirectly involved in the deaths of others. It's logically obvious that that could occur, but it's surprising that my reaction has the potential to override my (mostly logical mind) that I agree with your point and think the original commenter absolutely should provide some supporting evidence to such strong opinions. Apologies to anyone that found this to be an overly laboured and/or irrelevant point. It felt to me like an interesting bit of introspection.
- cenhyperion 13y ago
  "The intelligence was as clear as any intelligence I've ever seen and I've been in this business a long time. ... When you had intelligence assessments that said Saddam Hussein has reconstituted his biological and chemical weapons and could reconstitute his nuclear weapon in a year if he got foreign assistance — by the end of the decade if he didn't — I've actually never seen clearer indications than that."
001sky 13y ago
Shouldn't you adress this complaint to Stanford?

peterkelly 13y ago

Wow, and I thought the recent Mozilla thing was controversial... Popcorn status: Ready

Shivetya 13y ago
If it wasn't for message boards most of those commenting would never do a damn thing, hell with comment boards they don't have too. Its easy to be the cool, caring, and tough guy, around the internet water cooler. Angst ridden techie hipters!
ssharp 13y ago
I don't know how much of an effect this will actually have. It will be interesting, though. The SV mob was strong enough to affect Mozilla, but a service as huge as Dropbox might be mostly immune from the mob cries. They have lots of equity outside of the HN crowd and Rice is taking a board seat, not an executive position.
- yardie 13y ago
  It won't have an immediate effect. But once the network effect takes hold these things pick up steam fast. Bitcoin spent 3 years in obscurity before it took off. Also if you think about it are choices of browsers are actually quite limited. You have Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari. Our choices in cloud storage provides are unlimited. Even my ISP provides the service now.
001sky 13y ago
This should be stickied at the top. {As it was one of the first, and most prescient comments} Of all the things said, It also seems the least arguable.

acjohnson55 13y ago

I hope she hasn't ever donated to any disagreeable referendum campaigns..... ....or ever been a core member of an administration that left us with two disastrous wars, an offshore gulag, the greatest economic disaster in 70 years, a record of legitimizing torture, a decline in prestige on the world stage. Oh, and a strong record or rejecting marriage equality.

sigzero 13y ago
All continued by the current administration and more. What was your point again?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - JabavuAdams 13y ago
    Bullshit. A lot of the world despises that administration, and it wouldn't matter whether it was Rice, Rumsfeld, or Cheney.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
      - stephencanon 13y ago
        Chelsea Clinton has never even stood for office, much less been part of the senior leadership of an administration that led the US into two wars of aggression and endorsed torture. I really don't see how a vaguely rational person could even begin to compare the two, regardless of political beliefs. I haven't seen anyone arguing that Bush was worse than Obama in this thread, so I don't see how that comparison has anything to do with anything either.
        001sky 13y ago
        I'm sure none of this is relevant but (a) her dad is ex POTUS of a global superpower; and/or (b) her mom was Secretary of state of that global superpower. They also have the son of the wife of the CEO but that's a little different, she was a fashion designer. Condi was (b) so they are basically the same relation to the US gov't. I think the generalization that US foreign policy has radically changed its ethics or its data-security between 2008-2011 to be a bit unsupported by the facts. If anything, as tech has improved we have all become less secure...regardless of the POTUS...because the professionals working in the NSA and the CIA are just getting more powerful. But YMMV

mathattack 13y ago

My first instinct on seeing the title was "What does someone like this (or Al Gore, or any other politician) have to offer a tech startup?" Then the article makes it more clear: "What’s interesting about bringing Rice onto Dropbox’s board is how normal it feels. Dropbox needs people with international experience to help it at once deal with foreign governments that have blocked its use — China, for example — and as it works to spread a product developed in one country to others that are culturally different." Her connections at Stanford may help, though perhaps they're not as hard to find.

