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I refuse to use Dropbox after Condoleezza Rice was appointed to their board.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/protests-continue-a...

I hope these protests hurt Dropbox's image and business and they replace Rice with someone who isn't a war criminal.

How exactly is Rice a war criminal?

http://www.drop-dropbox.com/

Again, how exactly is Rice a war criminal? You linked to an OP-ED page. That's like linking to Greenpeace after someone asks what the benefits of Oil is to the World Economy.

The American invasion if Iraq, whose planning and execution Condeleeza Rice was involved in was clearly a violation of the UN charter, which prohibits aggressive action by one nation against another without the authorization of the UN Security Council.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted. It's not random trolls who're downvoting you either as this is HN...right?

Business is traditionally played as a game of market advantage/disadvantage. To Dropbox, Rice's international connections and political clout are far more valuable to them (obviously) than a few users throwing a hissy fit and dropping their service. Again, rather obviously, the method to change that view is if John Q. Public can create enough unrest and antagonism towards Rice, then that disadvantage outweighs the edge Rice brings.

There are two issues I see:

1. The power Rice brings to the table is ridiculously significant. Regardless of what she's alleged to have done, she is one of tens of western female political leaders. She has deep connections with major businesses within the US. Etc, etc, etc.

2. The article written at 'Drop-Dropbox' is full of strawmen arguments and subjective analysis. This, among other points, makes the article a piece of crap.

I don't really have the time, nor the willingness to actually pull apart the article, but I'll point out a few things:

"Choosing Condoleezza Rice for Dropbox's Board is problematic on a number of deeper levels, and invites serious concerns about Drew Houston and the senior leadership at Dropbox's commitment to freedom, openness, and ethics. When a company quite literally has access to all of your data, ethics become more than a fun thought experiment."

This is a slippery-slope argument, designed to instill fear into the reader. The author provides nothing of substance but insinuates: "Because Rice joined the Board of Dropbox, all of your data is going to be used for unethical (like what?) purposes". The author also shows a significant lack of understanding about how large corporate businesses work. The Board of Directors make broad, sweeping, general directions for the company to proceed in. In addition, if people are concerned with Rice making "unethical" decisions, keep in mind that there's a voting process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors#Exercise_of...) to keep power in check. Even further, once the company becomes publicly traded, a creation of a separate board who normally consist of outside members, are required to audit the company; this, in theory, prevents companies from "unethically" treating your data. Now even though this paragraph has nothing to do with the NSA and associated programs, I'm sure if anybody responds, it's going to be the first thing out of their mouth. To this I respond: Rice is not the US government. Much less, she's not even part of the NSA.

I'll point out another annoyance I've noticed: Strawmen Arguments.

Statements like:

"She helped start the Iraq War"

"She was involved in the creation of the Bush administration's torture program"

"Rice was on the Board of Directors at Chevron"

All are designed to instill fear, hatred, and disgust towards Rice. But really?...

Americans, Canadians, British, French, German, Australian, etc, etc, etc all helped to start the Iraq War. Americans are especially guilty. If anybody was around during 9/11, I'm sure we can all recall the fear and anger we had towards the suicidal fundamentalists who piloted planes into the Towers. Now, I'm not one to call for war, but I can remember that I wanted to do anything and everything in my power to hit back (somehow) at those who caused me and my country pain and harm.

Same can be more or less said for the other 'headlines' but I care far too little about changing a few random stranger's thoughts over the internet.

Thanks.

Are you really sure the French helped to start the Iraq War?

More seriously, I think it is reasonable to prefer that tech companies stay away from political figures. Suppose Rice was appointed by Google or Facebook instead of Dropbox. Or maybe George W. Bush himself. Wouldn't you feel unconfortable?

I would. Not because of Bush or Rice are right or left, did this or that, but just because they are politicians, belonging to another world. We, hackers of the tech industry, should not let them in. It is bringing the wolf to the sheepfold. A rotten fruit in the plate.

