[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Dropbox now requires access to contacts for...
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Tell HN: Dropbox now requires access to contacts for Google login
I remember I was using Google login to login to my Dropbox and in
the last year or so Dropbox started asking me to access my contacts
in Google. I would always deny access and still manage to
successfully login. Yesterday I tried the same but with no luck. I
contacted Dropbox support and this is their reply: > I'm afraid
that is not possible at the time. I apologize for any inconvenience
this may cause. Interesting that they chose this route when users
are getting more and more privacy-aware.
Author : poxobloc
Score : 559 points
Date : 2021-01-15 11:27 UTC (11 hours ago)
| 5988 wrote:
| is anyone here?
| jijji wrote:
| is Samba really that hard to setup?
| p_l wrote:
| A lot of dropbox use cases are impossible for Samba (among
| other things, shared dropbox folders became popular alternative
| to badly setup FTP servers in DTP-adjacent media companies).
| protomyth wrote:
| No, but Samba is not a replacement for DropBox.
| poxobloc wrote:
| OP here. Just to clarify some confusion. I can still login using
| my username and password. I just liked the simplicity of logging
| in via Google, since I was already logged in there.
|
| Seems like I'm no longer able to do that and, from what I read
| here, some users might be completely locked out unless they give
| access to Google contacts.
| lsaferite wrote:
| I stopped using Google login a while back after having a hard
| time moving an account to a different google account. I
| realized that the benefits do not outweigh the problems AND
| that I really didn't want Google being the gatekeeper to all
| these other accounts. It's also what has started me on the path
| of moving off of all Google products. I still like Google, but
| the honeymoon is certainly over.
| companyhen wrote:
| Check out https://ardrive.io new competitor in the storage space
| with an interesting model.
| rightisleft wrote:
| I saw this a week ago and refused it as well...
| madsbuch wrote:
| I recently moved away from Dropbox due to its increasing
| hostility. I am currently evaluating pCloud, though I am not sure
| they are the one I want to go with: They have some severe
| problems with consistency across syncs and they allow themselves
| to push advertisement through their desktop apps ie. they are
| highly intrusive. I guess I will give them the year I paid for
| and then move on.
| ffpip wrote:
| pCloud has terrible security. They don't even use https in all
| places.
|
| They also don't state what encryption they use. They rolled
| their own ig.
| nothis wrote:
| I tried about half a dozen cloud backup solutions and Dropbox,
| so far, is the only one who can deliver the only thing that
| matters to me: Consistency. Dropbox actually works and it works
| well. It can handle suddenly having thousands of tiny text
| files, it can handle a 5GB PDF, it handles foreign letters in
| file names and it has a sane way of determining which file
| version is the current one when switching between platforms.
|
| It gives me cold sweat to read headlines like this since there
| aren't enough alternatives to Dropbox that "just work". Similar
| to what happens to Apple. I have no idea why Dropbox is fucking
| around with their shit so much. I'd happily pay a dollar more
| here and there (and they _just_ increased pricing!), just don
| 't do bullshit in the background.
| DaWe wrote:
| Hi, I'm working on a Dropbox alternative where only you own your
| data. It's still in beta, but files are already stored on the
| decentralized Sia Skynet network and only you have access because
| all files are encrypted with your key!
| https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| How does one register?
| Erlich_Bachman wrote:
| Syncthing might be a good option for those that wish to migrate.
| It is a stable open-source solution for syncing a directory in
| many-to-many clients situation. The syncthing itself provides no
| servers. But if you wish to have a central server it could be as
| easy as just installing synchting on your main machine or a cheap
| VPS. The UI is good enough and it is stable.
| akvadrako wrote:
| I use a Syncthing a little, but the battery usage, especially
| on Android, is a big problem.
|
| It might work fine for small amounts of files, but it doesn't
| scale as well as Dropbox does.
| StavrosK wrote:
| I use both Syncthing and Nextcloud (each for different things).
| Nextcloud is more akin to Dropbox, and works very well.
| Syncthing is peer-to-peer, so you don't get a web UI you can
| browse on your phone and selectively download data (it's "all
| or nothing" per directory), but I haven't had a single problem
| with it in years. It just works.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| this. i was an old bittorrent sync user when it came up,
| continued to use it till they made it difficult. probably from
| day 1. then found out about syncthing and couldnt ask for more.
| it does take "understanding" to get everything hooked up but
| once done it just works without any issues
| tmslnz wrote:
| Syncthing has been working very reliably for our agency, with
| multiple users reading/writing to shared projects, with a NAS
| elected as "master" (though ST doesn't care who's who). Frankly
| impressive for an OSS project.
|
| However setting up and managing Syncthing is far from self-
| explanatory for a non-technical audience. It's OK in our case
| as we can hand-hold and onboard people in-house, but not ideal.
| Syncthing's usability would benefit immensely from an updated
| front-end UX, consistent across platforms.
|
| Dropbox for all its recent dark patterns and upsells is still
| one of the most intuitive systems. Yes, the client UX has
| worsened, but the core service retains a very predictable
| behaviour. A folder is a folder. Shared with X and Y. When un-
| sharing or deleting a folder or file the options are clearly
| communicated. Compare this with Google Drive, where a "file"
| can become orphaned and keep existing in limbo, where it's
| invisible in the browser or filesystem, but it's discoverable
| by search. It drove us nuts multiple times making it very hard
| to track access to old documents without having to update
| settings one-by-one, etc. Google Drive feels like an
| afterthought to accompany the otherwise great Docs, Slides. and
| Sheets.
| StavrosK wrote:
| That's because Syncthing is a different beast. If you want
| something closer to Dropbox, use Nextcloud, which does
| basically everything Dropbox does (and more) and has the
| simple sharing UI you're talking about.
| Daneel_ wrote:
| I've looked at Nextcloud, however it seems to be missing a
| key feature for me - the ability to store files server-side
| only. I want a google drive / Dropbox hybrid solution,
| where I can keep some directories synced and others
| permanently on the server.
|
| Does anyone know a solution that allows me to self-host
| something like this?
| StavrosK wrote:
| Nextcloud works exactly the way you want, so you may be
| thinking of something different. Maybe Syncthing?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Syncthing allows you to sync some folders and not others.
| danpalmer wrote:
| As a product focused company trying to create a great UX, it's
| really quite easy to justify something like this for creating a
| better UX. I can imagine a PM looking at the collaboration flow,
| UX researcher finding friction in initiating collaboration,
| testing mockups where Dropbox "magically" knows your colleagues,
| and it getting great reception from users. Most users still don't
| care about privacy, most users assume email addresses are
| essentially fully public.
|
| This part is a better UX for the majority of users.
|
| The problem comes when there's a data leak, or when the marketing
| team decide to email those contacts, or some time later that
| could really easily be argued as "this will never happen", and
| may often not, but it's possible.
|
| It's details like this that differentiate the "good" product
| companies from the "great" product companies, specifically
| because the detail of "not collecting email addresses" would
| never be noticed by those users, by construction.
| confiq wrote:
| why people would use oauth for services like this? I always use
| anonymous email
| ffpip wrote:
| More convenient. No passwords, and better security. Everything
| is centralized (disadvantage too)
|
| Also,
|
| "why people would use anonymous email for services like this? I
| always use oauth"
| confiq wrote:
| as for password, I use password manager.
|
| Problem with oauth that I can't make e-mail unique and I
| can't know where spam is coming from.
|
| ex: user+dropbox@mydomain.com will be unique for that domain.
| chaz6 wrote:
| I miss when OpenID was a thing and I could run my own iDP, but
| that didn't catch on because everyone wanted to be the iDP and
| not an RP. These days it's a cabal of a few big companies.
| redwood wrote:
| From my perspective, Dropbox was doomed to decline ever since
| they made a big splash about how proud they were of moving off of
| public cloud in to self manage data centers.
|
| While they no doubt reduced their operating costs with that move,
| I couldn't help it feel that this meant that they were investing
| so many of their precious mental cycles, hiring cycles,
| maintenance cycles, into plumbing instead of user-centered
| innovation which was their original sweet spot.
|
| What was celebrated at the time as a great example of how cloud
| is a big mistake for people to me is in fact the opposite and
| should be used in future as a good business case study.
|
| Folks never think about the opportunity cost; they get blinded by
| $$$ figures which are so misleading
| delfinom wrote:
| There's no reason why an org can't multitask their future
| plans. They more or less were forced to cut their own costs
| because their competitors owned the infrastructure they run on,
| they could never run cheaper than their competitors. Any good
| business leaves business roadmaps to different executives.
| Infrastructure doesn't need to be the primary concern of sales
| and product managers who should be plotting the growth of the
| company externally while a CTO is left to handle the "internal
| growth" of the company to match.
|
| Their true problem regardless is staying relevant in a market
| where the competitors offer better value through bundling as
| entire IT and cloud platforms. There's no point for businesses
| to use Dropbox when Microsoft provides Onedrive for Windows
| businesses and Google provides gdrive with gsuite. Hell for
| consumers, Apple and Microsoft provide seamlessly integrated
| storage in their operating systems.
|
| Dropbox can spend years developing their own office suite tools
| but they'll never be able to breach the brainshare and
| stability that the titans provide. There's only so many ways
| you can "innovate" file handling before you are flogging a dead
| horse or repainting a car tire for the 50th time. Dropbox's
| only chance was to breach heavily into cloud office suites
| _before_ google and microsoft jumped in full speed, which they
| didn't and the ship has sailed.
|
| Does it mean they can't stay alive? Well, they are floundering
| and playing catch up is difficult. Even Box is eating their
| business lunch and carving a niche because they offer a true
| professional business interface for IT admins to configure
| everything, down to legal compliance requirements. Dropbox is a
| fucking toy in comparison too focused on minimal hipster UIs
| based on a design language they originally used for consumers
| and have tried to force it onto business for more years than
| they should have.
| paride5745 wrote:
| I've got a Synology NAS and I keep OneDrive for documents I might
| need in case of emergency.
|
| Dropbox has no reason to exists for me. Firstly, they want to
| force me which filesystem to use on my Linux box, secondly, I
| already have plenty of GBs on Google Drive and MS OneDrive, so
| why would I need another service is beyond me. I mean, it's not
| like Dropbox is a safe encrypted alternative to GDrive or
| OneDrive anyway...
| mtzet wrote:
| They do provide provide first-party Linux support, which Google
| and Microsoft lack.
|
| What other reason should I have for trusting Microsoft or
| Google over Dropbox? (Serious question, I've been considering
| my cloud sync provider recently).
| teraku wrote:
| There are working open source clients for OneDrive. You can
| just encrypt the data you pump into OneDrive (or any cloud
| provider you don't trust) and just use it for quick online
| access and then sync everything into your local NAS/server.
| paride5745 wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| I have my data on my NAS and I keep on Onedrive and GDrive
| only what I might need while around.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| DropBox seems to have decided that the only way for them to grow
| is to turn their data sync platform into a collaborative
| platform. Makes a whole lot of sense to steal contacts from all
| your users.
|
| FYI - never use oauth to log into anything you care about.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > FYI - never use oauth to log into anything you care about.
|
| Or, "Then create a password and revoke oauth permissions from
| the provider"
| mkr-hn wrote:
| These days all browsers offer to generate and save a syncable
| password for you and fill in the email, so it's almost as
| easy to make a normal account as it is to use OAuth. It feels
| like OAuth/SSO is a tool for a different, less user-friendly
| era.
| tallanvor wrote:
| > FYI - never use oauth to log into anything you care about.
|
| I definitely agree with this. While it's true that Google,
| Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple are probably better at securing
| accounts than most other companies, there's always the
| possibility that they can be compromised.
|
| Another problem is that if your oauth provider decides to close
| your account for whatever reason, it may be difficult or
| impossible to unlink everything from it.
|
| Not only do I create real accounts for any service I want to
| use, I divide them up among multiple separate email accounts,
| so that if one account is compromised, I limit the associated
| services that are vulnerable as a result.