alttab 13y ago
Oh, she's there for her skills in manipulating foreign govetnments. That makes me feel better.
- mathattack 13y ago
  If you were a VC or investor in the company, it should give you confidence that someone is around that can give the CEO advice on managing geo-political minefields. The last thing you want is the overseas political issues that Microsoft and Google have had to deal with.
  - zimpenfish 13y ago
    Given how well she did giving advice about previous overseas political issues, I'd wager you'd want her as far away from your CEO as it was possible to get without sending him to the moon.
    - mathattack 13y ago
      Here we are getting a little out of my element, but... How well do we know that she gave bad advice, versus him not listening? I do know that her speciality was Russia, not the Middle East, but after all that time in DC I am pretty sure she's learned a lot. Sometimes you learn from political failures, just like entrepreneurial ones.

cryoshon 13y ago

Well, that's the end of my usage of Dropbox, effective immediately. I'll make sure to mention Condi's association with them in every conversation involving Dropbox, in hope of spreading knowledge about their profane selection of board members. It's a shame that they had to pick a Bush crony. These people should be in prison for malevolently misleading the public in order to start a for-profit war which killed hundreds of thousands of people.

jamespo 13y ago
I too am considering moving my free account to another free provider
- hrvbr 13y ago
  hubiC works as well as Dropbox, for what I can tell from a few weeks of usage.
antocv 13y ago
Hey now, it would have been for nothing, all years of war and 600 000 deaths, if these people who were in charge and lead the effort, would suddenly find themselves in low-key positions in society. The top cream must stay at the top. Besides, her technical skills and understanding of IT for sure are awesome, making her the finest choice for Dropbox business.
- JackpotDen 13y ago
  >Besides, her technical skills and understanding of IT for sure are awesome, making her the finest choice for Dropbox business. Is this sarcastic? I can't tell.
  - Infinitesimus 13y ago
    nah, totally serious /s
- notd97843 13y ago

Nemant 13y ago

Guys you don't get it. Dropbox is going to improve the internet by finding all of the Documents of Mass Destruction. Shutting down dropbox

bane 13y ago

This is probably tied to the DB for business offering and probably a play to become the official shared files app for USG and expansion into Asia. Also Dropbox announce two more executive changes today. The company has a new CFO, Sujay Jaswa, who is being into the role internally. Also, hailing from Google is Dropbox’s new COO: Dennis Woodside. In the post announcing those changes, it reaffirmed the above, indicating that Rice will help the company with its international operations. Also check out Rice's consulting firm which has been providing consultation to DB for a while now. http://www.ricehadleygates.com/ http://www.ricehadleygates.com/ The "work" page is illuminating. - either way, this is potentially explosively bad for DB. edit I'll also refer back to a recent comment of mine about how DP can scan your files https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498457 Now extend that to China providing lists of hashes of banned files, like Falun Gong texts or whatever. If you rely on DP a lot, it's like allowing government(s) to sniff around your personal hard drive.

Cenk 13y ago
> and expansion into Asia. Well, that’s certainly something Condi know something about.

gboone42 13y ago

I hear Box has weapons of mass destruction.

bachback 13y ago

"sudo apt-get remove dropbox", never to return. it seems obvious that most US tech companies have not at all realized that they are a global business, and the implications of the Snowden summer.

BjornW 13y ago

As a non US person I don't get why she would be beneficial for (as not_paul_graham states) "navigating foreign business opportunities." My first thoughts, as a person living in the EU are exactly opposite.

Eric_WVGG 13y ago

1 year of Dropbox == 1 "Transporter Sync personal cloud" I guess this is the push I needed.

veidr 13y ago

Brandon Eich isn't cool. You know what's cool? (BRANDON EICH * BRANDON EICH)

pointernil 13y ago

"On a similar Note: Rumsfeld joined the Board of Twitter" -- NO he did not. And I really hope he does not. Onion-News-Network please take over ;)

rglover 13y ago

What in the hell is going on?

beaker52 13y ago

We assumed the best pre-PRISM and we got PRISM'd. Dropbox, I'm out. I love Dropbox, it's my favourite service that I use regularly. However, I cannot trust Dropbox with the privacy of my data now.

