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Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service (dropbox.com)
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Funny that this is the only Dropbox post I've seen on HN besides infamous references to their launch post. You'd think there would be plenty of interesting improvements to make. Having been a paid user for the last decade my current experience is just getting error messages on my phone every week that something failed to sync, and that I have to re-enter the app every ~month to disable/enable syncing for my offline files, otherwise it doesn't work. I can't remember any time I've been pleasantly surprised by any change to the service.
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If the enshittification continues, it might be time to go back to rsync [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
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i'm so happy with syncthing project.
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I've been a happy customer of Tresorit for several years now. Give them a try if you're fed up with Dropbox. At first I was selective in what folders I synced but after a few months I decided to just sync my entire workspace folder with everything in it. Incredibly convenient, everything is automatically synced between my desktop and laptop. If you go this route look into filters, it's not a very advertised feature but works great for excluding build output, venvs and other stuff.
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Dropbox will be one of the next Bending Spoons acquisitions. Low growth, none of the upsell or product extension things they've done have really worked out, and no-one's idea of what the future looks like.
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Why hasn't anyone created a windows and mac client that git pushes changes to remote after file activities of local computer, and polls remote repo every 1 minute for changes to pull? I'd gladly pay for that. :-)
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i think that's kind of what rclone is https://github.com/rclone/rclone haven't used it yet. i either back up my data with restic or sync it to other devices with syncthing, but those are tiny files (keepassxc dbs)
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curl and ftp never refuse to work, or willfully erase your backup files on their own initiative. Just saying.
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Amazing Dropbox went from a brilliantly simple service to this stagnating corporate swamp of ooze. Yet another fascinating example of how headcount correlates with quality decline.
I guess teenagers don't have any need to sync files, eh? Hate to see this gradual erosion of internet access for young people - I'd bet half the notable members of this very site started their career trajectory by learning how to break/fix computers in middle school or before
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It’s erosion of closed saas, not the internet. That already broke the hacker environments of yesteryear.
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It is not about age. It is just a way to tie accounts to a real life identity. It won't be surprising if the requirement comes from some alphabet agency.
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Hmmmmm today is a very different world compared to when we used the Internet to learn how to code. Now with Ai doing all the coding is learning how to code even happenning anymore? Also, just talked two friends who work for mid-size companies and last week both of their CEOs told them to just point Ai to their Jira tickets to finish all their tasks. Anyone else hearing their CEOs instruct the same thing?
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It will simply teach them how to go around those "protections". And put them at risk of using shaddy services to do so. Exactly like what happened with the war on drugs...
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This has nothing to do with that. They probably realized that teenagers are a small enough portion of their userbase that the loss of revenue (and probably lack thereof to be fair) is far outweighed by the opportunity to ask users for their ID.
What’s a good Dropbox alternative? Especially for Macs. Feels like they spent twenty years just making the Mac client worse.
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I heard 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
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iCloud Drive is the obvious choice.
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If you only have ios and mac clients why not icloud?
There's at least 10 other accounts who do the same
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This account has 50 submissions in the last two hours! [Edit: not the parent; the posting account] I don’t know why GP’s comment was flagged because submitting at a rate of 25 submissions PER HOUR is not done out of a genuine desire to share something that may be of interest to fellow human beings. Not even for personal bookmarking
I switched to Sync last year. Much cheaper, better quality.
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forgot to link: https://help.sync.com/hc/en-us
I didn't know about Sync. TIL someone had the guts to start a company named "Sync" in 2011.
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Yes, brave name choice. I went to have a look and the home page is nice, well laid out, and has links to documents. Small free tier to put your feet in the shallow end, and a couple of monthly plans, one aimed at individuals and the other at orgs. Perhaps a family plan would have benefits? Alas no linux support, not even an api to allow the use of some terminal command to get round GUI fragmentation. Searching for 'sync online storage with linux' leads to a recent redit thread and a Mint Linux forum thread.
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not sure if this helps: https://help.sync.com/hc/en-us/articles/55076263500051-How-to-access-Sync-from-Dolphin-on-Linux
> 5. You automatically agree to the new terms if you continue to have an account. I would really love to see courts throw this BS out.
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I agree with you in principle. It would also potentially invalidate clauses like the one in GPL license too: "this version or any later version" — how can anyone consent to yet-unknown terms? In this particular case and going after the summary from big85, there's one case of legal compliance (like age restrictions — it applies in appropriate jurisdictions even if the ToS is not updated) or maybe two (banning per-account vs per-owner), some widening of the terms to the benefit of the customer (like refunds being permitted in "special circumstances" on top of "required by law, with only "reductionist" change being about lowering service window for unused free accounts (in some jurisdictions, even this could be about respecting data privacy laws — companies are obligated to remove any data which is not used after a certain time, though I think this is 12 months even under GDPR). As such, I believe this would not be a good case where you can bring enough light how this type of clause is harming one side to the contract.
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For "this or any later version", I have always read this line as you get to choose which version you want to follow, not the one granting you the licence.
