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Microsoft takes on Dropbox with major SkyDrive update
Deozaan:
and Dropbox ups the ante!
• Share your stuff with a link! http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=1138
-lanux128 (April 25, 2012, 12:10 AM)
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So now you don't have to put stuff in the public folder to share it with people? Cool!
-Deozaan (April 25, 2012, 04:45 PM)
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That's it? Is that really such a big deal?
-rgdot (April 25, 2012, 04:52 PM)
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I don't think it's a big deal, but I think it's a useful feature.
Though there's a pretty good argument against it:
Nice feature for individual users - but a privacy nightmare for Dropbox Teams!!
Imagine a group doing joint work in a closed group which is shared through Dropbox. Some group member wants to share (in good faith) with another person and sends him a public link. The other person thinks "wow, interesting" and shares (in good faith), say, on his Facebook page. Suddenly, privacy of a whole team is compromised without the team even knowing about it!! Unlike adding a new member to the Shared Folder, group members have no means to know that some group member has shared group-confidential stuff with the rest of the world!!
To me this is a major disaster and show stopper for using Dropbox for team work
Second scenario: Some person decides (or is politely asked) to leave a Dropbox team. He/she may of course keep the stuff elaborated jointly so far. Before the guy leaves the shared folder he "gets a link" - which allows him "eternal" read access to this folder, including all future additions to it, without being a group member anymore.
This is like installing a bugging device on a shared folder ==> Show stopper for Dropbox-based team work.
Do I need to give more examples?
Please add a feature to turn off public link generation for any given shared folder by the folder owner. To promote trust, this attribute should also be viewable by all subscribers to this public folder.
I know that people can always "steal" and publish stuff that should stay private. But the "get link" feature as it is implemented right now just makes it too easy to do it even unintentionally!-http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=1138#comment-508832964
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Carol Haynes:
I have had two BSOD 0x1e errors since I installed the desktop SkyDrive app on Windows 7 x64, uninstalled and haven't had one since. Think I will give it a miss.
lanux128:
and Dropbox ups the ante!
• Share your stuff with a link! http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=1138
-lanux128 (April 25, 2012, 12:10 AM)
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So now you don't have to put stuff in the public folder to share it with people? Cool!
-Deozaan (April 25, 2012, 04:45 PM)
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That's it? Is that really such a big deal?-rgdot (April 25, 2012, 04:52 PM)
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i actually like this feature. if you want to share a certain file in a folder, there is no need to move that file into the 'Public' folder. thus orphaning it from the rest of the items in the original folder.
agreed, no big deal but it's an oft requested feature and quite convenient too.
IainB:
Sounds like you're more trusting than I...
...
...The only stuff I'd store exclusively in "the cloud" is the stuff I don't give a damn about losing.
clusively in "the cloud" is the stuff I don't give a damn about losing.
-Stoic Joker (April 25, 2012, 11:28 AM)
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No, I think I may be just as mistrusting as you. :)
I don't store anything exclusively in the cloud. I have it all on two laptops and my daily backups, and probably in my restore points. If I put something in the cloud, it's usually because I want to be able to use it for sharing with others (i.e., not between my disparate PCs).
By the way, the Syncdocs thing seems to be a bit of a scam. After it has synced 500 documents, it stops syncing and asks you to start paying a fee for the service. Since I don't value the service nor the data, I am hardly likely to be willing to pay for it - in fact, I think the bandwidth it uses in duplicating all those files is a waste of money.
For example, if I have a document in (say) 3 different Gdocs virtual folders (they are really labels), then SyncDocs faithfully creates 3 "real" folders on my local PC and puts one copy of the document into each of them. Sheesh. :down:
IainB:
i actually like this feature. if you want to share a certain file in a folder, there is no need to move that file into the 'Public' folder. thus orphaning it from the rest of the items in the original folder.
agreed, no big deal but it's an oft requested feature and quite convenient too.
-lanux128 (April 25, 2012, 07:41 PM)
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That has been possible for ages with Gdocs. You just email people with a sharing link to the document, and the link can give anyone who has it read access, or write access, if you stipulate that.
At any time, you can revert the file to non-shared/"private" status, and thus remove further read/write access to the file at that point - thus rendering the sharing link obsolete.
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