
Dropbox Wants More Access to Your Computer, and People Are Freaking Out - okneil
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/dropbox-infinite
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aaronharnly
On a single-user machine all the interesting stuff (personal documents,
configuration, browser history etc) is in userland anyway. And people are
already entrusting Dropbox with their personal files.

I'd say this article represents Twitter-fishing -- search the comment-ome on
any recent event and you'll find somebody panicking, or being crude, or
whatever else you want to write an article about.

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beardicus
Wow. Pretty garbagey article. Yes you can find some people on twitter that
wouldn't want to load a kernel extension from Dropbox. Back in reality: nobody
will even know, nobody will care, everybody will be happy if "it just works".

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jhayward
I would have no problem with a kext from Dropbox as long as they publish the
source and use reproducible builds.

But given their ties to the US National Security establishment I would
definitely pause before giving them blind kernel access.

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dsfyu404ed
Tomorrow's headline: "Dropbox lays off enterprise sales team"

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maze-le
I cannot see any reason whatsoever, that this has to run in the kernel.

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tim333
I guess when a program asks to read a file, dropbox has to intervene at quite
a low level to get it from a remote server rather than the local file system
where the program thinks it is.

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grimborg
On Linux you can use Fuse in userland. On OSX I'm not sure.

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bobwaycott
Fuse filesystems on OS X are user-land applications entirely outside the
kernel. However, I believe OSXFUSE itself, atop which the filesystems are
built and operate, requires/includes a kernel extension.

(Edited for better explanation than initial wording)

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boduh
That's right. OSXFUSE includes a kernel extension
([https://github.com/osxfuse/kext](https://github.com/osxfuse/kext)). There is
no other technical way to achieve this without a kernel extension on both
Windows and OSX.

