http://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/googles_secret_nsa_alliance_...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/04...
Hillary hires Google executive as CTO
..and of course the data mining startup that Eric Schmidt is using in an attempt to get Clinton elected as president (the same one that worked for Obama):
http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working...
Many companies in Silicon Valley are tied to bad politicians and politics. At this point, it's almost necessary to survive.
My point is that if you are using this as a basis for services that you will or will not use, you will be left with a computer running GEOS...and no access to the outside world.
I just don't put any data on any cloud provider that I don't want the government to see. Bittorrent Sync works pretty well as a personal cloud provider.
Not op. I don't trust Google. In a transition period I do use some of their services, but I don't recommend doing that, and I'm slowly migrating away. Except perhaps for using their crawler (as in, having my public content be visible through Google search -- I've recently moved to DDG for my searches).
I also consume some content from youtube, but frankly the UI isn't all that great, and I mostly do it for music -- so I'm moving off that to -- to a lesser degree.
> My point is that if you are using this as a basis for services that you will or will not use, you will be left with a computer running GEOS...and no access to the outside world.
Fortunately we have some recourse between Replicant and Cyanogen (helped by Google using open licenses, even if their ASOP effort is... not all that friendly towards enabling all users to compile custom distributions for their handsets) -- and most other services can be self-hosted.
There aren't really any viable trusted/open hardware, so the degree of trust we can put in our computing/communication equipment is bounded -- but it's certainly viable to have a much more trustworthy (IMNHO) experience than relying on services designed on a business model that has spying on users as a core business model.
For "cloud files", I'm planning to use http://www.sxdrive.io/ backed by a rented server. Not perfect privacy, but a far cry from just pushing things to a random SaaS. At some point I hope git annex and/or IPFS might be a viable alternative. I don't see much point in using closed source software as an alternative, if the goal is to move to a "less untrustworthy" platform.
That's extreme and unfair, and a little like telling someone that if they oppose American drone warfare, torture, or the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, they should move to another country.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We should encourage as much protest as possible.
Arthur D. Levinson, Ph. D. Chairman of the Board, Apple Former Chairman and CEO Genentech
James A. Bell Former CFO and Corporate President The Boeing Company
Albert Gore Jr. Former Vice President of the United States
Robert A. Iger Chairman and CEO The Walt Disney Company
Andrea Jung President and CEO Grameen America, Inc.
Ronald D. Sugar, Ph. D. Former Chairman and CEO Northrop Grumman
Susan L. Wagner Co-founder and Director BlackRock
A lot of my personal moral concerns with Dr. Rice's appointment are as a result of actions she condoned or advocated for during her time in government. Don Knuth's letter to her in 2002 expresses my feelings on this topic much better than I think I can myself.
https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-reques...
In reality, Rice could've been recruited because of her relationships with top govt. security officials, in the hopes of facilitating more conversations, in which Dropbox has more leverage, to push back against mass surveillance.
If something like this isn't the case, then firing Rice wouldn't be a resolution anyway.
Rice was probably hired for several of the reasons that you mentioned above. Ultimately though, it's hard to make useful speculation from outside of the company, with little knowledge of the company's long-term goals.
That's not exactly reassuring vis-a-vis their ethical character.
As for character, it's unclear what's unsettling about presumed utilitarians acting towards what they believe to be best outcomes.
If that's the problem, then shouldn't they explain the connection? Since they won't, it's only natural to assume the obvious.
And why would one presume them utilitarians?
The guys at Dropbox are smart; isn't the "obvious" assumption that Rice could be useful in helping them to better manage some of these interests (e.g. potentially reducing govt. snooping by facilitating a more level playing field for comms. and negotiation)?.
Aren't most reasonable people utilitarians? :)
If by reasonable, you mean "rational" in the sense of rational choice theory, and if by "utilitarians" you mean "maximize of their own individual utility" rather than "adherents to the philosophical school of utilitarianism", then, yes, all reasonable people are utilitarians, by definition.
Also, realize that SO is a poor substitute for Dropbox, as it's only really a backup service. Although it includes a sync option which works passably, the moment you access your files from a mobile device, you upload your keys to the server, and zero-knowledge goes poof. And even if you're willing to give that up, I've never met a mobile app which allowed you to access and manipulate files in the ways Dropbox does. You can do some basic "share just this file" stuff, but it's a very different product.
I really hope that was just because I was on it when they were growing massively due to the NSA leaks, but sadly, for me, they were a textbook example of "Great idea, bad execution".
> Another benefit of SpiderOak is that they de-duplicate your data, so you may end up using less space on SpiderOak than you do on your own machine.
1. If your files change, SpiderOak saves versions of them indefinitely, with each taking up space (of course, all the deltas and stuff). There is no simple way to set it up so that file versions older than X days/years get deleted. The SpiderOak client is completely useless if you want to delete older versions of files because you'd have to wade through all your directories and subdirectories looking for files with multiple versions.
2. The SpiderOak client has also been buggy and ends up creating file versions of unchanged files too (like photos you may have saved once on your computer and never touched). So there's no easy way for you to get to specific places where files have several versions stored and do some cleanup.