Cenk 13y ago

http://i.imgur.com/pVbWMqn.png http://i.imgur.com/pVbWMqn.png

wellboy 13y ago

Finally, Dropbox is also an NSA company. Took them quite a while...

tegeek 13y ago

I ve just removed Dropbox from my life. Here are two alternates. https://www.copy.com/home/ https://www.copy.com/home/ https://hubic.com/ https://hubic.com/

donatj 13y ago

Do any Dropbox alternatives support Mac resource forks? That's the biggest reason I stick with them, as even Google Drive doesn't.

jonstewart 13y ago
Is there any Mac software that actually uses resource forks these days???
- donatj 13y ago
  Finder. Tags / Colors / File comments are stored in resource forks. I tag a lot of my work with things like "done" and "in progress" etc. It's really important to my workflow.
  - jonstewart 13y ago
    Oh. Huh. Didn't realize that.
- mhurron 13y ago
  Everything? Aren't file associations on OS X still stored in the resource fork? I remember trying to move some designers to a NFS share off of a netatalk fileserver and they flipped out when neither they nor their Mac knew what to open files in.
  - jonstewart 12y ago
    netatalk, hooboy, that brings back memories. Classic MacOS X stored the type and creator codes in the resource fork. Early versions of MacOS X discouraged this, but preserved and respected the codes if they were present. 10.6 Snow Leopard killed them off with the UTI (an unfortunate acronym) framework. http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/09/22/inside-snow-leopards-uti-apple-fixes-the-creator-code/ http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/09/22/inside-snow-leopard...
peerbreed 13y ago
You may want to look into Owncloud. It's opensource. You can run it from your own server or host it elsewhere. They do have clients for MAC and IOS. I'm not a MAC user personally, but I do believe they support MAC resource forks. You can also access your information through any web browser as well. I've been running it off my personal server for a while now. I am completely satisfied with the software. http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/

muyuu 13y ago

You guys ever heard of rsync? It's awesome.

jonstewart 13y ago
+1. Extra-credit if you've heard of cron.
- zimpenfish 13y ago
  With 16 rounds of ROT13 encryption for safety?
  - muyuu 13y ago
    With your own computers and your own encryption in place. Without sending your stuff straight to the NSA.
- gtremper 13y ago
  I don't want cronyism in my data storage.
mmagin 13y ago
Can you please explain how I should use this to: 1) Sync the 1Password iPhone app with the desktop app 2) Share cute cat photos with my wife (who uses Windows, and who is not computer-clueless, but is rather commandline-adverse.)
- muyuu 13y ago
  Keep on using Dropbox. If you use all that proprietary, anti-privacy rubbish then you can assume they can access to all your information anyway. On the bright side, I wouldn't worry too much about the NSA browsing through your cat pics. Or if you're willing to put in some work you can try something like this https://fak3r.com/2009/09/14/howto-build-your-own-open-source-dropbox-clone/ https://fak3r.com/2009/09/14/howto-build-your-own-open-sourc...

rootuid 13y ago

I'm more outraged by Condi's appointment than Brendan Eich's appointment to Mozilla. Condi preached death and torture, Eich supported bigotry. I'm sure however that nobody really give a f and the status quo will be maintained.

sanbor 13y ago
IMHO it doesn't make sense to compare Brendan and Condoleezza. Brendan expressed his vote democratically (different opinions are the base of democracy, right?), while Condoleezza had a charge of power in the State, she was an active executor.

Cbasedlifeform 13y ago

As it happens I was just looking at DB alternatives that would be more secure. The news that they have hired Condi the war criminal Rice to join their board is the clincher. Bye bye DB.