| malka wrote:
| My Spotify is broken since I deleted my Facebook. I can't
| even change the email in my profile.
| tored wrote:
| Contact Spotify support. Had a similar problem where I had
| a leftover Facebook-Spotify account after delinking that
| blocked my normal account from changing my email. Spotify
| support was quick to help me.
| pornel wrote:
| Sadly, you can't have a product that does one thing and does it
| well when you have to show never-ending growth to investors :(
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Even more sadly that same thing seems to be true of FOSS
| applications because people think an application you aren't
| constantly updating and adding features to is "abandoned".
|
| Software isn't allowed to just be _done_ anymore.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > FYI - never use oauth to log into anything you care about.
|
| Interesting remark. I'm not objecting but it's interesting that
| this goes against what can one read here very often from people
| who comment on new products, which goes like this: "if you
| offered oauth sign up, I'd sign up but won't bother with
| creating an account". Just an observation.
| malka wrote:
| I'm the opposite. 'only Google and Facebook Auth ? Can't
| create account ? Bye.'
| Tepix wrote:
| It vastly increases the tracking that FB and Google can do.
| Bad idea. Also, knowing Google, perhaps they one day decide
| to discount the oauth login feature?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| do you mean OpenID? I guess oauth is OK for signups if the
| tokens were expiring. But usually you naively give the
| credentials to a new startup, only to find out they abuse
| them months later.
| dudul wrote:
| Can you elaborate on that? How can they abuse it? Your
| oauth provider will show you which permissions the app is
| requesting when you grant them access. What kind of abuse
| have you seen?
| beastman82 wrote:
| Not following. What's wrong with oauth?
| merlinscholz wrote:
| When Google's AI (=RNG) decides to terminate your account
| (maybe you typed a few too many comments on YouTube, this has
| happened to people), you'll lose every service for which you
| used Google to sign in with.
|
| Also, the usual tracking stuff.
| arendtio wrote:
| In addition, you are limited to the few providers which are
| being supported by the platform. So you can't simply create
| your own authentication provider as it was possible with
| OpenID.
| switch007 wrote:
| Don't websites usually create an association between a
| local user (in their DB) and an oauth2 account, linked by
| the email address? And then all your data is linked to the
| local DB user. I guess it's a bigger threat if you don't
| use your own domain for email.
|
| EDIT: I'm talking about sites that also have their own
| local user db of course, so you could just do a password
| reset.
| Latty wrote:
| Is there an oauth provider that offers what mobiles have
| started to do with permissions, where "deny" just gives empty
| data to to the requesting application instead of actually
| rejecting the claim?
|
| It'd be nice to see Google offer something like that.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Facebook does this with theirs for access to a user's Pages.
| Just an empty array, which isn't unusual for normal users.
|
| Makes it tough for third-party devs to debug a legit "I am
| not seeing Page X as an option" though.
| arendtio wrote:
| I am not so sure if oauth is to blame alone. I mean, it is a
| technology that lets you control what you want to share.
| However, engaging in business with a partner who decides to
| change the rules, is something I see a lot more critical.
|
| So maybe the lesson should sound more like
|
| - 'Don't use Dropbox for anything you care about' or
|
| - 'Don't do business with large corporations for anything you
| care about'
|
| To clarify, I am not saying it to protect oauth (in its current
| state I am not a particular fan of it), but to show, that the
| technology doesn't change by itself and that someone decided to
| change it. So the company who decided to execute this unethical
| change should take its share of the blame too.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Isnt the point here that you don't have control? Seems like
| you need to allow contact access to use google login at all.
|
| There is no fine grained control to permissions.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's not oauth, that's just the granularity the auth
| provider has decided to expose in its permissions system,
| and the granularity Dropbox have opted to request.
| jeromegv wrote:
| That's oauth in the sense that if you login with your own
| login/pass, this will never be something they can force
| on you. I never use oauth, always login/pass, and don't
| have to care about what permissions they ask me, it's
| easy, they have absolutely zero access to my
| gmail/facebook/twitter whatever.
| hatmatrix wrote:
| Do you need Google login though? I think for every platform I
| have created a separate account (and don't link them together).
| ytch wrote:
| Me too. I buy a domain and setup a forward-all email server.
|
| For example, github@mydomain.dev for github. With a password
| manager, I won't confused at login.
|
| And most importantly, use fb@mydomain.dev at Facebook since I
| will see AD on Facebook about what I just browsed on another
| shopping site with the same email account.
| YuccaGloriosa wrote:
| "Facebook container" can be useful here
| ytch wrote:
| Facebook AD can target user by email /phone number:
|
| https://www.facebook.com/business/help/170456843145568?id=2
| 4...
|
| Container is not work in this case. But I use it too, it is
| useful on prevent me being tracked on random website.
| Timpy wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this, I've been trying to move away from
| Google Drive and I was about to go all in on Dropbox. The recent
| layoffs made me question Dropbox a little but this is the final
| nail in the coffin. I'm looking for something Linux friendly if
| anybody has a solution they're loving right now. Backblaze B2
| maybe?
| Lio wrote:
| I find this sort of thing goes hand in hand with the "Maybe
| Later" culture.
|
| You want to say "No." but you can't, they've taken that option
| away from you.
|
| Instead you're forced to give them permission to bug you again
| later.
| grishka wrote:
| I really wish mobile OSes would allow you to grant apps
| permissions but serve fake data, (that's important!) without
| giving the app the ability to tell the difference. Just so it
| appears to the app that you've given the permission, when you in
| fact have not. This would solve this entire class of problems and
| then some. So, for example:
|
| - App "has" access to contacts, but the system returns that you
| have none.
|
| - App "has" access to location, but the search for GPS satellites
| never completes.
|
| - App "has" access to storage, but it's actually /dev/null.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Although it'll never happen a cool idea would be to serve trap
| addresses and phone numbers so the developer can receive an
| instant ban if spam ends up on these addresses
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This would, of course, be immediately abused to ban
| competitors' apps.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| You would serve a different trap address to each app,
| nobody but Dropbox would have the Dropbox trap.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Nobody but Dropbox _and anyone with the Dropbox app on
| their phone_. It has to get from the user 's phone to
| Dropbox, which means it's on the user's phone at some
| point, barring some sort of convoluted user --> Apple -->
| Dropbox transfer scheme.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Right, the Dropbox app on their phone is asking the OS
| for contact info, which the phone generates and provides
| to the Dropbox app and only the Dropbox app. Any other
| app would get a different fake address.
|
| Or are you talking about the scenario where competitor
| apps use some kind of sandbox escape to jump out and
| steal other apps' trap addresses from the OS?
| rendall wrote:
| Each user has their own trap email for each application.
| The ban would happen for that user only
| dhimes wrote:
| This is an awesome idea.
| jve wrote:
| Well, from user perspective would be useful, but I don't have
| much expectations it would be implemented in, say, Android.
| They ofcourse want quality data.
|
| Haven't done in-depth Android development, but I believe there
| is option to fake some GPS data? Ofcourse, not that helpful if
| you want 1 app to have real data, the other... not so real.
|
| Proper way would be force devs think about REQUIRED and
| OPTIONAL permissions you can give. REQUIRED permissions are
| given on launch (or maybe you just get useless app), OPTIONAL
| permissions for improved features and fails gracefully if not
| given. It currently works that way, but is up to developer to
| implement it that way.
|
| Perhaps adding advantage to those apps that do not REQUIRE
| sensitive permissions. Say a filter in Play Store you can use
| to filter our apps that require X permissions to work. In some
| cases, devs would be incentivized to REQUIRE less permissions.
|
| When writing this comment, I thought about another solution.
| User profiles on android. Like on browser, where you get your
| own cookies etc. Googled around and.. looks like Android has
| something to offer!? Doesn't solve location, but perhaps
| Storage/Contacts.
|
| https://source.android.com/devices/tech/admin/multi-user
|
| https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2865483?hl=en
|
| > Notifications appear for all accounts of a single user at
| once.
|
| > Notifications for other users do not appear until active.
| Each user gets a workspace to install and place apps.
|
| > No user has access to the app data of another user.
|
| > Any user can affect the installed apps for all users.
|
| > The primary user can remove apps or even the entire workspace
| established by secondary users.
| grishka wrote:
| I'm primarily an Android developer myself and I do respect my
| users <s>and that's why I have no job</s>, so yes, I request
| permissions only when they're absolutely necessary and when
| it's obvious as to why the permission is needed.
|
| The bigger problem, though, is that you can't trust bad
| actors to act good. DNT in browsers has showed that extremely
| clearly: it was meant as a marker for you to not be tracked,
| yet advertisers used it as an additional bit for
| fingerprinting. Policy might be a way, but it relies on
| humans looking at apps. It's always much more effective to
| have technical measures in place, if possible. As in, no
| mater how much you'd like, you can't track a user across the
| web if their browser doesn't accept third-party cookies. And
| many app developers are in no way better than web developers
| with their incentives, intentions and tactics, it's just that
| the web makes these issues more noticeable.
| rurp wrote:
| I love this idea! Unfortunately the creator of the most popular
| mobile OS is also one of the worst offenders in this regard.
|
| Given how things are going with big tech lately I wouldn't be
| shocked to see Google implement this feature, but with
| exception criteria that just so happens to apply to all Google
| apps.
| ballenf wrote:
| An "easy" implementation would be to allow the user specify
| which contacts db is shared. User could then have multiple
| contact lists -- a fake one, a work one, a personal, etc.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I used to have a rooted android phone that could do this. If I
| remember correctly it was called Xposed Framework. I could even
| fake GPS data which was extremely useful in all kinds of apps.
| I also remember power usage increasing significantly after I
| installed this.
| photonios wrote:
| "Sign in with Apple" kind of has something like this. It can
| give the application a randomly generated email address that
| acts as a forwarding address. The application never receives my
| real email address.
| tomsmeding wrote:
| While for contacts and location that would be a good feature (I
| agree!), I'm not so sure about storage. It may be nice for
| certain rogue apps (or ones that request permissions they don't
| actually need) to give them /dev/null without them knowing, but
| that may actually result in bugs and unstable behaviour if apps
| are written to expect working storage.
|
| Storage doesn't have a built-in failure mode like contacts and
| location have.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Storage doesn't have a built-in failure mode like contacts
| and location have.
|
| Yes it does: disk full. It's perhaps a bit less reasonable to
| expect a program to keep working _properly_ in such a case,
| but it needs to be handled _somehow_.
| grishka wrote:
| Okay, you're probably right. It might be a better option to
| give an app a sandboxed storage location instead, just so the
| files it put there remain there because it might expect to
| find them there later.
| dmd wrote:
| ... isn't that exactly what access to storage does? Do any
| (mobile) platforms give access to NON sandboxed storage?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| No, sandboxed means restricted to that application. Apps
| need permissions to access data outside of their sandbox.
| They are suggesting that there be _another_ sandboxed
| storage for apps that pretends to be read data.
| Hizonner wrote:
| All apps get sandboxed storage without even asking. On
| Android at least, permission for "storage" means
| permission for an area shared between all apps. And a lot
| of apps dump stuff into it that you do not necessarily
| want every other app to have access to.
|
| It's always been that way.
|
| What it really needs is some kind of compartments, so
| that you can share storage between X and Y, and between Z
| and W, but not between X and W.
| ascar wrote:
| I just installed Signal two days ago and enabled backups.
|
| This asked, understandably, for storage permission. This
| prompted me to give access to the sdcard, however, I had
| the option to select a single folder (or actually
| directly creating it within the prompt) that the app will
| have access to. I.e. Signal now has access to
| sdcard/signalbackups/ but not to the whole sdcard.
| (unless this whole new permission process wasn't Android
| but the Signal app. I rarely download apps and have to
| give storage permissions).
|
| This used to be different, but times of giving access to
| full internal or external sdcards are over. Unfortunately
| though, the UX isn't perfect. I felt like I needed to
| know that I only want to give it access to a part of the
| sdcard and actively look that this is indeed possible.
