[tajen]

I think the concern might be that we are more and more granting ownership of our machines: If NSA wants to install a spyware on targetted systems, they have a dozen autoupdate channels to do it through now.

Which is good because we do nothing wrong. Apart from Youporn, where only one underage model that you didn't know about could lead you to jail. You know, accusations do wonders for your career.

Apart from this catastrophic scenario, I don't either see what's wrong. How many people per year are accused of pedophilia, that could be due to conflicting work/nation interests?

[thanksgiving]

> I think the concern might be that we are more and more granting ownership of our machines: If NSA wants to install a spyware on targetted systems, they have a dozen autoupdate channels to do it through now.

> Which is good because we do nothing wrong. Apart from Youporn, where only one underage model that you didn't know about could lead you to jail. You know, accusations do wonders for your career.

> Apart from this catastrophic scenario, I don't either see what's wrong. How many people per year are accused of pedophilia, that could be due to conflicting work/nation interests?

Thank you. And to people who think this won't affect them, it doesn't even have to be cp charges. NSA has lost the fight to keep its uncensored dragnet data to itself. Today, it is FBI who has access to it. Tomorrow, it will be the IRS which is fine. However, the real kicker will come when state departments of revenue and city police get their hands on it.

Remember, we as a people, legitimately break the law millions of times every day. It doesn't have to be cooked up evidence. If someone wants to hang any of us "upstanding" citizens, they just have to look hard enough.

[JustSomeNobody]

How long until we are issued tickets for speeding when we say simple things like, "I was hauling butt to get to work today!" on FB? Or have our insurance premiums jump because of it.

Certainly the former wouldn't hold up with current laws, but how long until the laws are changed?

The more we allow our privacy to be eroded, the closer we are to having this come true.

[mmjaa]

>I don't either see what's wrong

What's wrong is that the capability to safely serve and share files over the Internet to people you want to serve, safely and with some modicum of security, is perfectly within the reach of the vendors of Operating Systems.

However, these vendors have fallen asleep at the wheel and are allowing basic system services to be fractured at the base (i.e. in the base OS install), in order that third parties might fill the gap.

This is a heinous state of affairs for anyone thats been paying attention over the years, because there are no good reasons we can't just use our existing computers, and their operating systems, to provide the same kind of user experience as one might obtain with Dropbox, albeit without the creepy commercial-control/exploitation aspect.

I mean, honestly, if folks would just have a way to create their own VPN's out of the box, share the details, and set up a peer network as if it were .. y'know .. a function of the operating system instead of something you learn about from seeing it on a billboard or the back of a bus ..

[Gaelan]

Huh, not an unreasonable argument. However:

Dropbox seems to be singled out for doing things like this, despite browsers, Win10, etc.

The updater changes nothing unless someone has done a full audit of the Dropbox binary.

Updater or not, Dropbox/$minitrue can read/write anything you store there. If you have any executables (incl. source code, word docs with macros enabled, git repos via hooks…) in Dropbox, you're pwned as well.

If you don't trust Dropbox, an updater is the least of your concerns.

[jpalomaki]

Given the amount of vulnerabilities in commonly used applications, they would not need the auto update to infect your computer with malware. Just modify some existing document stored in your computer and wait for you to open it.

And to do that, there's no need to work with Dropbox. Eve could just work her way through your colleagues you are sharing files with to find the weakest link, plant the documents on his computer and wait for them to automatically sync to yours.