Diederich 13y ago

My family will be migrated from Dropbox by next week.

flexie 13y ago

I don't understand - is that because Dropbox wants to make it more clear to the world that there is a free flow of information from Dropbox to the US government?

DominikR 13y ago

I'd just like to know what the hell they were thinking when they gave her the job since I don't believe that many US citizens have fond memories of her. Couldn't she just get herself a job in the Oil/Gas industry or at some company that creates weapons of mass destruction like everyone else does after they leave a government position.

CalRobert 13y ago

OwnCloud, while not perfect, is really easy to set up. I had it running on a Droplet from Digital Ocean in about 20 minutes, and a Raspberry Pi in about 40 (note - it's a bit resource heavy for a Pi)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

med_abidi 13y ago

I'm dropping Dropbox forever.

rdtsc 13y ago

Why? What does she bring to the table?

rainmaking 13y ago
My best guess is they have been trying to get lucrative government contracts for a long time.

myth_drannon 13y ago

It's time for Ubuntu to re-evaluate its decision to shut down Ubuntu One

charismaticfoo 13y ago

How is Condoleeza Rice joining Dropbox, make Dropbox vulnerable in the hands of big brother than it already is? I do think it is a bit of an over reaction to move out of Dropbox solely because of this reason. In these days of Prism, we should assume that most of our private stuff is available for surveillance, unless we are ready to pay for a trusted fully encrypted (without de-deplication) sharing service.

ptbello 13y ago

https://www.dropbox.com/account/delete https://www.dropbox.com/account/delete Reason: Other Care to elaborate: Condoleezza Rice

subsection1h 13y ago
This is the most actionable comment in this discussion. Thank you.

apenney 13y ago

I cancelled both my accounts over this. It'll be a personal pain, as everything on my ipad hooks in nicely to dropbox, but it's worth it in order to not support one of the Bush era war criminals.

bovermyer 13y ago

Well goddammit. And here I was, about to completely switch from OneDrive+Google Drive to Dropbox. Now I have to pull everything out of Dropbox and put it... somewhere. Google Drive, maybe. Sigh. I hate leaving negative comments like this, but I really can see no positive light to this development.

EC1 13y ago

Very sad. I just deleted everything from my Dropbox and my account, sent them an email saying "I do not do business with war criminals." Good luck Dropbox, I hope you un-fuckup somehow.

matthewmacleod 13y ago

So I've been wanting to migrate away from Dropbox and onto a self-hosted solution for a while anyway, and I guess this would be a good opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any good open-source solutions at the moment. I'm not looking for a fancy web interface or anything, just a simple sync between devices, with a usable API for building apps. In particular, rsync etc. doesn't really offer this interface, and I'm really not convinced by the usability of e.g. OwnCloud. Any solutions I might be missing? Or is this something I have to build myself?

pedrocr 13y ago
As far as I know the current contenders are git-annex[1], syncthing[2] and clearskies[3]. They're all still very green. git-annex is technologically farthest along but is still very unpolished for the basic "sync this dir" functionality to be reliable/friendly. Clearskies is still at proof-of-concept stage, defining the protocol and implementing the first clients. syncthing is probably the best bet right now, but I haven't tested it yet. [1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/ [2] https://github.com/calmh/syncthing https://github.com/calmh/syncthing [3] https://github.com/jewel/clearskies-ruby https://github.com/jewel/clearskies-ruby
vjz 13y ago
I've been using ownCloud for over a year and it works great. The only issue is that it is not as convenient as Dropbox. It needs a server to host it, which is not free; and the server requires maintenance, security patches (see: heartbleed), upgrades, etc.
jancborchardt 12y ago
Simple syncing is what ownCloud does. Of course technically a server is inbetween, so it’s not directly between devices. LAN sync is requested sometimes, but currently not a priority. Please do let us know about the things you miss – on our issue tracker at http://github.com/owncloud/core/issues http://github.com/owncloud/core/issues And if you use IRC you’re welcome in #owncloud-dev (freenode). And be sure that we have a lot of improvements lined up for ownCloud 7 which will come out in a few weeks. EDIT: Also, if you have specific feedback on ownCloud’s usability and design let me know, I work on that.

