Dropbox passwords optional for four hours

I use any online service with the assumption that the things I put up there could likely become public, no longer anonymous, or what have you. I don't think this is overly paranoid, given how difficult computer security is.<p>To me; it would make sense if Dropbox stored everything encrypted (as in, encrypted pre-transfer), and you needed the private key to decrypt stuff, unless you specifically state that it is to be public. It just makes sense from a liability statement. That said, you can do this anyway as recomended in this article. (<a href="http://lifehacker.com/5813873/how-to-add-a-second-layer-of-encryption-to-dropbox" rel="nofollow">http://lifehacker.com/5813873/how-to-add-a-second-layer-of-e...</a>)

Anyone who had any confidential data in Dropbox (medical research data, credit card transaction data) must now file a data breach report.

This joke PAM "happy hour" module became reality: <a href="http://www.brendangregg.com/specials.html#pam_happy_hour" rel="nofollow">http://www.brendangregg.com/specials.html#pam_happy_hour</a>

I hope they add login activity to their "Recent Events" feed ASAP.

Anyone using SpiderOak? They're the only other versioning diff-based backup service I know of that supports Linux (with a free tier; there's also Tarsnap). They also claim 'zero-knowledge' encryption. Anyone have any opinions?

Hoping this convinced someone at dropbox to write a three-line release-blocking test to ensure that you can't login with a wrong password... <i>Crosses fingers</i>

They're probably rather distracted over at Dropbox, since iCloud is about to eat their business model. That would kinda tend to suck.

It's media like this that great minds are trying to fight, you just want to make stories, create a buzz, even if it's by communicating misleading information that, when interpreted by people would not show the truth of what happens but just make them go nuts.<p>illustrated example: billgates twitter account: " Do you want me to give you all my money or what lolz" techcrunch : "OH MY GOD, BILLGATES PLANING TO GIVE A WAY ALL OF HIS MONEY" and later : "OH MY GOD, HERE'S THE GUY BILLGATES WAS TALKING ABOUT" I mean seriously, I just hate buzz seeking journalists.

Dropbox's security is twitter's downtime. While much more is at stake than not being able to tweet, I can't imagine that this isn't their number one growth challenge -- something that, if they conquer it, will give them a much higher market valuation.<p>If this happens, let's look forward to a trove of blogposts about "how to make dropbox secure" from armchair CTOs, just like we saw with Twitter and the string of posts around "How I'd scale twitter" Sharding! Webscale!