Not to say that our industry is clean: it already has enough of politics and guys with blood on their hands. We should just avoid getting more of them.

I would certainly prefer an ex-drug dealer or an ex-pimp to become member of the board of some cherished tech company than even the most seemingly innocuous politician.

Maybe I am a bit extreme, but it is probably expressing what some other people feel. So, even if Rice had a cleaner record, it would still be not ok to join Dropbox' Board.

The point is that politicians are so entrenched in the establishment that the conflict of interest in inevitable.

Americans, Canadians, British, French, German, Australian, etc, etc, etc all helped to start the Iraq War. Americans are especially guilty.

This is a sweeping and completely unfair generalization. Plenty of Americans opposed the war, as the hundreds of thousands of protesters in major cities (300-400k just in NYC) at the time showed. The polls didn't show an overwhelming majority support for the war either.

Thanks to Obama she will never be judged for the alleged crimes her and her pals commited.

But the reputation of USA as the leader of the free world is safe,we can now give the russians moral lessons.

She's not, of course. The people who claim she is tend to be pushing a fantasy concept of international law.

So you're saying "There is no such thing", not "She's not one of them". At least be consistent with your argument.

Nope, that's not what i'm saying at all.

Yea all that talk and she is still there. Clearly it didn't have any kind of impact. Either people didn't follow through or they were free accounts which they probably don't mind losing anyways.

What boggles my mind is that there are many people who would pillory the guy who got canned at Mozilla because he gave $1000 to people to fear-monger about LGBTs, who gets multiple few-hundred-comment threads, but we talk about someone who could charitably be described as a war criminal, and also add ardent supporter of NSA surveillance and such, (i.e. things a lot more harmful and important than marriage equality) and the outrage is so lukewarm as to be non-existent.

I really don't get the culture here sometimes. Eich gets hung out to dry (which is something I still agree with, for the record) but Rice more or less gets a free pass, despite Rice having been responsible/complicit in a hell of a lot more evil in the world?

Ultimately, the state doesn't give a shit if gays can get married or not, and fighting that battle is a lot easier once you get the population on your side - the state's position being basically that it will do whatever the population wants.

However you could have literally every single citizen outside of government, the bureaucracy, and the sociopaths set up to control both, opposed to the kind of surveillance Dropbox facilitates, and the state would still fight tooth-and-nail for it.

It's really a case of cowards picking their battles, and piling on when it's convenient.

"The state" is not arguing on HN, which is more what I was talking about. Where's the community outrage that happened when Eich's donations came out? The politicos had nothing to do with that, it was all grassroots.

What boggles my mind is how a group of smart people decide that having her join the board is even remotely a good idea. Even if you want to pretend Iraq didn't happen - the NSA did and she was part of that. Just today - she was still supportive of the NSA. Just before her praise of the NSA Workday said everything needs to be done to stop them (read: our business is not going so well).

So we have an entire industry (Country really) who is screwed by this and they appoint her to their board. Either they are wrapped up in the idea of having a former high ranking political figure on their board or they just don't get it. Regardless from the outside it's not a very good look.

> What boggles my mind is how a group of smart people decide that having her join the board is even remotely a good idea.

On the merits, it's a really smart idea. She has connections and gives dropbox credibility in government circles (irrespective of political leanings)

> I really don't get the culture here sometimes.

LGBT community has a very strong support network and is a visible target. In case of Rice, her evil-doing is less apparent and diffused. There's no "minority" to protect - everyone is affected - but not in a personal discriminating manner. Wars happen, but some place else. Surveillance happen, but we don't really see it. Hence, public reaction is a lot less emotional.

Consider that Mozilla is a non-profit that relies very much on the community goodwill, while Dropbox is a full-blown for-profit corporation that cares first and foremost about maximizing revenues.

We cancelled my premium account and my girlfriends premium account after we decided we could not support Dropbox's new direction.

Rice does not inspire confidence with a company handling private data.

Lets face it, the 'brand' of Dropbox has been tarnished by Rice.

