Dropbox Wants To Replace Your Hard Disk 445
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."
Re:Yay! (Score:1, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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:Farts in their general direction. (Score:5, Informative)
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:Still missing encryption (Score:3, Informative)
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:An insecure HOLE straight to the desktop (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Mod parent up! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Farts in their general direction. (Score:5, Informative)
About 56 million [wikipedia.org]. It is the third most visited country in the world.
Re:Farts in their general direction. (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.