| But that might be my bias from previous usage talking.
| [deleted]
| mot2ba wrote:
| You could check MIUI or Realme which already has that feature.
| VoxPelli wrote:
| iOS almost allows this for geo-location nowadays, where one can
| pick whether to give ones exact position or a much less exact
| position, and for photos where one can select exactly what
| photos the app should get access to.
| higerordermap wrote:
| Does android have this API? The problem I see is, if they are
| introduced in later versions, people are anyway used to apps
| asking these permissions and developers don't bother to use
| these.
|
| Also, a question to security experts: In many apps say we
| want a UX where the user would immediately be able to see
| their recent pics and select from them (think recent photos
| bar in whatsapp), but app shouldn't be able to access them.
| Is it safe if OS provides it as a screen overlay service
| which doesn't require a separate screen/window, but runs out
| of process (a la file picker).
| grishka wrote:
| Android has a better API, and has had it for at least 5
| years. An app can open the system UI for you to choose a
| file, and it would then only get access to that particular
| file while the activity (screen) that requested it is
| running. As far as the user is concerned, this requires no
| permissions. Under the hood, the app gets a content:// URI
| with an "URI permission" granted. This is also how sharing
| (Intent.ACTION_SEND) works. You could as well use this
| mechanism to expose the content in your app to other apps
| in a controlled manner.
| jannes wrote:
| Yep. Android also has a Contact Picker that doesn't
| require contacts permissions where you just select a
| single person in a dialog.
|
| I have never seen it used in a real app. Most apps
| request permission to your entire address book.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| iOS does this for photos as of iOS 14:
| https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/24/ios-14-users-give-
| apps-...
| dividuum wrote:
| I wish there was an easier way to add additional photos
| quickly. From what I understand the only way is search
| for the app in settings, open the "Photos" permission and
| click on "Edit Selected Photos". Is there an easier way I
| missed? I guess I can't expect a simple click from within
| the app itself while selecting photos, as it's not aware
| it's seeing a limited selection.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I think it requires developers to fix that. At least in
| Slack there's two buttons next to their in-app image
| picker. One opens the camera to take a photo, the other
| pops up the iOS photo picker overlay where you can select
| more images.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| iOS has started doing this, at least for photos.
| Razengan wrote:
| They'd detect it easily and refuse to work.
|
| But iOS 14 let's you do this for photos at least.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Not _quite_ the same thing, but if you use Sign in with Apple,
| the application gets an Apple email address, and Apple forwards
| the email on to you.
|
| Facebook Login used to have this as an option too, but stopped
| years ago.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| This is true. I know this because my app was rejected from
| the Apple Store and we were told all apps with a social sign
| in component must implement Sign In with Apple.
|
| Implementation process was really easy. Took 1 day. That's
| really surprising for Apple where developing for their
| platforms is otherwise a huge chore you don't want to slog
| through
| HyperMassive wrote:
| LineageOS 16 used to have this feature. I really miss it.
| https://forum.fairphone.com/t/transitioning-from-los16s-priv...
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Sad to have just learned from that link that Privacy Guard is
| gone. That has indeed been a key Cyanogen/LineageOS feature
| for me for years (my phone is still on 16). I can't say I
| understand the decision to remove it.
| grenoire wrote:
| App developers find out about this practice as it gets more
| commonplace. They add a check for 'empty' data or resolution
| failures. If these checks notice that you had been providing
| null or fake data, the app now gives you an intrusive yet
| pleading popup to _please_ lift the privacy measures.
|
| You get annoyed, resenting the fact that your friends are using
| this piece of garbage. Reluctantly you lift the measures,
| forget about it, and just keep using the app.
| Redoubts wrote:
| That would get you banned in the Apple App Store
| userbinator wrote:
| Just like with adblockers and anti-adblockers, you then go
| one level deeper...
|
| It's a cat-and-mouse game. As long as you have full control
| over your device, you win.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| At some point we're going to have to reverse engineer apps
| and come up with hopefully free software replacements...
| [deleted]
| ffpip wrote:
| OPPO's colourOS as this.
|
| > The Personal Information Protection feature is a very clever
| way to bypass this situation. You can turn on protection for
| call logs, contacts, messages, and events. Once protection is
| enabled, ColorOS 11 will send apps empty information, tricking
| the app into accessing the blank data.
|
| https://www.xda-developers.com/oppo-coloros11-privacy/
| Aissen wrote:
| Yes, but it cannot be the sole feature. This should be done for
| compatibility with old apps, but _also_ explicitly forbidden in
| the app stores that any app try to work around that by doing
| any kind of active detection.
| birksherty wrote:
| I use xprivacy lua in android that does exactly this. It's not
| simple for general public though and it needs root.
| Erlich_Bachman wrote:
| Does it still work in recent Android versions though?
| birksherty wrote:
| Depends if your rom supports edxposed properly which is for
| android 9 onwards.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Apple solved this pretty well I thought. The developer
| guidelines say that you cannot require a permission as a
| condition of using an app. If the user says no, you _must_
| gracefully degrade. You can't exit(0) or put up an
| undismissable screen until you get the permission. Apps that
| violate this are supposed to get kicked out of the store.
| Dwolb wrote:
| YouTube TV still gets me though. Requires GPS access and
| won't let me access my hometown sports without it.
| secabeen wrote:
| Probably due to the blackout provisions of the contracts to
| carry hometown sports.
| emaro wrote:
| > Interesting that they chose this route when users are getting
| more and more privacy-aware.
|
| Agreed. But it's also funny, because 'privacy-aware' and 'Google
| login' is a bit of a paradox.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Upon hearing about this, my reflex was to wonder if google is in
| talks to acquire dropbox...but then i thought it through and just
| didn't see why the owner of google drive would want to acquire
| the owner of dropbox.
|
| To the original point, yeah, pretty crappy. My hope is that when
| i go file my taxes, or renew my auto registration, or interact
| with "real" official and important stuff, that i do not get asked
| for my FAANG credentials.
| pmlnr wrote:
| People are still using dropbox in the age of one-click nextclouds
| in aws, freenas, digitalocean, etc? Interesting.
| durnygbur wrote:
| > nextclouds in aws
|
| Now make the owncloud/nextcloud a reliable experience for more
| than one user, handle updates and occassional migrations, etc.
| PUFFhPhEHo wrote:
| For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself
| quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally
| with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted
| filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be
| accessed through built-in software.
| piva00 wrote:
| And we've come full circle from Dropbox's initial announcement
| post [1] to this post, almost 14 years later.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| bovermyer wrote:
| You know, this could easily be taken in a condescending way.
|
| I choose to use <insert name of service provider here> instead
| of rolling my own because I don't want to deal with the hassle.
|
| And before you say "but it's a one-click install! what hassle?"
| I'll answer you: the hassle is not in launching it, the hassle
| is in keeping it online and operating well at all times.
|
| People always forget about maintenance when they spout these
| things...
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Dropbox is dramatically cheaper per GB than the other cloud
| storage services, and it doesn't charge bandwidth fees.
| swiley wrote:
| There's syncthing now, no need for dropbox.
| F00Fbug wrote:
| I'm happy to see so many people advocating Syncthing... Nothing
| like rolling your own!
| tmslnz wrote:
| Many of us here are taking the opportunity to suggest Syncthing.
| I second that. We have been using it for years in our studio,
| moving much more data than it would ever be possible or practical
| with Dropbox and never had a bad surprise. We were also
| pleasantly surprised to see it working flawlessly behind a fairly
| thick NAT/Firewall when working from home. It's very stable,
| resilient and easy to set up for anyone lurking on HN.
|
| However it is not as easy as Dropbox to set up for non-technical
| peeps, which is a bit of a shame as it hinders broader adoption.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Also there's no iOS app.
| quantumofalpha wrote:
| Isn't that against GDPR for european users?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It is but the GDPR isn't being enforced even against bigger and
| more blatant violations so there's no risk there.
|
| (please don't refute this with a link to enforcementtracker.com
| unless you can show me a fine that's even remotely close to
| being dissuasive)
| rkangel wrote:
| I was going to say no (and I've left my logic below for
| posterity), but maybe you have a point. The OP can't continue
| to use Dropbox without giving up some more privacy. They can't
| even get in to get their data out (although GDPR does take care
| of that).
|
| Previous logic: They've asked for permission, been clear about
| what data they and presumably haven't prechecked anything
| (because they don't have control over that UI).
|
| I don't think GDPR has any protection about a vendor locking
| you in and then asking to change the privacy policy.
| pieno wrote:
| Exactly. Consent must be freely given to be valid under GDPR.
| Here is some analysis on what this means by the European Data
| Protection Board:[0]
|
| " 3.1 Free / freely given12 13. The element "free" implies
| real choice and control for data subjects. As a general rule,
| the GDPR prescribes that if the data subject has no real
| choice, feels compelled to consent or will endure negative
| consequences if they do not consent, then consent will not be
| valid.13 If consent is bundled up as a non-negotiable part of
| terms and conditions it is presumed not to have been freely
| given. Accordingly, consent will not be considered to be free
| if the data subject is unable to refuse or withdraw his or
| her consent without detriment.14 The notion of imbalance
| between the controller and the data subject is also taken
| into consideration by the GDPR."
|
| [0] https://edpb.europa.eu/sites/edpb/files/files/file1/edpb_
| gui...
| JorgeGT wrote:
| Follow-up question: are they notifying the scooped contacts
| that they now hold their personal data, as required by Art. 14
| of the GDPR? https://gdpr-info.eu/art-14-gdpr/
| lima wrote:
| Wow, this is awful. I just tried to log into my account and I
| can't unless I give them access to my contacts.
|
| This is completely unacceptable - feels like a ransom.
| paublyrne wrote:
| You should be still able to log in with the same email with
| user/password, without being asked for a new permission.
| lima wrote:
| I don't even have a password, I think.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Does requesting a password reset work? Some websites will
| let you set a password on an OAuth account using that.
| random5634 wrote:
| Damn - I was the one who fought for dropbox vs onedrive which
| comes with our Office 365 subscription at work.
|
| What a terrible sign!
|
| I'll try out onedrive again, and if its good enough will start
| the (slow) migration.
| sneak wrote:
| I'm a little surprised that you don't want Dropbox to have your
| contacts, but store them at Google.
| ukd1 wrote:
| This is one of the many reasons why I prefer not use google to
| store contacts; you can grant the permissions, and not worry
| about it.
| butz wrote:
| What is the best Dropbox alternative for Linux user? I do not
| want Electron based sync app and do not mind paying for secure
| file hosting. I'm using Dropbox as remote backup server, to
| complement local backups, but data size is only about 100GB.
| F00Fbug wrote:
| Dropbox lost me (100% Linux user) when they decided that ext4
| was the only file system they supported.
|
| I've very happily moved over to Syncthing. For a small
| installation you could use a VPS at Digital Ocean or Vultr. You
| could even get a Raspberry Pi and a cheap external hard drive.
| donohoe wrote:
| * _sigh_ *
|
| I would pay a lot of money for a service like the one Dropbox
| _was_ in in its first few years. That is the service that I need
| now, not all this shiny crud.
|
| I've been a Dropbox user for 12+ years.
|
| I imagine it as buying a car 10 years ago because it solved all
| your mobility needs (shopping, occasional longer trips, dropping
| kids/family members to their events etc). You wander into the
| garage 12 years later and you have this monstrosity with five
| wheels, built-in backseat crayons, 20-feet long, flippers, and
| just two functional doors.
|
| I don't need that. I certainly don't want that, and I'm actively
| looking to move away when my annual renewal comes up.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Depending on your platforms of choice, iCloud Drive has been a
| great solution for me. I was an early Dropbox user who got out
| when they started limiting the number of syncing devices for
| free accounts a while back, and the $0.99 a month I pay to
| Apple for 50GB of storage in a folder that appears on all my
| devices works exactly like I want it to - I save stuff there,
| and then forget about it until I need it, and its magically on
| whatever device I'm using.
|
| Sync could be a feature, or sync could be a product. But the
| lesson seems to be that if your product is sync, and you grow
| big and take lots of outside money to do it, sync won't be your
| product for very long. You'll need to expand and try to do
| everything else that could use good sync as a feature.