Even if all the other cloud sync companies have to hand over data to the US Government, at least they aren't being so blase about it by putting Rice on their board.

I'm doubtful about paid accounts having a significant impact on their bottom line. Do they publish numbers on that?

Dropbox could end world hunger and bring peace to the world and we'd still have people who wouldn't accept it. This is about an addition to their API. We don't care if you think she's the spawn of Satan.

It needs to be brought up in every Dropbox thread, and voted to the top comment. There is literally no valid use case for Dropbox, everyone using it needs to give it up for something else, and anyone who hasn't been made aware of that needs to be.

Even if they end world hunger.

Hypocritical much? Why do you speak for the whole HN? The community clearly does care as evidenced by a number of comments about Rice in this thread.

I use DropBox and so does a lot of other people I know. Their decision to hire Condoleezza Rice does not affect my decision and obviously has no impact on the decision of many others.

Stuff like this is why I like Dropbox even though it's more expensive. File syncing is their bread and butter. It's their main business, not a sideshow. They're always going to do this better than anyone else.

Can you give another example than this? Don't get me wrong, I'm trying to justify the huge price difference.

LAN sync is only available on Dropbox and is incredibly useful.

I really wish all the Dropbox clients on a LAN would coordinate and not all download the same file from Dropbox.

We had our three work machines all downloading a ~400MB file the other day. No reason Dropbox couldn't figure that out and have one machine download the file and then distribute over LAN.

"No reason Dropbox couldn't figure that out and have one machine download the file and then distribute over LAN."

They could have each machine download a chunk and have them swap chunks locally. That would asymptote in time towards a single download.

That would handle cases of the "one" machine going offline close to the end, or having it being the slowest machine available.

That's a great idea to handle those sorts of edge cases.

In other words, a slightly more managed Bit Torrent.

It's also available on AeroFS, and it actually works much better on AeroFS. (I still prefer Dropbox to AeroFS because Dropbox is more reliable.)

BTSync has it as well.

I tried BTSync and was blown away by how much faster sync in general and especially LAN sync was. I guess Bittorrent Inc. knows how to properly transfer files.

Spideroak does LAN sync as well

Things that come to mind immediately:

Dropbox works equally well across platforms with near 0 synchronization issues. It's just a folder. They aren't trying to add cloud to their own platform, they don't care what device you use or if you use Apple's word processor or Microsoft or Google Docs.

Dropbox has has a firebase/Parse style API you can use to build applications that store that application data in the cloud.

My favorite Dropbox API uses:

automatic syncing of O'reilly Media books. Whenever O'reilly updates one of their ebooks, I always have the current copy, because O'reilly syncs it with Dropbox.

1Password synching.

automatic Hackpad backups (they had that even before they were bought).

I installed this new app the other day, Trickster from the Mac App store, it automatically detected I was using Dropbox.

But I'll mention some negatives:

Those new recent android apps were really bad and I uninstalled them. Carousel and that other one, I don't even remember what it was now. They were just terrible apps, at least on my Galaxy S4.

> 1Password synching.

Some would think this as a normal use-case for a cloud-drive.

But since 1Password backups seems to be using a format that Box.com won't upload, they are rejecting the files with this error:

> "Package files — Save as a flat file or a compressed ZIP file and reload"

It also means that you can't save .dmg-files.

I don't understand these limitations, Box.coms software feels rock-solid, and then I hit these strange limitations.

Dropbox on the other hand seems to allow all the filetypes I have thrown at them.

> Some would think this as a normal use-case for a cloud-drive.

It's more than just that since the Android and IOS 1Password apps can sync from Dropbox without Dropbox being installed on the device. They're synching using the dropbox API in those cases I'd think.

Dropbox also has problems with OSX Package files.

Rubitrack is one that caught me out - http://www.rubitrack.com/faq.html

"This is a problem known to Dropbox for many years and it affects not just rubiTrack but hundreds of Mac apps that use a package file format."

