Dropbox Wants To Replace Your Hard Disk

Barence writes "Dropbox has kicked off its first developer conference with the stated goal of replacing the hard disk. 'We are replacing the hard drive,' said Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. 'I don't mean that you're going to unscrew your MacBook and find a Dropbox inside, but the spiritual successor to the hard drive is what we're launching.' The new Dropbox Platform includes tools for developers that will allow them to use Dropbox to sync app data between devices. The company's new APIs will also make it easier for app developers to include plugins that save to Dropbox, or choose files stored in the service for use within apps."

Comments

Re:Yay!

[faffod]

From the linked article

Datastores work offline, too With datastores, your app works great even without an Internet connection. When a user goes offline, your app can continue to work with all its data locally. The next time the user is online, Dropbox will take care of syncing things up.

Still missing encryption

[Okian Warrior]

Dropbox doesn't have encryption built-in, and this seems like a truly obvious feature. It's always been a mystery to me why they haven't implemented it. Their info page reads: "Dropbox employees are prohibited from viewing the content of files you store in your account".

This has been especially curious since the last year or two, when everyone's been complaining about how your data isn't safe in the cloud. Even the launch of Mega hasn't prodded them to add security in order to stay competitive.

Anyone know why they don't have an option to secure your data using encryption? Why we have to trust their employees not to peek at our stuff?

(Yes, I know there are 3rd party apps that add this.)

Re:Still missing encryption

[dbIII]

I'd say they didn't have it because of the deduplication of files that caused so much hilarity early in the life of dropbox. There was a hack that people used to download popular files, such as movie rips, directly from dropbox. So long as somebody on dropbox had that file, and you had the name plus file hash (eg. from a search of torrents), you could fool the thing into thinking that file was one of yours and it would let you download it directly.
Then there's the time people could log in with a username but no password.
Sorry, I just cannot take them seriously considering what they considered fit for launch early on. There are plenty of both commercial and non-commercial alternatives that deliver the same features and do not have such a poor track record as dropbox. Dropbox may have grown up a bit from nothing but gaffer tape and hype but how can we tell? We haven't been able to trust them before and it really hasn't been that long since the last utterly stupid mistake.

Re:Farts in their general direction.

[camperdave]

It sounds like Dropbox are spruiking for more VC funding by cobbling together more buzzwords.

Anyone with half a clue will steer clear of any cloud file storage.

spruik: (transitive, Australia) To promote a thing or idea to another person.

Re:An insecure HOLE straight to the desktop

[dbIII]

It's already in the corporate environment and causing amusing fuckups as a consequence. It seems just built for situations where client A and client B are competitors and the idiot using dropbox in the middle lets them see each other's stuff by mistake.

Re: Mod parent up!

[NemoinSpace]

damn right they teach 1984 now. It used to be a cautionary work of fiction. Now it's a users manual.

Re:Farts in their general direction.

[fnj]

And how many people honestly find themselves traveling to mainland China?

About 56 million. It is the third most visited country in the world.

Re:Farts in their general direction.

[Macgrrl]

The "i" is silent, the "u" is a long "oo" sound, rhyming with "you", tack a "k" on the end and you're golden.

Dropbox speed vs. SATA speed

[billstewart]

Ok, my home PC is actually running PATA/133, but it's still a lot faster than my DSL connection.

And yes, your 3TB drive may fail over the next five years, but you can buy two of them and do mirroring or incrementals.