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large
| automobile...
|
| And you may find yourself paying for 5TB of cloud storage with
| feature bloat...
|
| And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?"
| driverdan wrote:
| The car analogy is a good one. Try finding a decent new car
| that doesn't come with a cell connection and respects your
| privacy.
| nicbou wrote:
| I'm more concerned by how they tie the car to short-lived
| services and technologies. A car shouldn't be obsoleted by
| the software that powers its dashboard.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Am I the only one infinitely annoyed by dropbox hiding the
| download button in a context menu?!
| gus_massa wrote:
| And if you right click on the link to the file, it downloads
| the html page that shows the file, using the name of the file.
|
| So when you open the file locally, you get a corrupt file
| message because you downloaded the wrong thing.
| SavageBeast wrote:
| Dear Dropbox, I'm a paying customer and if you make sharing my
| google contacts a requirement I will cease to be a paying
| customer. I don't care why you did it. I don't care how great it
| is. I don't care how much more whatever it makes my "experience".
| I use Dropbox for cold storage and offsite backup - there are
| other ready options to serve this use case.
| kmfrk wrote:
| iCloud Drive is actually pretty decent now, except it seems to be
| completely random when it wants to sync files on Windows.
|
| Even so, it can still easily cover 50% of use cases for Dropbox.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Companies like Facebook with their demanding WhatsApp users
| provide access to private data, and now Dropbox demanding access
| to private data is highlighting an interesting phenomenon: These
| companies feel entitled to our private data and now are becoming
| hostile when they don't get it.
|
| I sincerely hope that the broader community outside of Hacker
| News pushes back severely on this behavior or else it will only
| get worse.
|
| Edit to add: These companies have such a feeling of entitlement
| to our data that their next move will be to try to convince
| legislatures to force us to give them access to it. Mark my
| words.
| ismaildonmez wrote:
| This has been so since a year or so, still very annoying.
| pengo wrote:
| My immediate thought is "why would anyone use Google or Facebook
| to log into other services?" I understand the desire to
| consolidate login credentials, but surely it's better to use a
| password manager than to give additional personal information to
| proven bad actors like Google and Facebook?
| pgt wrote:
| Hmm. My Dropbox Pro subscription renewal is coming up.
|
| Is there an alternative to Dropbox that isn't iCloud or Google
| Drive? I would like to pay for Tarsnap but I don't understand 250
| picodollars / byte-month.
| [deleted]
| matsemann wrote:
| https://www.jottacloud.com/en/ has been around for over a
| decade.
| ojno wrote:
| "250 picodollars / byte-month" is just a hackish way of saying
| "$0.25 / gigabyte-month, pro-rated down to the byte."
| gus_massa wrote:
| I always thought it was about avoiding the 1000 vs 1024
| discussion https://xkcd.com/394/
| Iolaum wrote:
| Check out the nextcloudpi project. Paid once for the
| pi/drive/case 4 years ago and been a happy user ever since.
|
| It's been so worry free that when I had to move house I had to
| read the docs again to make sure I do things right. And that's
| on top of me studying the project well enough the first time I
| set it up that I ended up contributing some patches.
|
| P.S. There are hosted offerings for nextcloud but for a
| household with 2-5 users I think nextcloudpi has the best value
| proposition.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| You need to set up a dynamic DNS, right?
| PrimeDirective wrote:
| Sync ( www.sync.com ) is pretty good, I wish their app and web
| ui was a lot better, the search sucks but I have been a paying
| customer for two years now. I like that it doesn't force you to
| collaborate. And that it's quite barebones. I have a 49 bucks a
| year for 500gb plan, which they no longer offer, but I guess
| I'm grandfathered in
| thedanbob wrote:
| I use a mix of syncthing and seafile. Syncthing is very simple
| to setup and pretty much set-and-forget. Seafile is more
| involved but the end result is closer to the classic Dropbox
| experience.
|
| If you're not interested in self-hosting and just want a
| straight Dropbox replacement, I'd look into Nextcloud
| providers.
| marcedwards wrote:
| I moved to Tresorit, and so far it's been great. It's end-to-
| end encrypted/zero-knowledge. The service is a little bit
| enterprise-y, but really solid. I've done all I can to test and
| and haven't been able to flaw it. Merge conflicts end up as
| duped files, just like Dropbox, which is great.
|
| Their Mac app is good. It's native and doesn't use a ton of
| resources (I haven't used it on other desktop platforms).
| AFAIK, it doesn't support APFS extended attributes, so Finder
| tags won't get synced. It does use the Finder sync extension
| API though.
|
| It works slightly differently to Dropbox -- rather than just
| being a single folder that syncs, it's more like selective
| sync, where you have multiple folders that are optionally
| synced. This confused me a little during setup, but I think I
| prefer it now.
|
| I tried pretty much all the other alternatives and didn't like
| them. I'm already paying for iCloud Drive, so I'd _love_ that
| to work, but it's chewed up files or taken hours to sync on too
| many occasions, so I don't trust it any more.
| stonesweep wrote:
| I'll add a +1 to pCloud (pcloud.com) - SyncThing doesn't fit my
| use case (I have no "one device to hold everything", it's all
| disparate laptops/phones) and I wanted a centralized location
| to store my encrypted backups and files and stuff.
|
| My requirements were integration with rclone and FolderSync
| (android app) to work natively with their APIs and it works
| like written on the tin. I was able to use rclone on a cloud
| server to transfer data out of Google Cloud (rclone can act as
| a local proxy to copy between services) and I'm able to use
| FolderSync on my mobile to keep it backed up.
|
| The pCloud branded mobile app is OK (nothing great), the webapp
| works well (again, just sort of works) and so far I've found no
| real problems with it - no failed syncs, my backups are backing
| up nicely, it just sort of works without fanfare.
| jasonv wrote:
| The pcloud pricing model is interesting/concerning. A one-
| time, life-time payment?
| stonesweep wrote:
| As I tend to go for the long game and expect to use it for
| years, I went for the lifetime (in my case it'll pay off
| itself within about 3 years), I was using Google Cloud
| storage buckets for longer than that so you know -
| financially for me, it works to replace the monthly fees
| for Google Cloud which was already a concrete cost. These
| types of pricing agreements are _usually_ not sustainable
| for a company long-term, I go into the agreement with eyes
| open and I 've got rclone ready to move the data again if I
| have to migrate.
|
| My actual expectation is that at some point, 500G will be
| "small" in provider terms and they'll offer upsells to 1TB,
| 2TB etc. over the life of my account trying to get me to
| the next level or some other features (which they already
| have - you can buy add-ons). Nothing wrong with that, I
| still get my portable 500G "for life" (of the Product)
| which suits my current space needs. I have enough portable
| space now that I can upload a hundred gigs of Music,
| something I wasn't able to do before (increased cost) and
| use that 500G space. (I had uploaded everything to Google
| Music over a decade...so... yeah)
|
| (edit: typos, wrong word/replaced)
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| 250 picodollars / byte-month is $3000/TB/yr, which is very
| expensive even compared to the already expensive S3
| (~$276/TB/yr).
|
| For reference, HDDs cost ~$20/TB, so you could buy a new HDD
| every 2.5 days for the cost of storing the data on tarsnap.
| u678u wrote:
| I just live with a NAS in my house, which syncs to S3.
| csomar wrote:
| Tarsnap is ridiculously expensive. Only use-case if you have
| small files (few gigabytes at most) and you want to use it to
| do backup with scripts/command-line and do care a lot about
| encryption.
| szszrk wrote:
| I really enjoy pcloud. It's simple, fast (I'm looking at your
| shitty galleries, OneDrive) and has a snappy mobile and linux
| app.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| i switched to microsoft 1Drive a long time ago, works
| seamlessly on windows
| pedro2 wrote:
| I am repeating myself from another thread but I'm 90% sure of
| the answer and no-one checks: are you sure OneDrive works
| well? Can you sync PST files? [1]
|
| [1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/onedrive-down-the-road-
| to-...
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I haven't had problems with files , but that might be just
| me. I had an issue in the past that it would crash . i
| removed and reinstalled and it s fixed now
| overlord_tm wrote:
| Check out https://koofr.eu/ Disclaimer: I work there :)
| Zhyl wrote:
| I use SyncThing [0]. It can work without a server if your
| devices are often up at the same time. Otherwise you can get a
| small cheap server from the provider of your choice to suit
| your needs.
|
| [0] https://syncthing.net/
| vaduz wrote:
| SyncThing is great when it works, but its platform support is
| spotty at best (notably lacks official iOS version, I found
| the Android one to be flaky and if you try to use it on a
| Chromebook, straight up does not work).
|
| It's great for serverless sync between Linux, freeBSD and
| Windows machines, though - it generally "just works". Didn't
| try it on macOS or Solaris, never had the need to.
| _Donny wrote:
| I am really happy with Nextcloud!
| arendtio wrote:
| Plus one for Nextcloud, which I use as a self-hosted version
| for years now.
|
| If you don't like the self-hosting part, there are even
| offers which make it simple, like the one from Hetzner[1].
|
| But there are also other providers:
|
| https://nextcloud.com/signup/ (click 'Change Providers')
|
| [1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
| merlinscholz wrote:
| I'm currently using onedrive for business (5$/month for 1tb,
| exchange and some other office goodies). I can highly recommend
| it, the privacy probably is not perfect with it being a
| Microsoft product after all. But the apps are superb and
| Android/iOS photo upload are a big plus.
| pedro2 wrote:
| I am repeating myself from another thread but I'm 90% sure of
| the answer and no-one checks: are you sure OneDrive works
| well? Can you sync PST files? [1]
|
| [1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/onedrive-down-the-road-
| to-...
| merlinscholz wrote:
| Since I currently do not own a Windows PC, I could only
| test using the web interface, Android and iOS app. All of
| them seem to work fine (~10MB .pst file), at least upload
| and download works and the hashsums match afterwards.
|
| If you want to test this yourself, Onedrive has a free tier
| you could try.
| tallanvor wrote:
| For the most part you should only be using .pst files for
| archiving, and those you should be able to sync in Outlook
| now.
|
| For Exchange/Exchange Online, Outlook uses a .ost file that
| lives in AppData, which is not synced by OneDrive.
| camhart wrote:
| I like https://tresorit.com. It's end to end encrypted. Doesn't
| work as smoothly as Dropbox, but worth it IMO.
| pedro2 wrote:
| Yah, looked at it too. Still thinking if E2EE is worth losing
| search and OCR.
| marcedwards wrote:
| Which search would you lose? Their iOS app has search, and
| on macOS your can use Finder's search. I assume there'd be
| ways on Android, Windows and Linux as well.
|
| Actually, I just checked and their Mac and web apps also
| have search.
| pedro2 wrote:
| Not by contents, I'd assume.
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| There is still One Drive if we are taking about the big guys.
|
| You could also look into seedboxes.
| pedro2 wrote:
| I am repeating myself from another thread but I'm 90% sure of
| the answer and no-one checks: are you sure OneDrive works
| well? Can you sync PST files? [1]
|
| [1] https://www.eejournal.com/article/onedrive-down-the-road-
| to-...
| baggachipz wrote:
| Remember when this(1) was Dropbox? Remember how beloved it was
| because it did a thing and did it well, without complicating
| things or being actively user-hostile? Well, of course it's been
| fully MBA'd at this point, a true shame.
|
| (1) https://i.ibb.co/w6zcwYW/Screen-
| Shot-2021-01-15-at-10-49-22-...