1Password's keychain uses resource forks I think, which makes it inherently not cross-platform (or rather, not cross-filesystem) and could explain the incompatibilities.

Not sure what could be the issue with DMGs, though, since that exact issue is pretty much the reason for their existence.

> It's just a folder.

Dropbox supports symlinks (and the way you'd expect them to)

I love Dropbox for exactly this reason. I can back up dotfiles, game settings, preferences, my music library... anything anywhere on my disk, as long as I symlink it. It does slow down some operations (since a Dropbox RMI needs to be called whenever one of those files changes) but it's saved me so many times, it's hard to believe.

Woah. This is big news for me. I wonder why this isn't more obvious.

The Packrat feature is also nice.

https://www.dropbox.com/help/113/en

Packrat is the most important part of Dropbox for me - has saved me countless times when I need an old version of a file.

For me it's 'stays connected' For some reason Google Drive will disconnect periodically and there is no reconnect option. You have to exit and restart, and then it needs to re-index everything.

Multiple Dropboxs. New feature, but I can run my work and home dropbox at the same time and they sync to different folders.

Sharing is cleaner. When I invite a Dropbox user to a share, the share appears in their drive. With Google drive, they get access to the share web only but it doesn't sync to their drive. The UI to get it to sync to drive isn't clear, so I end up doing a lot of 'support'

I also find the Google Drive .gdoc files bizarre. They aren't actual files, users don't understand you can't copy them out of the drive to back them up, etc.

Insync[1] does a good job of solving this, the google docs files are the microsoft equivalent, e.g. spreadsheets sync as excel files (note I'm not affiliated in any way).

[1] https://www.insynchq.com/

If you pay for the business account, you get unlimited space. If you actually do use multiple terabytes, then the per-GB cost is pretty good.

Shame on you for supporting a company that does not respect your privacy, lies to you, and puts a torturing, Constitution-destroying war criminal on their board of directors.

Guess what: 99% of people don't give a flying fuck.

That's progress. Last year it was 99.1%.

Easy downvote. I don't think any of your (inflammatory) assertions are supportable.

While exarch's comment is inflammatory, Dr. Rice was involved in asserting the legality of torture during her tenure in the executive branch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice#Role_in_author...

Her defence is that she was only the messenger?

You do realize that confirms she was not a war criminal?

Someone correct my if I'm wrong here, but if you're referring to PRISM, that's not lying. Note that Dropbox as well as any other US company is subject to (distasteful, but otherwise legal) demands for information.

PRISM is basically a secure upload endpoint, not some automated, unaccountable, secret data siphoning tool. (Though they have those as well..)

If I were a popular enough internet company to get frequent NSL requests, it would only make sense to sign up. I have to provide the data, might as well make it as painless as possible.

What I'm feeling about this? This is a great feature, but I don't trust the brand.

I'm really anxious about Canonical releasing the Ubuntu One Server project as open source https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers, soon as it happens I will dedicate to make it mainstream. Can you imagine the possibilities? decentralized synchronization, multiple storages protocols like S3 or FTP.

File synchronization is a hard thing to do, but I don't see common sense on making it centralized. Really have high hopes when Ubuntu One is released.

Can you imagine the possibilities? decentralized synchronization, multiple storages protocols like S3 or FTP.

At the risk of sounding like a shill, that's already possible with git-annex. It's decentralized, and it supports remote storage on S3, FTP, rsync, Webdav (e.g. Box.com), Tahoe-LAFS, Google Drive, Mega, SkyDrive and more.

I personally have a node on my laptop, one on my VPS, one on my RaspPi, one on my Nexus 7 and a bucket on S3, all happily syncing.

git-annex is quite difficult to use, even more so if one of your nodes is a Windows box.

The sheer number of symlinks put me off git-annex.

You should try the direct mode, then: http://git-annex.branchable.com/direct_mode/

Normally, git-annex repositories consist of symlinks that are checked into git, and in turn point at the content of large files that is stored in .git/annex/objects/. Direct mode gets rid of the symlinks.

