Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite
blogs.dropbox.com
blogs.dropbox.com
I'm not sure I understand the logic here
And they also released APIs designed to eliminate the need for KEXTs for virtualization products (see: Veertu and Docker for Mac beta), so I would expect them to also have/make APIs for Dropbox's use case as well.
I was excited for this. Was.
As large? Dropbox is like a fly to Apple. Not to mention competitors. And they haven't budged for much larger parties.
So, unless it's something that Apple intends to do anyway, Dropbox's request will don't have much success.
You'd think Apple would be happy to add extensions they themselves could use in the future to replace Dropbox with their own iCloud extension.
They could just add them internally and use them for an "upgraded Finder/iCloud" and not expose them for Dropbox to use.
Implementing them for a competitor so that they "can use them themselves in the future" doesn't make sense as a strategy -- except if they are too benevolent.
OS X is full of functionality unavailable to 3rd party apps (I'm looking at you Power Nap! -_-) and expecting decent behaviour from them is optimistic.
Not that I follow such things closely, but I can't recall ever having heard about Apple being happy to do something for someone who wasn't Apple. Do such things happen?
Apple didn't have to build an API for them, they simply provided documentation for how to use the existing API.
https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-availabl...
But that's not the same as building a bunch of APIs for a competitor.
which I got really excited about. I wonder what is their experience with using FUSE and DOKANY..
Thanks, Dropbox!
2: https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor
3: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.sy...
Putting ext3 into userspace led to slightly less than 10% performance degradation on postmark. Fuse really isn't an issue in most cases, and I can't imagine that this makes a huge difference on most workloads.
Reminds me of the performance arguments for kdbus.
Reminds me of the Coda/AFS2 days, really (those weren't as much fun as you'd think, back when we opened files over X.25 links...)
Bottom line: I hope it's configurable and that I can switch it off (preferably by default).
I've been resisting building a custom HFS+ reader for years but apples expanded use of hard links plus whatever DB is about to unleash might require a new approach.
First of all, Dropbox the web application is spammed with Dropbox Business advertising. I am already paying. And, no, my employer (a European university) is unlikely to roll out Dropbox Business. So please stop bugging me :(.
Secondly, more and more features are rolled out to business users first. Why? Are regular paying customers going to be treated as second-class citizens to bully them into business accounts?
I expect this to become even more of an issues after WWDC.
When it comes to my personal photos archive, I care about 2 things: (1) occasional sharing and (2) keeping my huge archive safe. Dropbox does both, iCloud does neither.
iCloud sharing only works with people using iDevices and I don't have many acquaintances or family members with a preference for Apple. Dropbox allows for publishing to a web link, with or without a password, with or without an expiration date. And that's cool, because I can send that link to anybody. Cross-platform and all that.
In terms of safety, I keep an extra offline backup by means of a home Linux server that's almost always on, synchronizing my Dropbox and does the occasional local backup. It has a big hard-drive of course. Dropbox works on Linux, iCloud does not. Also Dropbox provides a 30-days history of all changes and a 1-year extended history for extra cost. I got the 1-year extended history. With iCloud get some Ransomware and watch in horror how all of your photos are gone.
https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-mus...
iCloud definitely does occasional sharing. Keeping your archive safe is definitely questionable though.
> iCloud sharing only works with people using iDevices and I don't have many acquaintances or family members with a preference for Apple. Dropbox allows for publishing to a web link, with or without a password, with or without an expiration date. And that's cool, because I can send that link to anybody. Cross-platform and all that.
I can do that with iCloud Photos. I select a bunch of photos I want to share, I select an existing (or create a new) iCloud shared photo library, and then I enable a web link for them and share that. Works on fruits, robots, glass panes and penguins.
Aren't those who are "already paying" the most likely to upgrade? Maybe not you or not your institution, but most.
It starts with a few people at a business, and then they update to a business account.
Ironically, I would upgrade to a business account, if not for the "minimum 5 accounts" limit.
Now what in the world would I do with 5 accounts Dropbox? Should I pull like a company out of my ass?
I don't have a business, I already give you money, and now you want even more?
I don't understand the limitations that stops it from working. I still have my images there, and when I connect my phone to my laptop using USB-cable, Dropbox syncs the images.
The bit I don't quite understand about Project infinite is that you still have to manually decide what gets sync'd or not. It's also not a network volume, so things like virus scanners or search indexers can just page in-data? And if you want to offload data, you just move it from one folder to another which still eats space.
https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2011/06/yesterdays-authent...
Companies tend to be the same way, learning along the way and maturing, especially when it comes to business processes and risk-related parts of the business.
It's entirely possible that the Dropbox of 2016 isn't like the Dropbox of five years ago in many concrete ways. For example, they could have hired new people, improved testing and release processes, and become more serious about engineering discipline.
Many startups early-on make dumb mistakes and go on to great success and professionalization, but we should have both empathy and forgiveness for them in the long term. Dropbox has recently demonstrated a focused attention on large scale, challenging engineering projects (building a replacement for S3 in-house from scratch, writing kernel extensions, etc) and a reasonable observer might conclude that they've learned from the mistakes of 2011.
At some point, Dropbox clearly didn't take security seriously. They claim otherwise now. The question is now "at what point should we believe them?" It's subjective and my opinion is that the 2011 management that didn't take security seriously then probably still doesn't take it that seriously now - they've simply hired underlings to worry about it.
I have experiences with companies that have security in their DNA from day one, and I've {observed, worked with, been a customer of} a whole fuckton more who bolt it on later once time and money permit. Most of the latter do not actually care one whit about security, it's just one more "avoid existential threat x" box they have to tick as their business grows.
Google falls into the former. Dropbox and Slack and LinkedIn fall into the latter.
https://www.troyhunt.com/we-take-security-seriously-otherwis...
There is no reasonable amount of time that needs to pass until I willingly let a Dropbox or a Slack or a LinkedIn run code in my workstation's kernel. Maybe that makes me a jerk - if it does, I apologize.
PS: That's not how you spell my username.
Google has had multiple security incidents during the lifetime of the company that resulted in an increasing investment in upping their security profile. Operation Aurora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora) was one of them (which of course bit a number of companies and was quite a sophisticated attack), but they have had other screwups, like the SRE spying incident (http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...) and others.
For Dropbox, the password incident did result in major and serious change; it was a turning point resulting in significant investment in product and infrastructure security. In my admittedly biased opinion Dropbox now has one of the best security teams out there. For example the product security team invests heavily in the XSS protections on Dropbox's website that are top of class, and stronger than those on many of Google's own first party properties (I'll demur on details here at the risk of likely violating one or more NDAs, but I encourage you to read https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/category/security/).
Source: I've worked as a software engineer at both Google and Dropbox and I'm reasonably familiar with engineering, infrastructure/operational and physical security practices at both organizations.