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Kind-of sounds like Steve Jobs was right in what he told Drew
| Houston: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.
|
| Houston disagreed and they've spent all this time ever since
| trying to prove Jobs wrong. Meanwhile Apple built iCloud and
| Microsoft built OneDrive into their operating systems.
| manigandham wrote:
| Link to answer: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-more-
| popular-than-other...
|
| I remember reading this when it was first written. Ironically,
| Quora was also much simpler and better back then before turning
| into a spammy bloated mess.
| baggachipz wrote:
| The reason I did a screenshot was because I couldn't reliably
| link to this answer on Quora. What a dumpster fire that
| site's become too.
| manigandham wrote:
| Click on the timestamp for a direct link to the answer.
| Most social sites follow this UX pattern.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Even when I did that, it wouldn't reliably scroll to the
| correct location. Not sure if it's because of my ad
| blocking or what.
| pan69 wrote:
| This has been like this for a while, I tweeted to their support
| about this over a year ago. No response of course...
|
| It's a total dick-move by Dropbox since access to Contacts is
| clearly not necessary for Dropbox to work.
|
| However, the real problem here is obviously Google Login that
| only allows blanket permissions to either accept or reject.
|
| Permissions should be granular and as a user I should have the
| ability the "untick" access to Contacts if I don't want to give
| an app access to that data. If I untick a permission that is
| needed for app functionality, e.g. I deny camera access to a
| camera app, then the app simply would be able to do that feature.
| a3n wrote:
| I dropped DropBox when they put Condoleezza Rice on the board.
| Thanks for reminding me that that was a good move.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Same here, and I told everyone else.
|
| The site is still up.
|
| https://www.drop-dropbox.com/
| factsaresacred wrote:
| Airtable tries this too but you can still deny access, for now.
| Very off-putting first impressions for what is otherwise a solid
| app.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I left dropbox when they changed the full page upsell to "dropbox
| business" so that I couldn't easily figure out how to skip it and
| get on with my work.
|
| I had a paid pro account at the time.
|
| I actually had a conversation with a product manager; I checked
| the yes you can contact me when I cancelled my account. They
| simply refused to admit that an upsell was a advertisement and
| that disrupting my workflow on my paid, professional account for
| an ad was wrong.
|
| The other interesting thing about that conversation, they could
| not understand how a sole proprietor would see no benefit from
| collaboration tools and kept making up bizarre scenarios where I
| could use them.
|
| I actually asked them if they were a product manager or a
| salesperson at one point.
|
| To Dropbox's credit, that product manager didn't try to retain
| me, they were genuinely trying to figure out why I had quit; they
| just couldn't grok the reason.
| ykevinator wrote:
| Exact same experience, your first reaction when you see it is
| "am i logged into the right account?" because you know you have
| a paid account
| ashtonkem wrote:
| In my experience, product people often seem to get some pretty
| extreme tunnel vision about how the product should work vs.
| what customers really want. I've seen it enough to assume that
| something about that role incentivizes this behavior.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > they just couldn't grok the reason
|
| It's hard to make someone understand something when their
| salary (and entire reputation - given that increasing
| engagement/retention by X% is a big selling point on a resume)
| depends on not understanding it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is usually it! As developers, we have all worked on
| features where it was obvious that users wouldn't want it,
| but the feature would juice some metric so it was
| prioritized. Some time between that initial meeting about how
| this will juice the metric and launch, Product convinced
| themselves that users would actually want it and are not
| prepared to accept the feature's failure. Finally, when
| indeed users don't want to use it, it would get pushed at
| them repeatedly, through sales and through dark UI patterns.
| Tale as old as time...
|
| This is what happens when you plan your product not from user
| need but from company need.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Yes, but usually in that situation, the misunderstanding is
| intentional. This seemed a genuine inability to understand
| why I would quit over "a simple upsell".
|
| I am sure the inability to understand that it was a dark
| pattern to have no [X] or [SKIP] button was intentional :-)
| mrjin wrote:
| Well that was simply arrogance that can be see in almost
| every large organizations: they believe everyone would like
| their idea. The problem maybe most people do like their
| idea but there would be always someone does not.
| durnygbur wrote:
| > This seemed a genuine inability to understand why I would
| quit over "a simple upsell".
|
| Similar situation with major retail chains delivering
| brochures to a doorstep, or a bank clerk upselling bank
| credit and investment funds. It's not inability to
| understand, they are financially rewarded by doing this to
| you and their supervisors are malicious sociopaths. Their
| attitude is "why this person doesn't let me do my job".
| eitland wrote:
| I still have a free Dropbox account but I'm not buying.
|
| I had 16GB permanent at some point (and up to 50GB temporarily
| for various promotions) but at some point they cut my account
| to 10 for no good reason at acted dumb when I asked them about
| it.
|
| Microsoft gave me 5GB extra for uploading photos and shortly
| afterwards reduced it, forcing me to delete them, luckily I had
| them backed up elsewhere.
|
| Google Photos have started trying to monetize what they
| promised for free to (kind of expected, but with Google they
| could also have decided to shutter it).
|
| On one hand: we cannot expect companies to give things away for
| free.
|
| On the other hand: when they've given things away for free
| unforced it doesn't make them look good when they take away
| what they gave away.
|
| I now go with hetzner.com or something similar. It is paid and
| while that doesn't guarantee that they won't do something
| stupid at least they haven't a massive history of doing stupid
| things unforced.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I've just started moving big files into S3/Glacier/B2
| (Backblaze API compatible S3 competitor). If you know how to
| use these tools, they're far more long term reliable than any
| Dropbox like service in terms of offering and pricing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Companies throughout history have used the promotional idea
| of giving something away for free or drastically reduced
| rates for a new something in order to attract attention. Even
| drug dealers are known for "the first one's free" type of
| setup. Storage units have "first month free", cable companies
| "sign up now for 3 months at $49/mo for 6 months" kind of
| stuff. It wasn't until sleazy startups and SaaS types come
| along that do things like "free and always will be" *until we
| realize we were not good business people and can't run a
| business like that. Everything else has been regulated up the
| wazoo, but for some reason tech has been able to avoid these
| regulations OR flat out ignored them under the guise of
| "disrupting" the markets.
| bredren wrote:
| Washington Post and NY Times digital subscriptions do the
| same thing. If you subscribe to either, you can try
| cancelling and they'll restore the reasonable price.
| leokennis wrote:
| I have to say, for all the valid hate it usually gets, iCloud
| is actually becoming a pretty nice "usb drive in the cloud"
| compared to the bullshit that is getting tacked on to Dropbox,
| Google Drive and to a lesser extent OneDrive.
|
| On the other hand, I still keep a large WebDAV/OwnCloud server
| close for the moment iCloud turns to shit too.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I dropped them when they restricted free accounts to three
| devices and I suddenly got inundated with calls from annoyed
| family and friends to whom I'd spent five years evangelizing.
| ballenf wrote:
| They are the only company I know that continuously pulls
| features from existing tiers while raising prices on all
| tiers.
|
| They act like a monopoly seemingly oblivious to the many
| viable alternatives out there today.
| adamc wrote:
| Yep. I've been gradually replacing them because of that.
| cool-RR wrote:
| I use Dropbox the same way you did: As a screwdriver. This
| means, it does its job, it does it well, I'm not looking to
| make it a part of my life beyond that. I don't want new
| features or collaboration, and I definitely don't want to pay
| more than I do or see ads.
|
| The screwdriver-manufacturing business is not very profitable,
| so nobody wants to be in it.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Good analogy; my hammer manufacturer, Evernote, also has this
| disease. No, I don't want chat or Evernote for Business ...
| nbzso wrote:
| I am early user of Dropbox. Everything was fine and then three
| devices per account policy arrived. The next morning I deleted
| all my files. Bought my self a Synology installed Cloud Station
| and now I have a my own cloud storage, with no ads or shady UX.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Same with the ads for Amazon videos on Amazon Prime. They are
| ads and I don't want ads. But they don't see it that way (don't
| get me started on the forced watching of texts on Blue Rays).
| signal11 wrote:
| > Same with the ads for Amazon videos on Amazon Prime.
|
| On some smart TVs, there's an explicit (or on-screen) button
| to skip these. If you don't see a skip button and you have a
| Fire TV remote, you can press the >> double arrow button to
| skip these.
|
| I agree that there should be an option to disable these
| altogether, like how Netflix offers an option to disable
| video previews.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| You also can't change the UI language with Prime Video. I'm
| an American in Germany, no option to use English.
| rhino369 wrote:
| For some reason, Amazon defaults me to German subtitles,
| despite me being an American in America.
| snicksnak wrote:
| On top of that, Prime makes it particularly hard for you to
| use english. No option to make english the default language
| for playback. If you switch to english for an episode, the
| next one starts in german again....
|
| On my samsung TV you can't even change the language from
| within the menu while watching, you have to close playback,
| go to playback settings of the movie, change the language,
| go back to the movie's main menu and then start the movie
| again.
| atraac wrote:
| That and the terrible video quality is what makes me not
| prolong prime after some free time we got few months ago with
| some other product. It's like watching 480p Youtube on a 4k
| tv most of the time. Netflix or Youtube have zero issues like
| that...
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| I personally don't mind the ads on Amazon Prime because
| they're instantly skippable and do actually show things I
| might be interested in. Plus they don't show random shit like
| ads for a car or a TV or something. I don't sit and browse
| Amazon (because the browsing experience on Amazon prime is
| dogshit), so I go straight to anything I want to watch on
| there. The only opportunity to discover new shows on there is
| usually from outside of Amazon, or their pre-roll ads.
|
| Also, they should stop showing me ads for things I've
| watched.
|
| They better not make them unskippable ever.
| heelix wrote:
| The ads Amazon added to Twitch prime have been brutal.
| Nothing re-engaged me in the adblock war than their
| constant barrage there.
| SifJar wrote:
| "instantly skippable" depends on device I think. For a long
| time, there was no "Skip" button in the Roku app, you could
| only manually forward through it. It has now been added,
| but very possible there are apps on other devices still
| missing that feature
| drdec wrote:
| My experience - I have a TCL Roku TV, no skip button on
| the remote. When the promos play on Amazon Prime a Skip
| control (link? button?) appears on the lower left of the
| screen with focus. If I press OK on my remote it
| activates and goes right to the content.
| SifJar wrote:
| Yep, exactly same in app on regular Rokus - I was
| referring to the fact that the on-screen "Skip" is a
| relatively recent addition (at least on my Roku, Roku
| Express)
| laumars wrote:
| I don't think I've ever received an ad on Prime Video. Is
| it an American thing? Do they happen in the U.K. too?
|
| It might be the case that my DNS server (basically PiHole
| but something I built before PiHole was a thing) is
| blocking them. However it doesn't stop inlined ads from
| YouTube, 4oD, Twitch and other streaming / on demand
| services.
| YuccaGloriosa wrote:
| I'm in UK, using Fire stick in telly, shows skippable
| ads.
| laumars wrote:
| I don't get ads. Not on a fire stick, via a web browser
| nor on the LG TV app. Not even a skippable ad. Nothing.
| [deleted]
| coredog64 wrote:
| The Prime Video experience is slightly better after a
| recent update. Now when you quickly add something to your
| watch list, it doesn't freak out and forget where it
| was/load entirely new genres.
| matsemann wrote:
| Yes wtf, I'm already paying and trying to watch a series I
| enjoy, stop pestering me. Just one of many dark patterns at
| Amazon, cancelling Prime is so difficult that Norwegan
| Consumer Council and 15 others yesterday started a legal
| fight with Amazon: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-
| nytt/amazon-manipulates-... The video there is quite
| aggravating.
| mleonhard wrote:
| I called Amazon to cancel Prime. I wanted them to record my
| reason for cancelling. And I wanted them to spend some
| extra money answering my phone call and talking to me.
| buckminster wrote:
| I'm receiving scam calls from India saying "Your Amazon
| Prime subscription is about to renew, please talk to our
| representative if you wish to cancel". If Amazon Prime was
| easy to cancel this scam wouldn't exist.
|
| (I actually tried going along with the scam, but his call
| centre was so noisy he couldn't hear what I was saying,
| ffs.)
| Symbiote wrote:
| As if that wasn't enough, the full complaint shows that
| after all that scrolling and clicking (I lost count), an
| email is sent with a big yellow button, and the website
| starts showing the same button, "Continue your membership",
| which re-subscribes _with a single click_.
| easton wrote:
| Anyone who thinks charging a user $99 with a single click
| and no explanation near the button should be sent to UX
| jail (where the only way to get food is to come up with a
| grep command the warden needs to find part of a street
| address).
