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Comment by stbenjam | Hacker News Reader

I just tried this with a doc file, and the buzz was nearly instantaneous, within seconds -- 3 buzzes total.

Certainly it's automated.

Paranoid part of me says it's NSA keyword scanning. I feel a little insane suggesting that, but it's certainly conceivable these days.

The other possibility is Dropbox is indexing the files for search?

Anyway, using Dropbox unecrypted is a terrible idea. EncFS has user-friendly frontends like Boxcryptor.

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Keyword scanning shouldn't resolve images, unless they're using OCR to read any text they have. In that case, they'd be wasting a lot of resources.

Where do you get that this is using images?

Honey Docs doesn't actually explain what the callback looks like in the doc file, but it doesn't look like it has anything to do with images.

The HTML, DOC, and XLS files all have identical structure (though different content). They are all HTML, and Honey Docs is relying on Word/excel's parsing the HTML in those files to fetch the image (a 1px gif).

I downloaded the credit card Honeydoc. The content looks like:

    <html>Nicole  Davis  4556062729618215<br />
    Brian  Baker  4556767839126624<br />
    Patrick  Jones  4916615717158539<br />
    ....
    <br>
    <br>
    <br>
    ....
    <img src="https://honeydocs.herokuapp.com/img/html/202719bb5717d5621068780180abc593b0fedda692bd63727a510911d21fdcbf.gif">
    </html>

Oh, and FTR, Excel gives a warning before opening the file. So they at least have thought through this vector (if you want to call it that).

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