Well, that's the end of my usage of Dropbox, effective immediately. I'll make sure to mention Condi's association with them in every conversation involving Dropbox, in hope of spreading knowledge about their profane selection of board members.<p>It's a shame that they had to pick a Bush crony. These people should be in prison for malevolently misleading the public in order to start a for-profit war which killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Sooo, will we be seeing a repeat of the Eich-like public outcry?<p>Though I may understand the business rationale for this hire, I certainly wont trust founders, board or anyone else at Dropbox who is OK working with a person that is partially responsible for deaths of thousands(arguably hundreds of thousands) people in the Iraq war based on false premises about "WMD".<p>Oh, and we shouldn't forget about her role in "enhanced interrogation techniques", too.<p>EDIT: Thinking a little more about this I will be cancelling my Dropbox subscription.<p>EDIT2: Yes, we are seeing an outcry. I am incredibly happy that coolness factor in tech is now more connected to ethical behavior of its top management and board members.
I hope she hasn't ever donated to any disagreeable referendum campaigns.....<p>....or ever been a core member of an administration that left us with two disastrous wars, an offshore gulag, the greatest economic disaster in 70 years, a record of legitimizing torture, a decline in prestige on the world stage. Oh, and a strong record or rejecting marriage equality.
Reasons this might be a great move for Dropbox:<p>1. It will help them secure major enterprise clients, probably the govt. or with ties to the govt.<p>2. Great selling point to institutional investors come IPO time.<p>3. Navigating foreign business opportunities.<p>Although I'm not a fan of this move by Dropbox, it is important to note that Stanford has hired Rice as a professor as well. No one is abandoning Stanford, and the hits that Dropbox is going to take are going to be minuscule in comparison to the upside. This is just the hard reality.<p>Rice does have a lot of experience that is relevant to Dropbox and students at Stanford and I'd just like to leave it at that because at the end of the day, connections + experiences that come from being Secretary of State trump pure meritocracy or idealism.
This is probably tied to the DB for business offering and probably a play to become the official shared files app for USG and expansion into Asia.<p>Also<p><i>Dropbox announce two more executive changes today. The company has a new CFO, Sujay Jaswa, who is being into the role internally. Also, hailing from Google is Dropbox’s new COO: Dennis Woodside. In the post announcing those changes, it reaffirmed the above, indicating that Rice will help the company with its international operations.</i><p>Also check out Rice's consulting firm which has been providing consultation to DB for a while now. <a href="http://www.ricehadleygates.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ricehadleygates.com/</a><p>The "work" page is illuminating.<p>- either way, this is potentially explosively bad for DB.<p><i>edit</i> I'll also refer back to a recent comment of mine about how DP can scan your files<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498457" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7498457</a><p>Now extend that to China providing lists of hashes of banned files, like Falun Gong texts or whatever.<p>If you rely on DP <i>a lot</i>, it's like allowing government(s) to sniff around your personal hard drive.
My first instinct on seeing the title was "What does someone like this (or Al Gore, or any other politician) have to offer a tech startup?"<p>Then the article makes it more clear: <i>"What’s interesting about bringing Rice onto Dropbox’s board is how normal it feels. Dropbox needs people with international experience to help it at once deal with foreign governments that have blocked its use — China, for example — and as it works to spread a product developed in one country to others that are culturally different."</i><p>Her connections at Stanford may help, though perhaps they're not as hard to find.
I find this board appointment alarming for what it signals.<p>We know that the NSA et al. are always seeking access to new sources of electronic data. It is beyond doubt that they have considered how to get access to Dropbox user data, and almost certainly beyond doubt that they have approached Dropbox about it.<p>To me, this appointment signals that Dropbox wants to reach a <i>negotiated settlement</i> with the NSA over their access to Dropbox user data. They hire someone who knows all the key players and issues, to negotiate on their behalf. Presumably Ms. Rice will be instructed something like:<p>"We're getting a lot of pressure from the NSA. If the public knows we are giving away their data, there will be a shitstorm, it'll cost us a lot of business. So, you have to make sure NSA access to our data is somewhat limited, there's some kind of plausible legal authority, a court order or something, make sure they pay us for our efforts in copying the data over to the NSA, that sort of thing. Set it up so we can put all the blame on the NSA if anything leaks, and claim we were mandated to comply by law. Okay?"<p>And then Ms. Rice will be dispatched to undertake that negotiation.<p>So, if the NSA doesn't yet have a pipeline from Dropbox to that datacenter in Utah, they will soon.