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| A _recurring_ $99 -- I can 't think of any other
| subscription service that doesn't take you through an
| explicit approval for signing up.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I've cancelled Prime, now they hit me with week long
| delivery times which after a day are reduced by half or
| less, just to get me back on Prime.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I just wait for the free month of prime offers and do my
| Amazon shopping only during that time. Why pay when they
| keep giving it to me a few times a year.
| uCantCauseUCant wrote:
| Seven of Prime, Tertiary Attribute of Bezos
| dazc wrote:
| I have Prime and, because many of my orders are for
| business use, I keep being invited to AmazonBusiness
| where I can download invoices (which I can do already)
| and buy another kind of Prime or start paying for
| deliveries again?
| delfinom wrote:
| That's normal for non-prime. You get thrown onto the back
| of the priority queue but at the same time get on the
| wild scheduling ride their systems take.
| zwaps wrote:
| I still have prime, and a good half of my "next day
| shipping" deliveries are delayed by a day, two days or
| even more.
|
| Granted, the current situation is problematic, but this
| happened even before and since you are prime, you don't
| get any money back or something like that. It's just bad
| luck then.
|
| Now, you might think you could rely on the services where
| you pay extra for same-day delivery or morning next day.
| But those end up missing the delivery window a good half
| of the times I used them - even before the pandemic.
|
| Next day or same day delivery just isn't something that
| seems to work reliably here in Western Europe.
|
| I know companies where a local driver will literally get
| in a car and bring me what I need right away, but that
| doesn't scale to Amazon levels.
|
| Given that prime delivery rarely holds its promise, it is
| no surprise that Amazon needs to make non-prime delivery
| even less attractive.
|
| But you know, there are other vendors! Plus, you are less
| likely to get a fake product if you order directly from
| there.
| ndiscussion wrote:
| Not sure if it still applies since I cancelled prime, but
| you can contact Amazon any time a package is late, and
| they will give you credits or extensions to your Prime
| sub. That was in the US a year or so ago.
| ballenf wrote:
| It's amazing to me how long deliveries take if you're not
| prime. Of course the actual delivery is just as fast,
| they just wait a few days to fill the order.
|
| And the dark patterns on placing an order without re-
| upping Prime feels like the fake download buttons on
| download.com without an ad blocker.
| bigtones wrote:
| Same on Cable TV. It's full of ads in the USA - and that's
| after you pay $100 per month for a cable subscription.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| They're annoying, I don't want a trailer recommending me
| stuff before I watch something, there's already
| recommendations showing up visually in the list of contents
| when you choose something..
|
| And yes Amazon, they are ads.
| shultays wrote:
| I am cancelling it the moment the expanse is over.
|
| Worst part is, prime crashes my TV's video player. Once that
| happens I am not able to play any video at all, even on other
| apps. And ads made it worse since it usually crashes as I
| switch videos and adds are more video switching.
| mitjak wrote:
| but they're promoting other Amazon shows and they can't be
| skipped! what possible other framing could there be.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Honestly, the most annoying thing about this is when they
| show you an advert for a series that you have already
| watched. I mean it's not like they don't have the data
| already...
| dazc wrote:
| Most ads I see are for shows I have already decided I will
| never watch even if they pay me.
| SifJar wrote:
| The ones that really bug me are the generic "Prime Video"
| ads. Not advertising a particular show, just telling me how
| great the service I am already subscribed to is...
| asidiali wrote:
| The worst - YouTube TV
|
| They show you ads for YouTube TV, literally while are you
| watching TV with your paid YouTube TV subscription.
|
| How many ad dollars are just being flushed down the drain...
| r053bud wrote:
| This is meant to be a replacement for normal cable....which
| also shows ads. As far as I know there is NO live cable
| service that is ad-free.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >This is meant to be a replacement for normal
| cable....which also shows ads. As far as I know there is
| NO live cable service that is ad-free.
|
| HBO doesn't show commercials. It DOES use the time
| between two shows (starting on the hour or half hour) to
| preview other shows on the same network but I find these
| slightly less annoying that paid-for ads.
| wasdfff wrote:
| When cable came out it was ad free. That was one of the
| selling points actually.
| asidiali wrote:
| There are also normal ads for third parties. So not a
| replacement. They just also run their own ads.
|
| And no, it's not an ad placeholder. Because they have
| that too. There is a scene that says "you're watching
| YoutubeTV, your show will resume momentarily" while a
| yellow ad bar progresses.
|
| They aren't also analog ads. You can tell when YTV is
| playing back an ad recorded within the show, vs when they
| flip the stream from content to ad content because the UI
| changes.
|
| Nope, from what I can tell, they definitely just show
| their own ads to their customers.
|
| When I had Dish, I saw a lot of DirectTV ads. That makes
| sense. But I never saw Dish advertising Dish. Maybe I
| just never paid attention.
| andromeduck wrote:
| "already have it" seems like a fairly simple, common, and
| oh so fustrating problems especially for services that
| already know your email. Right now the worst offender for
| me is IBKR for egigh I get ~10 ads per day on YouTube
| despite both being linked the the same
| IP/email/device/browser as he service.
|
| Likewise with Amazon showing you an ad for a product you
| literally bought minutes ago as if you'd want to buy
| another before the first arrives or LinkedIn recruiters
| trying recruit you to your current role.
|
| Specialty equipment like for photography/cycling or 3d
| printing is the worst. Buy a Sony camera or Peak design
| tripod and you'll get ads for the same thing for a year.
| Like accessories and complementary products I'd understand
| but come on. Just how many thousand dollar cameras do you
| expect me to buy per month/year?!
| asidiali wrote:
| Spot on, I've noticed it too. It's crazy. I can only
| imagine the XX% of ad spend that could be optimized if
| this problem was solved across the industry, and the
| millions of dollars that would be saved...from a basic
| query optimization? I guess it has to be a harder problem
| than that, otherwise it wouldn't be an issue, but sheesh
| is it ridiculous from the outside looking in.
|
| Like I understand the complexity in optimizing that query
| for Amazon and personalized product history, etc.
|
| But YouTubeTV for Pete's sake, is a static property of
| the network. It doesn't change for anyone already
| _watching YTV and therefore subscribed_.
|
| Just don't put YTV ads on the YTV network. Simple as
| that. Someone legit went and _added_ them.
|
| "Already have it"!!!
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Ads on Amazon Prime are infuriating. And I can't help think
| how annoying it must be for people with disabilities.
|
| My other bugbear are the auto playing videos on Netflix and
| the use of massive spoilers in episode thumbnails.
|
| As a single consumer in a vast ocean I don't think my
| opinions will ever be listened to. Right now it's worth
| putting up with this crap as the benefits outweigh the cost
| but if it gets any worse I'll be unsubscribing.
| simplerman wrote:
| > Ads on Amazon Prime are infuriating. And I can't help
| think how annoying it must be for people with disabilities.
|
| Or people with small kids.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| This is a great example of why I still prefer torrenting
| films and TV shows as opposed to using my wife's Netflix
| sub: the pirated media is better!
|
| Netflix and Hulu and competing with easier to use and more
| flexible pirated media, whether they like it or not. The
| consistency and flexibility of the VLC interface (or
| whatever media player you choose) is vastly better than
| whatever features a Netflix PM is trying to push to juice
| their metrics.
|
| (I won't even get into unskippable screens on Blu-Ray discs
| which are removed on the pirate version.)
| manigandham wrote:
| Agreed. Also there are in-between services like Put.IO
| that provide better UX while handling most of the
| technical bits: https://put.io/
| permo-w wrote:
| If VLC had a slightly prettier interface, a better logo,
| and more intuitive queueing/playlists, it would be
| perfect
|
| Okay, I'm sure the logo has meaning to the devs, so they
| don't mind it looking like an error message. That's fair.
| They aren't Instagram, they're not going for the lowest
| common denominator. And, okay, the UI works, so why fuck
| with it?
|
| But why doesn't it play the next video in a directory
| when you've finished the first? Why is the playlist
| option so hard to find and oddly implemented? Why can't
| they update the UI to look like it was at least made for
| win7?
|
| This sounds like a major gripe, but really it's not.
| Everything else is amazing in that app, it's one of the
| best, most complete user experiences around, especially
| for a free app, but it just seems like it has some really
| obvious problems with fairly minor fixes
| manigandham wrote:
| Just drag an entire folder or multiple files into VLC and
| it'll play everything in order automatically.
|
| I use MPV which has a much more minimal UI and better
| performance: https://mpv.io/
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, piracy is almost always the better service. How the
| hell can a bunch of enthusiasts come up with a better
| service than multi-billion dollar companies? They
| seriously need to stop and rethink their industry. When I
| use my Netflix I get a horribly compressed "high
| definition" picture, annoying autoplaying ads for shows I
| don't care about and a constantly decreasing amount of
| content. Piracy offers the opposite of all that: high
| quality encodes, no bullshit ads anywhere and complete
| collections of everything.
| rhino369 wrote:
| First, I dispute that piracy is really better. Amazon and
| netflix generally work easier than piracy. My, um friend,
| has radarr + usenet + plex, and its work pretty well 80%.
| But subtitles are often a problem. Unpacking/par checking
| sometimes takes forever. Sometimes the decoder in plex
| doesn't really work. Sometimes the movie has been DMCA'd
| off the use net servers. Private trackers involve sucking
| up to to 15 year old polish kids who run their service
| like the Stazi.
|
| You can usually find everything you want, but sometimes
| it requires some time.
|
| I don't have a large 4k tv, so maybe I'm not appreciating
| how bad the streaming movies look.
|
| But Netflix, Amazon, itunes, Vudo, etc. are all way
| easier services to use.
|
| Second, they are targeting the masses, who probably like
| a 30 second preview for another show and don't care how
| 4k is encoded. In my experience, about 50% of people with
| high def TV's didn't even set up high def cable packages.
| skulk wrote:
| The reason piracy is perceived to be better is agency.
| With Netflix/whatever, you have zero agency if something
| you want isn't there, other than signing up for some
| other streaming service.
|
| Even if it's hard to find something on public trackers
| with the right dubs/subtitles, it's rarely impossible for
| popular content. And if the subtitles are bad, you can,
| for example, download a different lower quality rip and
| pull the subtitles off that. The point is, in this system
| the user has control over the data they are consuming.
| This is infinitely preferable to some people than the
| chains of DRM.
| manigandham wrote:
| There's a big range between generic streaming and setting
| up all those usenet (which is probably the most
| complicated of them all).
|
| Something like https://put.io/ is far easier while still
| providing all the control you need over files and usually
| makes them available instantly.
| machello13 wrote:
| Agreed. I use and love Plex (subtitles are less of an
| issue since they added the ability to automatically find
| subtitles for shows/movies), but people who say the
| experience is better are forgetting the amount of time
| and effort you need to find a reliable torrent site,
| manage the torrents, and set up the plex server.
|
| It's not a huge amount of work by any means, but for many
| people it's probably insurmountable. Let alone when you
| compare it to the work involved to use a streaming
| service:
|
| 1. Sign up 2. Enter CC info 3. Done
| encom wrote:
| Ease of use depends on your computer literacy, I think.
| For me it involves pasting the IMDB ID into a fairly
| popular public torrent site (eg. tt0095560) and feed the
| magnet link to Transmission running on my storage server.
| When it's done, it gets picked up by LibreELEC and is
| ready to watch. Could my mother use this? No. But you
| don't need a computer science degree to do this either.
|
| When Netflix launched in Denmark, I immedately jumped on
| it. It used to have endless amounts of great content, and
| was way more convenient than piracy. Now it's just filled
| with trash, and I can never find what I want to watch.
| Piracy has again become more convenient.
| corin_ wrote:
| They become multi billion companies by having different
| incentives (making profit) than the enthusiasts.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > constantly decreasing amount of content
|
| Frankly, this matters less and less if 98% of your
| offering is "Netflix originals" pulp. After 10 minutes of
| watching I have a feeling they should pay me for watching
| this.
|
| In anyone asked me, I'd prefer quality over perceived
| quantity. Quality needs time, thought, talent.
| tartoran wrote:
| I think all creators should have a pirates donations box
| so pirated content doesn't impact the creators that much.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Nothing is really stopping you from paying for the
| content and pirating it to get the quality you want.
|
| But lets be honest, essentially all pirates just want the
| content for free.
| tartoran wrote:
| I'd like to bypass the whole system (the middleman army)
| and give a donation directly to the creator if possible
| and I do sometimes when I'm awestruck with something. But
| that is not always possible and rare to matter in the
| grand scheme of things.
| rhino369 wrote:
| That doesn't really make sense in the context of movies
| and tv shows. The creators are thousands of people.
| sundvor wrote:
| Does watching hq torrents of content I have legal access
| to count? :)
|
| My 960 GPU in the htpc doesn't quite have the bit depth
| that Netflix wants, therefore it disables 4k entirely.
| Bought the GPU at the time as it was the first with
| hardware HECV, has zero issues playing back a 4k encoding
| by someone else..