This cleanup of older versions matters a lot more if you have a smaller account quota, lesser free space on your account, and you're not willing to pay for the $129 a year 1TB option that is heavily pushed (compared to the other tiers) by skewed pricing on SpiderOak's part.
Overall, SpiderOak is still better though. Dropbox is more dishonest in its approach to deduplication. Dropbox dedpulicates data across user accounts (so if you and I store the same free eBook from Project Gutenberg on our Dropbox accounts, Dropbox saves only one copy) and deduplicates data within your user account for files you may have replicated across folders. But in both the cases it treats your space quota as if deduplication is not done at all, effectively charging you for more than the space you're actually using.
I haven't researched it, but it could work like this: scan the local machine, find duplicates, upload unique files, and then create links to any place a file is duplicated. It all happens locally, so only encrypted data is ever uploaded. Some tiny bit of info about the structure of the file system might be transferred and known by SpiderOak, but I can't conceive of a situation where that matters.
I'm happy with it but I do have a NAS at home that serves as a "always on" sync point for my other devices.
I humbly suggest people look into the following, and am eager for suggestions from other HN readers:
- rsync
- btsync
It handles file conflicts, which is massively critical for anyone thinking of rolling their own. It also works over ssh, so it's encrypted.
After trying out Unison, Sync, and plain old rsync, Syncthing turned out to be the best of the bunch for me. Open source, modern interface, relatively simple to set up, seemingly quite secure... Hard not to like it.
You may also want to set the --max-delete option, to avoid the scenario where the sender doesn't have the volume mounted, resulting in the receiver deleting everything.
Be also aware that rsync is completely unencrypted, so you need to use it in conjuction with sshfs, ecryptfs, or some other method if you want security.
(You can also use other backup solutions, but I suspect most use the rsync transport, whether it's by itself or with Duplicity)
http://www.skylable.com/products/sx/
(Self-hosted, GPL)
Second place on my shortlist would probably be:
For syncing a mix of files, I'd probably not go for rsync, unision handles "real world" (messy) syncs across files better. For backup I personally use duplicity driven by backup ninja (encrypted with GnuPG). But I've yet to do any restores, so I don't really have backup yet ;-)
For anything tex-ish, Mercurial works fine for me. I'm not sure if git (today) is any less capable of handling small binary files -- I'm guessing not. But mercurial text UI/UX is much friendlier IMHO.
I have great hopes for IPFS, but personal/private use is still on the roadmap, so it's not usable for what I personally would need most. But I'm more and more confident they'll get there.
If you tell us more about your needs, we could give more tailored recommendations.
rsync.net has a deeply discounted rate for new "HN" customers.
Also, we just enabled explicit support for attic/borg.
Microsoft/Skype - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/20/nsa-prism-tech-comp...
In the first case, it's something that companies can fight back against (and some have) as long as their hands aren't tied by unconstitutional, secret pressure.
In the second case, it's the company actively going out to ask for that kind of influence on their organization. And, furthermore, Dropbox's reason to exist is to keep your privacy. It's not like a gaming site or something. Leaking your Dropbox information would almost always compromise your privacy/safety.
Don't apologize. Bring this up every single time. It's relevant every time Dropbox is mentioned, and easy for them to change.
> the views of their board members
It's not just the views. It's also the basic resource of trust: Dropbox is not a trustless vendor - their basic service requires trust. And yet they have a board member who has unambiguously and without apology violated client trust in her previous engagement.
I disagree. If the thread is about Dropbox in relation to their security/privacy, then yes, it's relevant. In a thread announcing a new service, with no other mention to privacy? Not so much.
That said, I'm not saying it's not important to bring it up. It's very much important to discuss the implications of something like that, and people clearly didn't know about it judging by the comments here. But I disagree that this is the right place for it; a repost of that thread from 2 years ago I'd consider more appropriate for this discussion.
Arguably, security is an issue for anything that contains user content. Dropbox's business is enabling users to share content.
I could see that the issue might not be appropriate everywhere but I think it's appropriate here.
The security of this one feature might be relevant, but the security of the company, especially in the context of a completely separate decision that isn't at all related to this product is, IMO, not relevant here.
My concern is that such a topic is going to dwarf the discussion of this feature, which is really what we should be discussing here. You can already see it happening; the comment thread is the top thread here, and most of the comments on this story are related to it. So while that shows people are interested in that particular topic and its implications, it's also by far dwarfing the real discussion topic for this link, which is the Dropbox Paper product.
It's worse than that. If sharing was their only business, as opposed to backup, storage of data -- then it wouldn't matter as much if you could trust them or not. If your intention is to share data, then that data shouldn't be considered as secure any more -- even if you trust the person(s) with whom you share it.
But as Dropbox does more than just enable sharing of data, trust is paramount. Without trust, docker isn't a service, it's a liability (I don't necessarily I think the addition of a pro-surveillance board member makes much difference for how much I trust Dropbox, I'm making the point that trust is/should be a core business value of Dropbox -- if you can't trust it, I don't see how you can use it (without engaging in doublethink).
That feels... wrong to me.
Some people do that, some people don't. There's no meaningful "we" here.
> That feels... wrong to me.
Why?
With a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service.
I think all users should carefully consider if they are happy with using Dropbox in light of the views of their board members.