JabavuAdams 13y ago

Ok, if I cancel my Dropbox subscriptions, I'd like to maintain some level of consistency. Assuming that I have a great disdain for the architects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which other tech companies should I consider boycotting? To avoid a combinatorial explosion, I'd limit myself to executives or boards pulled from state, military, and intelligence roles in the last three administrations. Oh, and McNamara. Fuck that guy.

cwal37 13y ago
I don't know off the top of my head, but I think your best bet is to probably just check the wikipedia pages of major figures. If there haven't been updates in the past year or two, do some pointed google searches for news articles on board or COO/CFO/CEO appointments.

rainmaking 13y ago

Well, this certainly puts all the hysteria about Brendan Eich in perspective.

ekianjo 13y ago

> Rice is a famous figure, known in almost equal parts for her ferocious intelligence, and controversial role in the Bush administration, which included comments on alleged weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was thought at the time to possess. TC needs to correct that last sentence: "weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was KNOWN NOT TO possess" would be more correct in light of what actually occurred behind the scenes.

streptomycin 13y ago
I would say it was more like "weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was HOPED TO possess". The Bush administration had a bit of circumstantial evidence that they sold to the world as definitive evidence, but they didn't actually know that there were no WMDs.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Correct me if my memory is failing, but they had several UN inspectors go to Iraq who found nothing and Tony Blair had his aides fabricate some false evidence that was later used by Powell to declare "hey, we found 'em, now let's nuk'em". When you need to fabricate evidence, you do it because you lack of actual one in the first place.
  - streptomycin 13y ago
    Saddam didn't let the UN inspectors look everywhere they wanted to, so that wasn't conclusive (in retrospect, this was an incredibly stupid thing for Saddam to do... maybe he wanted to bluff that maybe he did have WMDs to make himself appear more powerful than he actually was, not thinking that the US would actually invade?). IIRC Powell's "evidence" (and some other evidence too) came from Curveball, not from the UK. It was very shaky evidence, but it wasn't known to be completely false. And even if it was, there was still the hope that Saddam had some kind of WMDs that we didn't know about. I'm veering off into speculation now, but I think their thought process was... We gave him WMDs in the 80s and he used them in the 80s. What were the odds he really got rid of them all and hasn't tried to acquire more? I think everyone in the Bush administration just assumed that to be the case, so they weren't worried that the actual intelligence was incredibly suspect and possibly even fabricated. They already "knew" Saddam was guilty, they just needed to get the authority to take him out, and then they would be greeted as liberators and find copious evidence of all of Saddam's WMDs and evil deeds.

marshray 13y ago

Say what you want about politics, that lady is sharp as a tack (and a concert pianist too).

HNaTTY 13y ago
Yes, she is smart, and witty, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, and I still deleted my Dropbox account today.

tokenizer 13y ago

https://www.dropbox.com/help/41/en https://www.dropbox.com/help/41/en

izzydata 13y ago

Why is dropbox doing this exactly? What can she possibly do to help them?

embro 13y ago

I signed up for Wuala about a month ago. Wasn't ready to make the switch but... It's time to make it happen.

zos 13y ago

DROPBOMBS

donatj 13y ago

The overreaction and moral indignation of HN of late is irritating to say the least.

macinjosh 13y ago

Shout out to BitTorrent Sync as a great alternative to Dropbox for some. Open and distributed so its already 2x better than dropbox. http://www.bittorrent.com/sync http://www.bittorrent.com/sync

josephagoss 13y ago
I use this as my main sync software. However the code is still closed and backdoors could easily exist.

cheshire137 13y ago

Dammit, I just got excited yesterday about Mailbox coming to Android.