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Wait, can you not play SDR 4K on Netflix?
|
| What happens if you play the first season of Stranger
| Things, which was produced in 4K but not in HDR?
| novok wrote:
| Really? Nowadays ive found it hard to get good 4k hdr
| downloads of things with seeders. Piracy seems to top out
| at 1080p at least it bittorrent land
| ndiscussion wrote:
| A lot of it is probably caused by demographics - torrents
| are pretty popular in countries where 4k is not the norm
| and may not be accessible.
|
| FWIW I have 20/10 vision (twice as sharp as "perfect
| normal") and have never seen the appeal of retina screens
| or 4k.
|
| edit: Also the file sizes are vastly larger for 4k for an
| incremental benefit.
| novok wrote:
| You should see a 1080p vs 4k HDR video of the same thing
| on an OLED and see the difference. I see the difference
| all the time. The mandolorian is a good one for that.
| ndiscussion wrote:
| I don't have a 4k screen currently but it looks like most
| TVs support 4k nowadays, so if my TV ever dies, I'll be
| sure to try this. Thanks for the viewpoint.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Depends on where you're downloading. 4K isn't as
| prevalent but it's usually out there.
| hellojason wrote:
| > auto playing videos on Netflix
|
| You can now disable this at the account level. They added
| the option a few months back.
| wolco5 wrote:
| They removed this feature and I like the rollover
| previews. Where can you change this?
| fredzel wrote:
| Pretty annoying when they run you trailers of a sequel
| before you even finished the first one because 'you might
| be interested' - sometimes even the thumbnail is a spoiler.
| [deleted]
| ballenf wrote:
| Ads on Prime on kids content is _especially_ frustrating.
|
| My biggest goal with kids is to help them with their focus
| and limit exposure to "infinity pools" of content. It's not
| that I have a problem with the content of the ads, it's
| that they train kids' brains to want to switch quickly
| between content the moment a show has a lull.
|
| It creates that FOMO that they might not be watching the
| most exciting show right now because the ad always makes
| the other show look way better.
|
| Youtube is of course the epitome of this issue, although
| disabling the mini-player on kids content helps a little.
| ilikepi wrote:
| > My other bugbear are the auto playing videos on Netflix
| and the use of massive spoilers in episode thumbnails.
|
| You can actually turn off "Autoplay previews" now. You have
| to log into your account from a web browser, and then look
| at the Playback settings for the profile you want to
| change.
| 5988 wrote:
| oh cool
| aidos wrote:
| What you can't turn off is the bit where they drop you
| into another trailer when you've just finished watching a
| series after months of investment. A little time to
| digest would be real nice.
| js2 wrote:
| Every single video app I have on my AppleTV: Netflix,
| Amazon, Criterion, even Apple's own TV app, shrinks
| whatever you are watching down to a thumbnail just before
| the movie or show ends.
|
| I fucking _hate_ it. Yes, I'm one of those weirdos who
| sits through to the end when the copyright rolls past and
| gets pissed off when the lights come on at a theater
| during the credits.
|
| It is incredibly disrespectful to the film.
|
| This is one of those "good taste" things that I feel like
| Steve Jobs wouldn't have tolerated.
|
| It's especially annoying on some older films with short
| end credits because it happens before the movie is even
| over.
| sigil wrote:
| Thanks for staying for the credits! I make credits for a
| living, so I'm biased, but you're right that they serve a
| real artistic purpose, as a gentle transition from the
| dream world back to the real one. No one likes to be
| shaken awake and bombarded with a new dream -- especially
| when they haven't yet made sense of the last one.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > They serve a real artistic purpose, as a gentle
| transition from the dream world back to the real one. No
| one likes to be shaken awake and bombarded with a new
| dream -- especially when they haven't yet made sense of
| the last one.
|
| This really hits it for me. It's not even the credits
| that I need, per se, as long as the movie _stop playing_
| when it 's done, whether with a credits sequence or a
| simple fade to black.
|
| I waited for Stranger Things to come out on BluRay
| (currently waiting for the third season), and I'm 100%
| convinced I had a better experience than someone watching
| on Netflix, because the episodes actually ended after the
| credits. For a show few people will get to see this way,
| the writers really knew how to conclude each episode in
| just the right spot, so you had a nice place to take a
| breather and contemplate.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| This reminds me of AMC's Lost finale, where after the end
| of the show, AMC added a simple shot of a desert island
| with some lapping waves, just to give viewers thirty
| seconds to digest everything that had happened.
|
| Of course, this confused the shit out of many viewers,
| who thought it was part of the show and tried to find
| meaning in it...
| princetman wrote:
| I get the sentiment for live performance, but in your own
| home, I can not relate to this. Vast majority of people
| in credits are doing a job and getting paid for it, just
| like any other profession or trade.
|
| We don't pay "respect" to delivery drivers, or to
| designers and engineers who brings us our gadgets and
| services in same way. Why should I spend my time and
| attention on credit rolls? It's not like anyone noticing
| it.
| js2 wrote:
| Perhaps I should have said it's disrespectful of me, the
| audience member. It should be my decision whether to
| watch to the end or not.
|
| I really enjoy movie watching. I use the credits to
| contemplate what I just watched. Sometimes to see who
| played specific roles, or what music was in the film, or
| the locations. So yes, I do watch the credits.
|
| I know most people don't. But that decision should be
| mine or yours.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You don't tip? Tips are showing your respect for
| deliveries. Also, most gadgets I've seen have a screen
| that can be viewed with credits in them, as well as most
| software. Video games have credits too. Books have
| credits too, right there on the cover and is probably
| what grabs your attention more than the title.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Yes, when was the last time you actually saw the credits
| on those devices? Like who is the lead designer of your
| phone? Who is the lead programmer of the last game you
| played?
| reaperducer wrote:
| There are credits in the About menu of about 50% of the
| programs I use each day.
|
| There are even credits in the loading screen of Adobe
| Photoshop.
| newswasboring wrote:
| That is not my point. Things being there doesn't make
| them important
| dylan604 wrote:
| They are so not important that the company decided that
| is the first thing you should see every single time you
| launch the app.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > It is incredibly disrespectful to the film.
|
| I found this attitude a bit confusing. The film makers
| are not there, who are you showing respect to? Also, do
| you read each crew members name? If not, what's the point
| of sitting through it?
| js2 wrote:
| To me, it's like speaking loudly in a library, or people
| horse-playing in a museum. Perhaps it's more accurate to
| say it's disrespectful of the audience.
|
| I want to be in control of whether or not to watch to the
| very end. It should be my choice.
| tyrust wrote:
| Of the services you listed, I only have Netflix. I hated
| that too, fortunately you can disable it [0]. Perhaps
| your other services have a similar setting.
|
| [0] - https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102
| aidos wrote:
| Neither of those settings help on web. You can stop the
| previews when you're browsing around. And you can stop
| the auto play of the next episode. I have both of those
| turned off. The annoying one I get hit with (on web) is
| that when you get to the end of a whole series (or movie,
| I guess) they roll more or less straight into another
| trailer.
|
| Bojack Horseman; I laughed, I cried, I lived...I jumped
| up out of my seat after six seasons to turn off some
| offensive trailer when it was finally over.
| js2 wrote:
| That setting doesn't disable the shrinking of a movie
| down to a thumbnail at the end. It only disables the
| auto-starting of the next episode of a TV show.
| tyrust wrote:
| Huh, fixed it for me on my Chromecast. IIRC it would
| shrink down to show what was autoplaying next, so when I
| disabled that it stopped shrinking.
| js2 wrote:
| Thanks for the info. It's possible I'm mistaken or that
| it behaves differently for movies vs TV shows. I'll pay
| attention tonight and update back here. If it is behaving
| differently between platforms, that seems like a bug I
| should report to Netflix.
| wst_ wrote:
| You should consider moving to Japan then. Theater stays
| dark until the last line of credits passes. Actually this
| is nice thing. You can still listen to the music, pay
| silent respects to the horde of people involved or just
| contemplate the movie.
| navbaker wrote:
| Your "time to digest" is Netflix's "fleeting window of
| opportunity to keep you engaged" or whatever businessy
| term describes that.
| jbay808 wrote:
| They aren't Facebook. They just need to keep me
| subscribed, not engaged.
|
| I bet someone has an engagement OKR anyway, though.
| dhnajsjdnd wrote:
| Hours of video watched per month is metric Netflix tries
| to optimize, because it predicts churn. If a customer is
| spending decreasing hours on Netflix and watching Disney
| instead, they are more likely to cancel.
|
| Goodhart's law applies. If a customer is watching more
| Netflix because they are binging some fantastic new
| context, that's great for Netflix. If the customer
| watching more because the app keeps auto playing
| something they didn't ask for and gradually pisses them
| off, not so good. Netflix might have better ways of
| measuring customer satisfaction that can tell if these
| behaviors make the customer more satisfied overall.
| madjam002 wrote:
| Yep, this is what I hate. Finishing a TV show, taking it
| all in, only to find myself scrambling for the remote to
| press Watch Credits so it doesn't move on to some random
| trailer.
|
| The Kodi Netflix add-on might not have the best
| interface, but at least it doesn't do stuff like this!
| corin_ wrote:
| I have it turned off in my profile, which works nearly
| everywhere, but doesn't have any effect on the Apple TV
| netflix app.
| avian wrote:
| What you still can't turn off AFAIK is the video starting
| to play in the background if you go to the "more info"
| menu. At least on the Android TV app.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Note that this anti anti feature was introduced quietly
| so not everyone may have noticed it yet.
| DanBC wrote:
| My current favourite sketch about popup ads: https://twitte
| r.com/thepincomedy/status/1349299943576662017?...
