

Upcoming talk on hijacking Dropbox accounts - sweis
https://www.usenix.org/looking-inside-drop-box

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Mindless2112
> Finally, we describe the design and implementation of an open-source version
> of Dropbox client (and yes, it runs on ARM too).

I wonder how long that implementation will continue to work. The official
Dropbox client auto-updates (well, the Windows one does; Linux doesn't,
afaik), so Dropbox can almost change the protocol whenever they like.

~~~
kevingadd
When did Windows Dropbox start auto-updating? I've never seen it update; one
of my machines had a client from like 3 years ago and another machine had a
client from a year and a half ago.

~~~
Mindless2112
It's been that way as long as I can remember, though I could be
misremembering. It's mentioned in the Dropbox help [1].

[1] [https://www.dropbox.com/help/13/en](https://www.dropbox.com/help/13/en)

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gwu78
Time to lift the veil on Dropbox. Maybe it's just librsync, Amazon S3
commands, and some Python duct tape. Built from open source? Maybe the biggest
coding challenge for the founder was getting their icon to display well on
Apple OSX? Could it be true? Nah. Pay no mind.

Looking forward to this paper. Will Dropbox try to censor the authors? DMCA?

Should there be an open source client to do what Dropbox does and should we
all be paying for AWS S3 instead of paying Dropbox? Never. Perish the thought.

~~~
krallin
I would be surprised by Guido Van Rossum left Google to work on "some Python
duct tape" at Dropbox ; ).

~~~
gwu78
I wouldn't. Maybe they offered him a better deal. I'd be surprised if he
evaluated the job opportunity by reviewing the Python script they used to
launch the service.

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httpagent
Seems like BitTorrent Sync would be a likely alternative.

[http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html](http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html)