With direct mode, you're operating without large swathes of git-annex's carefully constructed safety net, which ensures that past versions of files are preserved and can be accessed. With direct mode, any file can be edited directly, or deleted at any time, and there's no guarantee that the old version is backed up somewhere else.

Yikes!

If you edit a file in Dropbox without it having had time to sync the previous version, what do you think it'll happen?

Git-annex with symlinks can add an extra layer of protection, in that you have to unlock the file before editing, so that it can ensure it has backed up. In direct mode, it just works like any other syncing systems - non-synced versions are lost.

> Git-annex with symlinks can add an extra layer of protection, in that you have to unlock the file before editing

Is that like how Perforce handles it?

I wouldn't know, I never used Perforce. But there's a walkthrough for that: http://git-annex.branchable.com/walkthrough/modifying_annexe...

That's without the Assistant, which further simplifies the latter steps by automatically taking care of committing and such. You just do unlock <file>, edit, then add <file>.

The Dropbox team has been working hard on Webhooks for some time now, it looks like this is a much-needed tool for developers.

For example, a little under a year ago I released a mobile writing app that synced using the Dropbox Sync API. Right out of the gate there were problems syncing large documents, specifically due to slow mobile connections. The webhooks functionality (while I haven't launched a version of the app that implements this) allows me to check for changes quickly on a server before syncing files on the user's device.

Kudos to the team on adding a much-needed feature to the Dropbox functionality.

If anyone has questions, feedback or comments about webhooks or the Dropbox API more broadly, feel free to post here

You can also ping me at levine at dropbox

Whats the best/recommended way to test webhooks with a server running locally? Do you require webhook urls to be SSLd?

P.S. Also eagerly waiting for your Shared Folder API [1] :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484409

Webhooks don't require SSL. We're going to publish a little Python script soon that can generate fake webhook notifications for local testing, but in the meantime, I'd suggest just using curl. Something like this:

curl http://127.0.0.1/whatever -d '{"deltas": {"users:" [12345]}}'

Another possibility is to use a tool like ngrok or localtunnel, which is what some of our beta testers did.

I went ahead and published Python code to generate fake webhook requests. See https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox_hook.

http://john-sheehan.com/blog/a-survey-of-the-localhost-proxy...

This is great, thanks! Quick question: Is there a best practice for handling rate limiting? I.e. if you send us X number of web hook updates in quick succession for a user, are we ok just sending X delta requests back at you in quick succession? Or do we need to worry about rate limiting? What's the maximum rate we can expect to be sent web hook requests for one user?

Take a look at https://www.dropbox.com/developers/webhooks/tutorial#best-pr..., specifically the part about managing concurrency.

There are rate limits (per user) on the Dropbox side, but they're pretty high. I think the bigger concurrency issue is going to be on your end (making sure you don't process the same changes multiple times). Taking a lease per-user is a good start, and we're going to publish a more advanced sample in the coming weeks that uses a queue to really eliminate duplicate calls.

I have a question:

How do you feel about working for a company that employs a war criminal on their board of directors, and that lied to the public about its collusion with the NSA over PRISM and other warrantless surveillance programs?

Feedback: I moved my file syncing from Dropbox to Spideroak after you announced Rice was coming on board, and recommend all my friends, family and coworkers do the same. It's a shame because I love the product.

Same here, except I went with BTSync. Really glad I did - it's a nice little product.

I have a question: why does Dropbox hire board members better known for their support for torture than their business acumen?

After reading the comments here and learning that you have hired Condoleezza Rice you have lost yourself another paying customer.

What features have you added to your API to allow various intelligence agencies to more easily snoop on your customer data?

Can I use this new API to be notified when Dropbox board members resign?

You can use this API to get a boilerplate non-response full of hypocritical "commitment" about user privacy.

Wow, they've been building up to this one for I think years. Very happy to see it. Having a real-time* filesystem available is going to great for not only the big projects like web hosting but I can imagine a ton of little in house tools that could make use of this.