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| > Ads on Amazon Prime are infuriating. And I can't help
| think how annoying it must be for people with disabilities.
|
| I usually watch TV with subtitles on (it means I can have
| the volume a little lower), and I find that cases where
| pre-roll ads are inserted either don't adjust the subtitle
| sync or don't adjust it properly. Amazon's subtitles are
| generally 1-2s ahead of the video, which is just enough to
| let the air out of a big reveal or ruin a joke.
| Psype wrote:
| Actually, ads on Prime videos are for their other shows,
| and skippable. I discovered nice shows that way. But I
| agree, we should have at least 2 easy options in settings:
|
| - Never show ads for other shows - Always skip opening
| themes
| [deleted]
| eadmund wrote:
| I _hate_ the ads on Amazon Prime! The same ad, playing over
| and over every. single. time. And always for something I have
| no desire to watch, not in the slightest; something slightly
| offensive to be shown once and definitely offensive to be
| shown over and over and over.
|
| First world problem, I know. But still highly annoying.
| intrasight wrote:
| Pay for your content but then torrent the actual viewing
| experience. Problem solved - on all platforms.
| snicksnak wrote:
| I do torrent movies consistently even though I could watch
| them directly through my subscription, mainly because of
| two reasons:
|
| A) Usually my VPN is active and I don't want to shut it
| down just that netflix/amazon allows my to watch something
|
| B) I like setting the playback speed to ~1.1 of my media
| player, which is not supported by any streaming provider
| I'm subscribed to.
| j45 wrote:
| I just blocked all notifications from the Amazon app. Works
| great.
| sam1r wrote:
| >> they couldn't grok the reason
|
| B2b enterprise "feature" apps don't understand the b2c direct
| to consumer perspective.
| joering2 wrote:
| Privately I left Dropbox long ago when they stop supporting
| bit-by-bit comparison, and moved into chunk-by-chunk check.
| Found out hard way when detached VeryCrypt secure trunk and
| attached it day later on another machine. Started scratching my
| head what the heck. Upon checking, the file was not
| synced/uploaded and that's how I managed to discover their
| change.
|
| Business-wise, it was a stuck forced update that made me drop
| them (pun intended). At some version it did not want to open
| anymore before update. Fine. The problem was that you could not
| download update; it was downloader you download and that
| downloader himself pick file over the internet to download.
| Problem is the folder and file name was always different
| causing my simplewall (best firewall I know for Windows 10) to
| block the file each single time. Before I had chance to fiddle
| with firewall settings - something I never like doing - I was
| already registered into lifetime 2TB offer with pCloud,
| including their "Cyrpto" package for $299 one-time. Never
| looked back. And also upload speeds I found much faster than
| DropBox. As of syncing... I think its decent enough. Never had
| problem. Although their local drive logic is tad different -
| you are mounting a remote drive which is not equally convenient
| like DropBox local folder, but at least pCloud does not check
| folder for changes non-stop.
|
| Disclaimer: have nothing to do with pCloud as a company, just
| their happy client.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Marketing droids are the WORST.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I stopped using Dropbox when they stopped allowing bulk note
| exports in Paper. Paper is so _good_ , but it's ruined by their
| moat-building. They seem to be headed down a path of
| increasingly dark patterns.
| kmisiunas wrote:
| I immediately download all my Paper notes. On the upside, the
| bulk downloading option is still available:
|
| Dropbox Paper > Your Icon > Download docs you created.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I wouldn't have moved away from Dropbox if that option
| existed on my account.
|
| The options I see:
|
| Upgrade
|
| Settings
|
| Install Dropbox app
|
| Sign out
|
| Add team account
| mathattack wrote:
| I had a similar experience after kicking out Box. Sometimes
| enterprise SW companies get so caught up in the 20% of power
| users that they forget the value of simplicity for the 80%.
| [deleted]
| zerkten wrote:
| > I actually had a conversation with a product manager; I
| checked the yes you can contact me when I cancelled my account.
| They simply refused to admit that an upsell was a advertisement
| and that disrupting my workflow on my paid, professional
| account for an ad was wrong.
|
| I'm not in the slightest bit surprised. As product management
| has exploded as a role (look at the number of courses, books,
| etc.) there has been a huge influx of people with less
| experience, and most importantly perhaps, less breadth of
| experience. This is a good thing in the long-term, but there
| will be growing pains.
|
| I feel like the usual trope for programmers is that "PMs aren't
| technical enough", but the bigger issue for companies is that
| they don't have a breadth of experience and develop a narrower
| set of skills than they historically have. They smart and
| driven, but cost is what you are seeing with the cognitive
| dissonance.
|
| This is less noticeable in smaller startups. The problem is
| exacerbated in more mature products like Dropbox where they are
| trying to move an existing user base onto a higher profit line
| of products. You need to have the broader base that PMs at
| legacy companies (e.g. Microsoft) have to make this shift.
| Further, it's harder to appear credible with enterprise
| customers beyond shadow IT.
| [deleted]
| retox wrote:
| I was told a story about the Dropbox sales team a while back that
| swore me off using them. They contacted the company I worked at,
| that didn't have a business contract with Dropbox, offering a
| great deal and a meeting was quickly arranged. The meeting (which
| I only heard about secondhand from a good friend) quickly turned
| into a strong-arm operation.
|
| Dropbox had 'detected' that employees at our company were using
| Dropbox and it would be unfortunate if their stored files were no
| longer available and it would be in our best interest to sign up
| for a business account or we might legally be in breach of some
| terms of service. Some detective work later it was determined
| that people had been signed in to Dropbox from company machines,
| but there were no accounts opened with a company email and
| nothing business related was being synced. All Dropbox binaries
| and network connections have been blocked since.
| protomyth wrote:
| Well, the tactic worked for Oracle, and I would assume some of
| those lawyers landed at other SV companies. Although, to be
| fair to Oracle, they didn't do dark pattern stuff when I used
| them.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The problem for Dropbox is that social media makes these
| strong arm tactics harder, as the victims have an opportunity
| to put the company on blast publicly and trash their
| reputation. 20 years ago companies could do this repeatedly
| for a longer period of time before they'd gain a reputation
| for being scummy.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| But then look at how their "cloud" is doing.
|
| Is anyone anywhere in SV building new products on top of
| Oracle?
| protomyth wrote:
| Oracle isn't an SV focused company. There is plenty of
| money in all those non-tech businesses to be a big winner.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Dropbox had 'detected' that employees at our company were
| using Dropbox and it would be unfortunate if their stored files
| were no longer available and it would be in our best interest
| to sign up for a business account or we might legally be in
| breach of some terms of service.
|
| That's such a dumb sales tactic. Having users inside a company
| without any contracts with the company means that there are
| probably evangelists for the product working there but
| management won't buy. Time to give a free trial of the pro-
| enterprise-moneymaker version and hope that someone decide it's
| worth it.
| Terretta wrote:
| The best answer to this tactic is, _"Nice Dropbox you have
| there. Shame if OneDrive were to happen to it."_
|
| The O365 integration with OneDrive is so seamless relative to
| other options, employees won't even complain after an initial
| learning curve. In fact, many will start subscribing to O365 on
| iOS etc. and start having access to the same content synced
| across Windows, MacOS, iOS, Xbox, etc.
|
| At this point, with employees adapted and the "M365" data
| visibility and DLP tools switched on, the enterprise can switch
| off Dropbox or other file depots so even personal accounts
| won't work.
|
| It takes a year or so to play out, but that's how you lose
| 20,000 customers at a time.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| We use Onedrive at my work. It's a little annoying because
| OneDrive reads through your Word documents and tells you that
| you actually can't save that file here, because it has some
| external font or macro inside it. I like that Dropbox and Box
| don't look inside your files and I really hope Microsoft
| copies that feature soon.
| fencepost wrote:
| I'm going to hazard a guess that this is a function of
| saving into a Sharepoint Library that appears as
| file/document storage. This would likely work if you were
| saving into a folder that's then synced via OneDrive.
|
| The commentary that I've seen really has Sharepoint as the
| storage for anything that may be shared with other users
| (via file, Teams, whatever) and OneDrive as storage for
| files that are strictly for one user.
|
| Caveat: not an expert on this
| mxuribe wrote:
| This is an interesting take, and i agree with you. I myself
| have used dropbox for personal stuff, and onedrive with
| several of my previous employers for years now. For any
| person or business that i know who is all-in on microsoft
| products/services, i recommend to just adopt leveraging
| oneDrive, and life for them gets easier. (I didn't say better
| in other ways...but certainly easier.)
|
| In fact, oneDrive is good enough that i signed up my family
| for the o365 family plan, because the cost is hard to beat
| (and because my family doesn't care if their machine is
| windows or linux)... But, when i went to start mixing in my
| files (vs my partner's and rest of family's files)...I
| learned that onedrive does __NOT RUN NATIVELY ON LINUX__
| ...and linux is my personal daily driver. Hence, while my
| family, and all of our collective and shared files (including
| family photos) live on a paid oneDrive account, my stuff
| (files that really only pertain to me like dev. projects,
| etc.) live in dropbox, because dropbox runs decent enough on
| my linux machine. I can not wait for the day when dropbox is
| NOT the only decent option for linux machines. (Caveat: I am
| a big fan of nextcloud, but they're not there just
| yet...hopefully soon though!)
| josh_frome wrote:
| I have been happy with this OneDrive client on Ubuntu for
| the last year: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| I mount onedrive on linux pretty well with rclone.
|
| 1. Setup rclone with onedrive (you have to copy an oauth
| token iirc)
|
| 2. Run mount nohup rclone --vfs-cache-
| mode writes mount onedrive: ~/onedrive &
| j45 wrote:
| There are some easy to access alternatives not to use Dropbox.
|
| I'll be canceling my 10+ year subscription.
|
| Also this is an great example of why to always create accounts
| under an email address you type in, not an identity service
| through faang.
| beshrkayali wrote:
| As an alternative, I recently setup Nextcloud on an Ubuntu
| running vm using the snap package[1] and it took around 30
| minutes in total.
|
| 1: https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloud-snap
| avh02 wrote:
| I did the same some months ago - just a heads up that it's not
| without it's rough edges, but definitely does a near-enough-to-
| what-i-want job. I've noticed a few unsynced images and am
| currently struggling to get the android app to stop trying to
| sync a gigantic folder.
| beshrkayali wrote:
| I was using the docker image with my own ansible/nginx setup
| before but I found that maintaining required a little more
| attention that I'd like to give it, so I decided to give the
| snap package a go. One nice thing is that it self-updates
| automatically. What sort of issues did you encounter?
| frankzander wrote:
| Nextcloud works quite well. And you have also a calendar and
| some other nice features which DropBox not provides. Also the
| desktop sync client as well as the android client(s) works
| quite well.
| beshrkayali wrote:
| Yeah, those little applets are pretty useful. It does feel
| somewhat slugish if you enable many tho. Sync works perfectly
| for my use case.
| joshxyz wrote:
| Airtable too lol
| poxobloc wrote:
| Ah! So that was the service where I was able to continue
| logging in by selecting Deny/Cancel! I believe in AirTable you
| can get around this. Not on Dropbox.
| rkalla wrote:
| Reading through these comments - sounds like the classic "let's
| squeeze blood out of this rock" behavior that tech companies like
| Yelp go through with the realities of "you must always be
| increasing profit" take hold.
|
| Anti-consumer behaviors out at the edge seem to always be the
| last throws for these companies.
| jo-m wrote:
| A year ago, I replaced Dropbox with Syncthing [1] for all my
| private use.
|
| It syncs directly between your devices without need for a central
| server (except for device discovery).
|
| I use it without an always-on instance (NAS, cloud server), so it
| only syncs when my Laptop and Phone are on at the same time. This
| is enough for me. It just works (TM).
|
| [1] https://syncthing.net/
| F00Fbug wrote:
| I did the same thing. I use Syncthing for a bunch of thing and
| it really works well. I'm in the process of rebuilding my
| offsite backup machine with it. I make a local backup of all my
| digital pictures and will soon use Syncthing to move a copy of
| that backup to a relative's house in another state. Even if my
| house burns down I'll have all my media. The offsite box is a
| 10 year old desktop running Debian with a 12Tb drive in it.
| Backup server is set to "send only" and offsite copy is set to
| "receive only" so it's a one-way pipe.
| youbookface wrote:
| > The Syncthing Foundation stands against racism! Read about
| what we're doing.
|
| Ugh, is anyone tired of every website's insistent virtue
| signaling?
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Yes, but I feel like in the end it'll do more good than harm.
| youbookface wrote:
| I'm sure all the racists that read that will change their
| views.
|
| No, it's really just obnoxious, imagine meeting a person
| for the first time and they say "Hi, my name is
| youbookface, and I'll have you know that I'm not a racist
| and here's a list of all the organization I've donated to!"
| saos wrote:
| For what???
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