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A comment on Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?. Parent comment

Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by gnud on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @03:58AM (#9136745)
Just some more information: Dropbox does not read the file outside the dropbox folder. It does, however, 'QueryBasicFileInformation' and and 'QueryDirectory' when I create a file on my desktop.

I'm guessing this has to do with the explorer extension.

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by pudquick on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:04AM (#9136770)
This is the first comment in this discussion I've seen that is actually interesting and might provide an explanation.

The Dropbox file status symbols are a -big hack-. Up until OS X 10.10, for instance, the file browsing interface didn't provide per-file badging at the OS API level. So they literally had to patch the running Finder process to do this.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn something similar is going on with Windows Explorer.

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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by ryanackley on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @08:10AM (#9137455)
No, Windows provides a well-documented way to customize folder and file icons inside Windows Explorer (their equivalent of Finder).
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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by nodata on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @05:29AM (#9137015)
They were patching the running Finder process? wtf?
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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by cpach on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @06:23AM (#9137126)
See this blog post from 2011: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2011/03/22/disabling-dropboxs-haxie/
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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by mrpopo on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @06:52AM (#9137206)
I know my company has had many problems that were pinned down to Dropbox hooking some Win32 API functions that we use. I am not familiar with the semantics of hooking, but could it be related to that?
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Re:Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC? by neckro23 on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @09:20AM (#9137726)
Windows has a standard way of doing this, no? I've seen other Windows apps like TortoiseSvn do icon overlays too.
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