canistr 13y ago

What's fascinating about the comments is that, had Condoleezza Rice been appointed Commissioner of the NFL, would people have said "I'm giving up the NFL forever"? Obviously this question should only apply to NFL fans who also make this claim about dropping DropBox as a service.

eneifert 13y ago

If I wanted political rants I would go back to reddit. Come on Hacker News, you're better than this.

elwell 13y ago

It should be noted that her consulting firm [0] has been advising Dropbox for the last year. [0] - http://www.ricehadleygates.com/ http://www.ricehadleygates.com/

general_failure 13y ago

I am a bit ignorant here. What makes Rice a good candidate for the board? Because she has good tie ups with political big wigs of other countries?

dllthomas 13y ago

This seems like a thread that would benefit from that "pending" feature...

znowi 13y ago

That's unfortunate and I, too, will be closing my account with Dropbox. Moving to SpiderOak. I realize, though, that neither me nor thousand others will change the Dropbox policy. They most likely anticipated the public outcry over Rice and considered it not a threat. They play in the big league now, increasingly catering to the enterprise world. And those guys are not particularly worried about privacy issues. They rather cooperate, like the PRISM companies. It's not the first nor last time a nice, user-friendly startup turned "evil" over a certain threshold of growth. If you happen to find a large influential company that stayed true to its original promise to their users - cherish it with all your heart. They are a very rare kind.

jellicle 13y ago

I find this board appointment alarming for what it signals. We know that the NSA et al. are always seeking access to new sources of electronic data. It is beyond doubt that they have considered how to get access to Dropbox user data, and almost certainly beyond doubt that they have approached Dropbox about it. To me, this appointment signals that Dropbox wants to reach a negotiated settlement with the NSA over their access to Dropbox user data. They hire someone who knows all the key players and issues, to negotiate on their behalf. Presumably Ms. Rice will be instructed something like: "We're getting a lot of pressure from the NSA. If the public knows we are giving away their data, there will be a shitstorm, it'll cost us a lot of business. So, you have to make sure NSA access to our data is somewhat limited, there's some kind of plausible legal authority, a court order or something, make sure they pay us for our efforts in copying the data over to the NSA, that sort of thing. Set it up so we can put all the blame on the NSA if anything leaks, and claim we were mandated to comply by law. Okay?" And then Ms. Rice will be dispatched to undertake that negotiation. So, if the NSA doesn't yet have a pipeline from Dropbox to that datacenter in Utah, they will soon.

AJ007 13y ago
When the PRISM story broke, the Guardian reported that Dropbox was listed as planned to be added http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-... There are two perspectives for this one -- #1 Dropbox wants an insider to help them be on the receiving end of better decisions related to non-consensual government surveillance #2 Dropbox wants better information themselves on non-consensual government surveillance From a PR perspective, this looks bad both to both Americans and international Dropbox users. It does not instill confidence in Dropbox. Dropbox is a dominant platform right now but it certainly does not have to be the dominant platform. Any non-US company doing sensitive work is being negligent to their investors using platforms which enable easy spying (remember, the controversy in the US is about the NSA spying on American citizens, there is no legal barrier nor likely will there ever be one for spying on foreigners. The NSA has a blank check to do what they want if you are from abroad.)

Ryel 13y ago

Can someone post up Dropbox alternatives? Particularly any service that is blessed by, or maybe created by a HN user?

dombili 13y ago

I only had 4 small encrypted files on my Dropbox account, so the decision to close my account was a no brainer. I'm not even angry at them for selecting a war criminal as a board member but she supports the NSA and warrantless wiretappings. This is such a stupid decision for so many reasons. But I'm not surprised, because we deserve companies like Dropbox who doesn't care about their users private data, because we've been prioritizing convenience over security for years. Well, not anymore. Good riddance. My problem with this is that even though Condi Rice is a war criminal, no one will say so in the media (some will, those that public don't really listen/read). But it was easy to bash Eich (and rightfully so) because marriage equality sells. Don't expect Dropbox to back off from their decision because only a small group of people will boycott them.