I don't understand - is that because Dropbox wants to make it more clear to the world that there is a free flow of information from Dropbox to the US government?
"sudo apt-get remove dropbox", never to return. it seems obvious that most US tech companies have not at all realized that they are a global business, and the implications of the Snowden summer.
Ok, if I cancel my Dropbox subscriptions, I'd like to maintain some level of consistency.<p>Assuming that I have a great disdain for the architects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which other tech companies should I consider boycotting?<p>To avoid a combinatorial explosion, I'd limit myself to executives or boards pulled from state, military, and intelligence roles in the last three administrations. Oh, and McNamara. Fuck that guy.
As a non US person I don't get why she would be beneficial for (as not_paul_graham states) "navigating foreign business opportunities." My first thoughts, as a person living in the EU are exactly opposite.
So I've been wanting to migrate away from Dropbox and onto a self-hosted solution for a while anyway, and I guess this would be a good opportunity to do so.<p>Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any good open-source solutions at the moment. I'm not looking for a fancy web interface or anything, just a simple sync between devices, with a usable API for building apps.<p>In particular, rsync etc. doesn't really offer this interface, and I'm really not convinced by the usability of e.g. OwnCloud. Any solutions I might be missing? Or is this something I have to build myself?
I ve just removed Dropbox from my life. Here are two alternates.<p><a href="https://www.copy.com/home/" rel="nofollow">https://www.copy.com/home/</a><p><a href="https://hubic.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hubic.com/</a>
We assumed the best pre-PRISM and we got PRISM'd. Dropbox, I'm out.<p>I love Dropbox, it's my favourite service that I use regularly. However, I cannot trust Dropbox with the privacy of my data now.
I cancelled both my accounts over this. It'll be a personal pain, as everything on my ipad hooks in nicely to dropbox, but it's worth it in order to not support one of the Bush era war criminals.
That's unfortunate and I, too, will be closing my account with Dropbox. Moving to SpiderOak.<p>I realize, though, that neither me nor thousand others will change the Dropbox policy. They most likely anticipated the public outcry over Rice and considered it not a threat.<p>They play in the big league now, increasingly catering to the enterprise world. And those guys are not particularly worried about privacy issues. They rather cooperate, like the PRISM companies.<p>It's not the first nor last time a nice, user-friendly startup turned "evil" over a certain threshold of growth. If you happen to find a large influential company that stayed true to its original promise to their users - cherish it with all your heart. They are a very rare kind.
OwnCloud, while not perfect, is really easy to set up. I had it running on a Droplet from Digital Ocean in about 20 minutes, and a Raspberry Pi in about 40 (note - it's a bit resource heavy for a Pi)
I only had 4 small encrypted files on my Dropbox account, so the decision to close my account was a no brainer.<p>I'm not even angry at them for selecting a war criminal as a board member but she supports the NSA and warrantless wiretappings. This is such a stupid decision for so many reasons. But I'm not surprised, because we deserve companies like Dropbox who doesn't care about their users private data, because we've been prioritizing convenience over security for years. Well, not anymore. Good riddance.<p>My problem with this is that even though Condi Rice is a war criminal, no one will say so in the media (some will, those that public don't really listen/read). But it was easy to bash Eich (and rightfully so) because marriage equality sells. Don't expect Dropbox to back off from their decision because only a small group of people will boycott them.
Guys you don't get it.<p>Dropbox is going to improve the internet by finding all of the Documents of Mass Destruction.<p><i>Shutting down dropbox</i>
Well goddammit. And here I was, about to completely switch from OneDrive+Google Drive to Dropbox.<p>Now I have to pull everything out of Dropbox and put it... somewhere. Google Drive, maybe. Sigh.<p>I hate leaving negative comments like this, but I really can see no positive light to this development.
Shout out to BitTorrent Sync as a great alternative to Dropbox for some. Open and distributed so its already 2x better than dropbox.<p><a href="http://www.bittorrent.com/sync" rel="nofollow">http://www.bittorrent.com/sync</a>
Because this article contains very little information, the Rice/Dropbox story was posted to HN yesterday, and the current thread has gone both far off topic (relitigating the Bush years) and uncivil, we're going to demote this post.<p>I'm going to lighten the penalty on the other major Rice/Dropbox post, though, because although political causes are usually off-topic for HN, that story is at least new and the thread hasn't degenerated as badly.<p>Please note that when we say something is off topic for Hacker News, we do not mean that the topic is unimportant.