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Certainly, but would that even be enforceable from a perspective of the grantee? "Hey, I trusted FSF to do the right thing with the next version and they did not" They blindly accepted to honor the terms which have not yet been defined.
Diffchecker for the save https://www.diffchecker.com/QD8AKShC/
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Super useful. Any open source tools like this?
Spain Orders Blocks on Archive.today and Its Mirrors (reclaimthenet.org)
Modern Spain is having patchy record with digital age. Earlier: 1. Blocked Telegram with a court order, reinstituted after public backslash 2. Blocks Internet and Cloudflare during La Liga matches 3. Prime minister Pedro Sanchez from Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has demanded the end of anonymity in Internet They say it is to protect the kids, but likely it is to find out who watches La Liga without a premium subscription.
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It started around 2008 when they had one of the most permissive landscapes in Europe with pressure by the US using the Special 301 whatchlist. Then Obama increased the pressure with Zapatero and after a couple of tries the timeline you describe was set in motion. Thanks MPAA and RIAA as usual.
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This censorship mechanism comes from 2011, when it was created under the Spanish Socialist Party's government lead by Zapatero. There was a lot of backlash, but the Intellectual Property Comission (also known as "Comisión Sinde") was never dissolved under the next governments' rules. Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
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What happened to Spain? They didn’t get hit by WW2 and yet…are a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.
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According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita? I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
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There is only so much one can reach economically with all mañana and siesta and hard push for socialism/communism. They also seem to enjoy importing tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from north Africa into EU in one big move, consistent with above (what rest of EU thinks is clearly not important). At least they don't seem to be having italian-level of corruption managed by mafia. With all that said it would be strange if they would be further, prosperity comes from hard work and discipline.
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Insanely ignorant comment.
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> With all that said it would be strange if they would be further, prosperity comes from hard work and discipline. It must really suck for all of you living outside of Spain, looking at us taking naps and being "inefficient" with all our communism, yet we have health care, and work/life balance and have time enough for family and hobbies. Of course, best is to just see it like there is no prosperity in the country, because there are no startup unicorns or billionaires buying up our media.
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You mean Spain the fastest growing European country by many metrics? Not sure, we're here, been chilling all summer, time to get back to work now :) What happened to the country you live in?
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PSOE happened
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I was been there. I mean socialist fantasy and everyone was equally poor except party members. It is astonishing to watch this shit happening in different countries with different cultures during long period of time. But with same end. And it is not prosperity. This time in Berlin as recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-election-housing-crisis-left-party/
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> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. But then again, discussing politics hardly ever gets less divisive here or elsewhere.
Since a few months archive.is is "unstable" from Spain. I thought the reason is the ISP but sometimes by just reloading it works... Can anybody shed some light?
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Since a few months archive.is is unstable regardless of where I connect from, Spain or not. Are others not seeing the same thing? Maybe 20% of the times I try to use it the servers aren't responding.
https://archive.is/2YdN9
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This is working fine for me in spain so far....
"502 Bad Gateway" (I'm in Spain)
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> "502 Bad Gateway" (I'm in Spain) Here you go, this should work: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimelannister.github.io/htmlpipe/?https://ppng.io/2YdN9_3 (an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page, might take some time to load though) (this uses htmlpipe, something I have made :-D)
Works fine for me, also Spain, Vodafone as the ISP. Edit: eeh, that's a different site than the one mentioned by the submission, why it wouldn't work? Edit2: Also, the error is wrong and server-side. If your ISP is trying to block the website, you'll get either a tls error that the certificate isn't matching, or for non-https sites you get redirected to the scary "You're contributing to something illegal blah blah".
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There’s a whole network of “archive.<something>” sites under the “archive.today” umbrella. I’ve seen .is .ps .md .ph and .at, at least.
This is so funny. An article about internet censorship of an archive site that requires an archive site to read! That’s Brilliant! :D
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Let me add a few more layers just for some fun and profit :-D Here[0] is an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page which archives the original article about internet censorship of an archive site that might require an archive of an archive site to read (given that people of spain cant now view archive.is in the first place or might have some difficulties doing so) [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimelannister.github.io/htmlpipe/?https://ppng.io/2YdN9_3 (If someone is perhaps interested and wants to see me talk more about what this is, then please read the blogpost that I had made for more info: https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-can-use-it-for-archive/ )
I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet. I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune. If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire. Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.
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How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that. And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.
UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8 (utf-8000.jb2170.com)
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This is like TIME CUBE ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube ) but for encoding nerds. edit: replaced false prophet site with wiki link for the original one and true timecube.com...lost to the sands of ...time.
FF bytes are an easy way to identify an invalid UTF-8 file. This idea doesn't have that property.
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As are FE, FD, FC, FB, FA, F9, F8, F7, F6 and F5.
True, but not all non-UTF8 bytestrings contain 0xFF bytes, so it’s not very useful in practice.
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Yes, I agree. It's more common for programs that say they support UTF-8 to not really do so at all. It wasn't that long ago that "UTF-8" support was often just single byte, so it was little more than ASCII. Even now it's common for programs to choke on the optional BOM. Yes, it is redundant, congratulations. The spec still explicitly allows it. Three and four byte character support is still not the best, too.