* We know which type of real-time we're talking about...

It has been a long time coming and we're really excited to see what folks do with it!

At AudioBox (https://audiobox.fm) we have a strong use case for it. We are already providing our users a "live filesystem" with Box, exciting that Dropbox is also adding this.

We'll have a look at this after our next release.

Speaking of the devil... as of a few hours ago she is still defending the NSA programs.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25762917/condoleezza-...

I'm guessing the boycott is over?

Not for me. I've moved to Google Drive. Cheaper, faster, better and less pro-war!

Interestingly your name anagrams with mosad.

But... it's missing the second 's'.

soad = system of a down :)

Not for me. All I care about this announcement is the hooks that Mamdouh Habib was hanged on while he was tortured in Egypt, sent there by the CIA.

And one of the Dropbox board members was an ardent supporter of this and other despicable practices(also known as torture).

If Daniel Levine is fine with this, then I am definitely not fine with paying, using or promoting his product API.

edit: I switched to spideroak and am quite happy with the product.

I lolled.

Look up the story of Mamdouh Habib. It's really sad, he was tortured physically and mentally, labeled a terrorist and was released without charges by the USG after 4 years in detention.

Nope, switched to BTSync. I'll investigate syncthing and whatever else comes along, but basically anything-but-Dropbox.

Nope, permanently moved to SpiderOak

Not for me, I cancelled my account and moved to a self-hosted Owncloud instance.

I won't be sending any more of my personal data, taking Mailbox off my iPhone was sad though.

No way. I moved permanently to unison.

Nope, moved to Google Drive.

Nope. I won't be back. Using unison now. Syncthing looks nice, too.

I gave up on them years ago and switched to spideroak. Haven't looked back since.

Nope. I'm using ownCloud now on a VPS. Dropbox worked hard to lose my business, and I hate to see hard work go to waste.

Another Spideroak migration here. Haven't looked back.

Owncloud (but without enthusiasm).

https://owner.io/ Hosted in a german data center under the strictest security standards.

Nope. Actually turned out not to be such a bad thing as it forced me to rethink an implementation approach (using Dropbox APIs) that had seemed like a good idea, and was getting really sticky.

To me, Dropbox is "over". Moved to ownCloud, never looked back.

Not just a boycott, but I simply have no reason to use Dropbox. It's more expensive, does nothing Google Drive can't do, and on top of that, has all the political issues.

Is there a file storage protocol?

On the same note, it would be cool to have this protocol to drive the development of Dropbox (and other file storage services for that matter) in the same way that Git drives what is capable on Github.

Agreed. I am trying to see if this framework allows for a simple polling and synchronization of a particular dropbox to a unix system. That is, a simple way to clone my dropbox to any old unix system that is running their python code, and keeps it updated via the polling mechanism.

This is interesting because we (rsync.net) would then "freeze" that python app[1] (whatever it ends up being) and let users clone and sync a dropbox to their rsync.net account.

We already do this with s3cmd and git, and dropbox would be a nice addition.

[1] We don't allow interpreters (python, perl, shell) in our environment, so we have to "freeze" python to a binary exe.

If you're polling client-side for a single account, you should just be using longpoll_delta[1] and delta[2]. But maybe I misunderstood the use case?

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs#longpoll-delta

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/docs#delta

Interesting the company they feature, Picturelife, seems to be a direct competitor to their own new Carousel app.

Webhooks or no, Dropbox has already nailed down the core features but the Rice situation is gnawing at me.

I would love to see a canonical list of alternatives to Dropbox, I still have 30GB in free layers(thanks University promotions), but the more I think about it, the less I want to keep using Dropbox.

So some options are to set up your ownCloud at VPS, use Google Drive, or Microsoft Skydrive or something else.

Problem with latter two is that those are not exactly highly ethical choices either.

On the other hand ownCloud fails the grandma test something that Dropbox has been excellent at.

What other options are there?

I hope http://www.site44.com/ is also implemented the Dropbox Webhook.

Of course. :-)

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