> Rice is a famous figure, known in almost equal parts for her ferocious intelligence, and controversial role in the Bush administration, which included comments on alleged weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was thought at the time to possess.<p>TC needs to correct that last sentence: "weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was KNOWN NOT TO possess" would be more correct in light of what actually occurred behind the scenes.
Partisanship aside,<p>I am super bullish about Dropbox, and have been since they were getdropbox.com. I think they have wonderful leadership and I've never had a single problem with their service. I've used both the paid version and the free model. I think they have <i>amazing secret stuff</i> planned for the next couple of years.<p>Even with all that said, I'm <i>very</i> confused. Does she have a personal connection with some of the founding team or something? I can't remember Rice ever expressing much care for tech while in the White House (unlike Al Gore's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway</a>) and even then Al Gore joined Apple, not Box.com or Google Drive. Even if she had gone with Google, Microsoft, Oracle, or IBM, it would have made more sense to me.
I'm more outraged by Condi's appointment than Brendan Eich's appointment to Mozilla.<p>Condi preached death and torture, Eich supported bigotry.<p>I'm sure however that nobody really give a f and the status quo will be maintained.
As it happens I was just looking at DB alternatives that would be more secure. The news that they have hired Condi the war criminal Rice to join their board is the clincher. Bye bye DB.
"Tech-company boards should have more women and [underrepresented] people of color!" —The Mob, yesterday<p>"But not someone whose politics we don't like!" —The Mob, today
"On a similar Note: Rumsfeld joined the Board of Twitter" -- NO he did not. And I really hope he does not.
Onion-News-Network please take over ;)
Rice's views on internet privacy, in light of her support of bulk data collection, are legitimate concerns for her appointment to the board of a company like DropBox.<p>The war criminal stuff, though, is just pointless. We're all war criminals for supporting this or that candidate. It's just more shades of Eich, grist for purists, but irrelevant to a decision to continue using or boycotting DropBox.
People still use Dropbox, after they pre-emptively screwed Boxopus?<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20130116123236/http://blog.boxopus.com/2012/06/25/dropbox-disconnects-us/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20130116123236/http://blog.boxopu...</a>
There is also the argument to be made that Condi is unlikely to add much value to a tech company like Dropbox in reality, which means Dropbox is autopunishing itself here.<p>And if the opposite is true, and she will add alot of value, then who can blame Dropbox for making this call?
How is Condoleeza Rice joining Dropbox, make Dropbox vulnerable in the hands of big brother than it already is? I do think it is a bit of an over reaction to move out of Dropbox solely because of this reason. In these days of Prism, we should assume that most of our private stuff is available for surveillance, unless we are ready to pay for a trusted fully encrypted (without de-deplication) sharing service.
What's fascinating about the comments is that, had Condoleezza Rice been appointed Commissioner of the NFL, would people have said "I'm giving up the NFL forever"?<p>Obviously this question should only apply to NFL fans who also make this claim about dropping DropBox as a service.
What the fuck is this left-wing McCarthyism!<p>Fuck this shit. I hope Hacker News doesn't fall for this garbage ass new trend. The Mozilla affair was bad enough. This bullshit is going too far.<p>I'm a libertarian leaning Democrat BTW, if you need to peg me in a hole.
She is an intellegent person, so could somebody explain too me why so many deem this a bad move without mentioning the War,WMDs,NSA or some political bias?<p>I'm all ears.
I'd just like to know what the hell they were thinking when they gave her the job since I don't believe that many US citizens have fond memories of her.<p>Couldn't she just get herself a job in the Oil/Gas industry or at some company that creates weapons of mass destruction like everyone else does after they leave a government position.
Very sad. I just deleted everything from my Dropbox and my account, sent them an email saying "I do not do business with war criminals."<p>Good luck Dropbox, I hope you un-fuckup somehow.
and Al Gore is on the board of many businesses... what's the big deal with it? because she's republican?<p>EDIT: why am i downvoted? because i'm pointing out ex politics on both sides seat on boards or because i talked about being republican,which is not popular here?