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> "UTF-8" support was often just single byte, so it was little more than ASCII "Single byte UTF-8" is ASCII. That's one of its most important properties. > Even now it's common for programs to choke on the optional BOM And they should... BOMs (and especially the hilarious UTF-8 BOM) are strictly a legacy Microsoft/Windows thing and should be abolished along with "extended" 8-bit ASCII encodings and UCS-2/UTF-16 (only UTF-32 makes sense, but should only be used at runtime to allow random access on UNICODE code points, but not for data exchange.
Telling a Computer to Do Things (will-keleher.com)
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I was sure this article would be about how we tell computers to do things now (writing prompts to an AI in plain English). I was wrong. Interesting nonetheless.
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Why are we assuming using the terminal is the only way of "telling a computer to do things"? Every way you interact with a machine, you are telling it to do things in theory. For example > At a fundamental level, I wasn’t able to tell my computer to accomplish anything that involved logic or stitching together multiple programs How can that be true if you are telling it to boot on into a os? It doesn't involve logic? Or stiching together multiple programs? Using a shell =\= telling a machine what to do on a broad level. You are just using the abstractions provided by the os. If you mean get better at shell so you can use it more efficiently than okay cool but that doesn't someone who uses a GUI doesn't "tell" the machine what to do as much as you.
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Good advice. I've gotten a ton of utility out of my shell without learning very many tools particularly well. If you take nothing else away from this, memorize the syntax of one-liner for loops, it has saved me so many times.
Google AI Studio fakes data deletion. VRP auto-banned me in 60s for reporting it (medium.com)
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https://github.com/istokovicsgyorgy79-jpg/CanusLupus/blob/main/SECURITY%20BYPASS%20%26%20COMPLIANCE%20FRAUD_%20UI%20_Permanent%20Deletion_%20Bypasses%20Documented%2024-Hour%20TTL%20via%20Pointer%20Unlinking%20(CWE-459)%20%5B563114351%5D%20-%20Issue%20Tracker.pdf And look at this, here is my latest ticket from IssueTracker, check it out xD I uploaded it here. Their automated bot kicked me out of the VRP, claiming I violated the 'Code of Conduct' just because I told the truth. To make it worse, the bot actually put in writing that this is 'Intended Behavior'! First of all, under the law, an automated bot shouldn't even have the authority to issue permanent bans without human review... and second, that idiot bot literally confessed in writing that their deceptive design is an 'intended feature'. So, if this goes to court, Google will literally be arguing with themselves, and I'll just be sitting there laughing at them xD
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I doubt much people using Google think that their data would just magically disappear the moment they click a button, to the contrary, I believe most qualified users would know that their data is forever stored, maybe "anonymized" sure (but can still be correlated back). If some users think this, have they question the Why would they do it? Why would Google lose money that way? ToS is irrelevant when it comes to what's running on their own private infra.
No, sorry. Promising to permanently delete data without doing it is the madness and should be illegal if it's not already. Hide the permeantly delete for privacy just a bit further and offer a soft delete to the user then for the normal case.
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But that's silly. If you don't trust a website with your cat photo, don't upload your cat photo the website. As I said above, the only thing my site does with your cat photo is show it back to you when you ask to look at it. No training. No selling your data to anybody. All I'm doing is storing it because you asked me to, and showing it to the people you ask me to. You can certainly ask me to stop showing it to people. But please don't get all excited about how your rights have somehow been violated. The fact is, people click delete buttons without thinking about it. Those people get way more mad when they can't undo that delete than you are now.
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That’s not silly. Your rhetoric is. “I don’t get it, why do people expect a promise to permanently delete your things to akshually do just that” Such a goofball stance on the subject tbh.
RSA-896 (saweis.net)
Not every bitcoin tx output. With taproot (P2TR), scripts are optional, and outputs can be based solely on Schnorr signatures.
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P2TR outputs have a script that always starts with OP_1. That script may or may not commit to a tapscript.
> Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use. I don't have any insight on modern GPU datacenters, but in decades past, some owned and operated datacenters didn put effort into making sure power management worked because the cost savings were worth it. I'm pretty sure I saw plans to shed load and power off servers if a utility made a demand response request or in case of loss of cooling. I wouldn't be surprised if some owned and operated data centers do regular full shutdowns at off peak... WOL, IPMI or RTC wakeup can bring them back when needed and if you already have a dynamic service orchestrator and setup times are acceptable, why not shut down if there's no actual priority work and there's also no idle priority opportunistic load either...
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No one does this. There is zero value, economic or otherwise, in turning off machines.
But Anthropic isn't paying for the electricity and cooling. They don't run their own data centers, they rent compute from providers who cover those costs. That's entirely why they can blow compute on the fun projects like this. If they had to pay extra for the electricity, they wouldn't do it.
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But training LLM's is also a task one can do whenever you have a spare GPU-minutes. I wonder why they don't have some kind of scheduler which makes sure there are never any idle minutes. One would imagine they at least would have autoscaling on their production serving workload and use the freed compute capacity for model training for example.
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