This part of the talk is probably the part I have the least interest in, honestly.

It would be cool, yes, to act like a first-party Dropbox client and have full access to my account via open tools.

But in the meantime, they do have a python API and SDK:

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/sdks/python

This lets me setup a sub-folder under my account with no more than python present on a machine and perform upload / downloads of content. Nothing processor architecture-specific about it. And with python modules like https://pypi.python.org/pypi/watchdog it's pretty trivial to trigger a re-upload of local content when it changes. The API provides counterparts for detecting changes in remote content (the /delta command).

In fact, this is how I've got Dropbox access running on my gen1 AppleTV :)

I'm more generally interested in the process of reversing of the code and protocols.

Building your own is great, but all I really want is a small package that I can drop on my ARM NAS that will keep a copy of my Dropbox data. Dropbox themselves have been dragging their feet on this for some unexplained reason.

> drop on my ARM NAS that will keep a copy of my Dropbox data

Do you also have Dropbox installed on a desktop at your place?

Maybe you could co-monitor your desktop Dropbox folder using this: http://sparkleshare.org/

It appears to be a Mono/.NET based project, but apparently there's Mono for ARM.

There's probably other options as well - just a thought :)

When did Windows Dropbox start auto-updating? I've never seen it update; one of my machines had a client from like 3 years ago and another machine had a client from a year and a half ago.

It's been that way as long as I can remember, though I could be misremembering. It's mentioned in the Dropbox help [1].

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/13/en

That's the point.