Dropbox and Deutsche Telekom partner in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox and Deutsche Telekom partner in Europe

blog.dropbox.com

27 pointsnikunjk31 comments

Is it just me or is this a 180 degree turn around for Deutsche Telekom? After the NSA scandal they planned to create an "All-German Internet" [0] (a strange plan to begin with) but now they seem to be saying: we don't care, let us let our users store their data in "in data centers across the United States" [1]. As if nothing ever happened.

[0] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/deutsche-telekom... [1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/7/en

Especially since Telekom has its own cloud storage service.

Especially since there was a story the other day about the US government having access to US companies' servers, regardless of whether or not they are on US soil.

Or the whole, "lol honeypot for files",

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/07/14/jtrig... (shaping and honeypots) ... so uh, that Rice to the board looks a bit more obvious now.

Oh come on, "email made in Germany" was a marketing stunt all along - a simple way to benefit from the general rage related to the NSA scandal. It didn't make any sense in the first place and I'm sure Telekom is very well aware of this.

That's right since the "email made in Germany" and "full encryption" only works between the 3/4 major email providers in Germany.

DT like any other company wants to sell and is pure marketing strategy.

The "All German Internet" plan was an attempt to extract money out of service providers in Germany.

There are strong peering interconnects in Germany, most notably DE-CIX (AFAIK the largest interconnect world-wide). Who's not present there? Telekom.

There are two ways to connect with our beloved former monopolist (who still captures a significant part of the market through inertia): Either you peer directly (and they have rather arcane and costly ideas about what that means, and where the pipe goes to that you will be leasing), or you go through one of the international backbone providers that are too big for Telekom to ignore.

Which is why communication with Telekom customers from the outside (data centers in Germany, other ISPs) tends to cross the Atlantic twice.

Telekom's PR attempt was mostly targetted at politics to try to get them to pressure other internet infrastructure companies to pay up for direct peering with Telekom.

Here's what DE-CIX had to say about it (German only, they don't seem to have translated that particular press release, obviously biased): http://presse.de-cix.net/press-releases/pressemitteilung/art...

I have worked a lot with people from all levels at Telekom over the past year. Privacy is still a huge theme, but it's a big company with many initiative & unfortunately left/right hand coordination is often lacking. Last year they did a similar deal with Evernote & Box, so nothing out of the ordinary here.

They will have this only outside of Germany. You know to keep the show running.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/dropbox-de...

This is the new Dropbox, with Condoleezza Rice et al on the board.

How do you grow your installed base? Give a big corporation a load of money to install it on their customers' devices, whether they like it or not.

The average consumer does not care. The average mom and pop just want to see it work across all devices. Take a photo, it available on your website or ios device immediately. Guido for technical expertise. Condoleeza for strategic partnerships. I see the plan now...

For now, it looks like there's a negative association with Dropbox and Condoleezza Rice.

When only positive association can be seen on HN, can we then assume that the DoD's "social media" tools to control conversation has worked?

(remember folks, this is no longer conspiracy territory).

Look at the jtrig section for shaping/honeypots,

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/07/14/jtrig...

... there's no evidence it is related, but when you think about that and social media to promote things ... does that mean imgur and dropbox were planned for honeypots and IPOs? At this point it seems it's best just to assume everything is compromised and backdoored, oof.

Oh. That's the first time I've seen that. Thanks.

Here's some pure speculation:

DEADPOOL - is.gd

MOLTEN-MAGMA - CloudFlare

LONGSHOT - Dropbox

PIXTRIX - Imgur

It's interesting to note that the CEO of is.gd (Nick Craig-Wood) and CloudFlare's JGC both blogged about solving GCHQ's challenge... maybe they both got approached?

This has nothing to do with Rice.

Dropbox has had pre-installing contracts with Samsung for 2 years.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/12/how-dropbox-continues-to-w...

https://www.dropbox.com/help/297/

Really, Dropbox? DT? The most shitty telecom provider you could find? The pest of German internet access? The plague of providers? ... bah. At least it is only a pre-install program and not something like "we use Telekom for all our services in Europe". I hope it stays that way.

More realistically, DT is (perceived as) a premium provider and his will automatically expand Dropbox's market and can be kind of a strategic partner (what Dropbox supposedly needs since the competition from big players is heating up). Speculation: Deutsche Telecom's equivalent product was most likely inferior and hasn't caught on well enough, so that's a win for them as well.

The general (perceived) shittyness of all providers in general is just a function of the business model: huge number of customers pay for mostly fixed costs.

> More realistically, DT is (perceived as) a premium provider

Okay, maybe my views about DT are really outdated, but ... premium provider? Who thinks about DT as a premium provider? The only thing I think about when I hear Telekom is "incumbent who does everything to stifle competition" and so do most people I know.

Then you don't want to know about Telefonica in Spain or BT in the UK. It's the same thing with every ex-monopoly.

In my experience a lot of older people in Germany still think that DT is THE provider for internet and mobile.

So actually Dropbox becomes just another preinstalled app and Telecom won't have to invest into any kind of own cloud infrastructure.

After Uber did the same thing a month ago with AT&T (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/05/28/uber-partners-att-p...), this seems like the marketing strategy that becomes unlocked after hitting a $10B market cap.

The pre-installed apps you can't remove is a pest. Samsung is quite good at it too - you can't remove the Dropbox app at all without rooting your phone.

I guess all of that Internet rage at Dropbox getting Condoleezza Rice has faded. What's on TV?

and there i was hoping they were removing dropbox from their bandwidth limitations.

As a consumer, I find these bundled apps a pain. But a brilliant business move by dropbox to become ubiqutous as the default file sharing app. If they rebrand, you won't even know it's dropbox under the hood.

Dropbox, a great company like that don't need this kind of strategy.

Meh, I would have expected contracts of the DT bundled with Dropbox

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

I will not stop posting this on every Dropbox story on here. I find it reprehensible. Information from the linked site above on why you should not use this company's software and move to an alternative such as SpiderOak:

Why Condoleezza Rice should not hold power at Dropbox

* She helped start the Iraq War

"The Iraq War directly caused over 120,000 civilians to die. The total body count, including soldiers, is nearly 188,000. Nearly 5,000 US and coalition forces were killed. Over 30,000 were seriously wounded."

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

"Rice verbally agreed to allow torture methods to be used on captured suspects, and then lied about the extent to which she was involved."

* Rice not only supports warrantless wiretaps, she authorized several

"Rice not only spoke in favor of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program and expansive domestic surveillance program, she authorized the warrantless wiretap of UN Security Council members."

Is this really a company you want to trust your data with, let alone your money given the blood on Rice's hands?

I feel like a broken record posting this each time a story comes up on HN but I feel it needs to be said so people can be educated about this company.

Dropbox makes it easy for me to sync and share files (specifically funny meme images), I haven't found anything else that works the same way but without the, ah, interesting government aid.

I've never heard of Spideroak, but it looks like it could be solid competition for what I want in specific. But now can it be trusted...

the point of spideroak is that you (in theory) shouldn't need to trust "it", because encryption.

depending on your use case this may or may not be the case anymore though, i haven't followed the recent development of their android app or their "hive" feature.

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