Zenst 13y ago

She is an intellegent person, so could somebody explain too me why so many deem this a bad move without mentioning the War,WMDs,NSA or some political bias? I'm all ears.

muyuu 13y ago
Well, she voted for unwarranted government surveillance. So there's that. Not that anybody sane should be using dropbox to store any sensitive/private information.
- Zenst 13y ago
  That I can apprecieate, but that was in her political role and would be like working for company X and promoting company X's interest and products in many ways. But yes your spot on about what you should store in the cloud and how. That does nail it but still leaves the unfetted tramplement of rights issue leaving a bad taste for the customer base. So I get that. Was just hard to cut thru everything as so many tangents going on that it was hard to get to the real issue at hand, which has people up in arms. Thank you.

thrillgore 13y ago

I'm with the peanut gallery on this one. Fuck Dropbox.

boston1999 13y ago

Why would they choose her while there are so many other more qualified people for the board of a technology company!

rainmaking 13y ago
I would suspect something along the lines of mandatory dropbox usage in the DMV to the tunes of 15 bucks a pop.

arbuge 13y ago

There is also the argument to be made that Condi is unlikely to add much value to a tech company like Dropbox in reality, which means Dropbox is autopunishing itself here. And if the opposite is true, and she will add alot of value, then who can blame Dropbox for making this call?

boondox 13y ago

Was thinking of running my own server/Dropbox replacement for awhile now. This news is just the kick my rear needed to put my plans in gear.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

javindo 13y ago

It's a shame to see such a thing happening to a YC project, but I suppose they're all grown up now and responsible for their own decisions.

TheMagicHorsey 13y ago

What the fuck is this left-wing McCarthyism! Fuck this shit. I hope Hacker News doesn't fall for this garbage ass new trend. The Mozilla affair was bad enough. This bullshit is going too far. I'm a libertarian leaning Democrat BTW, if you need to peg me in a hole.

27182818284 13y ago

Partisanship aside, I am super bullish about Dropbox, and have been since they were getdropbox.com. I think they have wonderful leadership and I've never had a single problem with their service. I've used both the paid version and the free model. I think they have amazing secret stuff planned for the next couple of years. Even with all that said, I'm very confused. Does she have a personal connection with some of the founding team or something? I can't remember Rice ever expressing much care for tech while in the White House (unlike Al Gore's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway) and even then Al Gore joined Apple, not Box.com or Google Drive. Even if she had gone with Google, Microsoft, Oracle, or IBM, it would have made more sense to me.

lexcorvus 13y ago

"Tech-company boards should have more women and [underrepresented] people of color!" —The Mob, yesterday "But not someone whose politics we don't like!" —The Mob, today

dang 13y ago

Because this article contains very little information, the Rice/Dropbox story was posted to HN yesterday, and the current thread has gone both far off topic (relitigating the Bush years) and uncivil, we're going to demote this post. I'm going to lighten the penalty on the other major Rice/Dropbox post, though, because although political causes are usually off-topic for HN, that story is at least new and the thread hasn't degenerated as badly. Please note that when we say something is off topic for Hacker News, we do not mean that the topic is unimportant.

nsxwolf 13y ago

Rice's views on internet privacy, in light of her support of bulk data collection, are legitimate concerns for her appointment to the board of a company like DropBox. The war criminal stuff, though, is just pointless. We're all war criminals for supporting this or that candidate. It's just more shades of Eich, grist for purists, but irrelevant to a decision to continue using or boycotting DropBox.

duncan_bayne 13y ago

People still use Dropbox, after they pre-emptively screwed Boxopus? http://web.archive.org/web/20130116123236/http://blog.boxopus.com/2012/06/25/dropbox-disconnects-us/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130116123236/http://blog.boxopu...