I'm pretty excited about this one. We've been using Paper internally at Dropbox (under a few different codenames) for more than a year, and we now run almost all our collaboration through it--design docs, specs, etc.
I'm on the infrastructure (storage) team, so I haven't really had anything to do with its development. My team's use started out as "dog fooding", like most internal adoption, but now we'd all be pretty pissed if it disappeared because it's simply way better than the array of tools we were using before. Great usability, speed, etc. Feels lightweight but powerful at the same time.
Awesome, a Dropbox employee commenting on this thread. Let me ask you some questions that I hope you might answer, but also understand if you aren't willing/able:
1. Will there ever be a zero-knowledge option at Dropbox? I just stopped using Dropbox in favor of SpiderOak because I wanted to start storing medical records in the cloud, and there's no way I'd do that where you (or your coworkers or hackers) could read them.
2. How do Dropbox employees feel about the Drop Dropbox campaign? Is Condoleezza Rice's involvement part of an overall culture or just a small anomaly (or somewhere in between)?
The background behind it is we evaluate this option (and debate it internally) all the time, and it's neither in line with the type of services we are expected offer (collab, etc), and there is insufficient customer demand for it. It is also dangerous, since nontechnical users lose their private keys with startling frequency, and it's difficult to explain to them that we're completely unable to help them when this happens.
We do, however, totally know there is a small slice of technical users that want to treat Dropbox as an opaque "backup service", and they're willing to take on the risk of key management. So we refer them to one of our partners that specializes in providing this layer on top of Dropbox.
Never say never, so we may decide to offer this type of account in the future--possibly to businesses. We would have to alter or disable large swaths of collaboration features that require server-side representations/alterations of data. But, as I said, it's a product feature under constant consideration.
2.
Once again, I have to emphasize, this is a personal take, not Dropbox's take.
I sympathize with the tinfoil hat crowd, but I think most Dropbox employees find it a disappointing take on the company that has always strived to make the very best cloud storage product possible, on all platforms.
We are in a segment (cloud sync/collab, not backup) with some very, very large players. Storage is not a loss leader to us. It is not subsidized by a massive advertising network capitalizing on customer behavioral data. Our customers are not what's for sale--our storage services are.
If you or your business does not like our services--does not consider them fast, secure, etc--enough to pay for them--we don't get revenue.
I very much doubt any of our competitors cares as much about your data staying private, available, usable, etc, as we do. There is no other way for us to capture value from the market then make you all ridiculously pleased with Dropbox and Dropbox's treatment of your data.
So I would ask you to imagine what the culture of a company looks like that is incentivized thusly. We obsess over doing the right thing with your data. So threads like this are hard to read, to be honest.
This is inflammatory insulting language and your use makes me trust Dropbox even less. The thing is that post Snowden companies like the one you work for are assumed to be in the wrong on privacy and the "tinfoil hat crowd" as you put it are demonstrably correct. Companies (and individuals) don't use Dropbox because they trust it (anymore) they use it because they think that they documents they store there don't have any important intellectual property that the US government can pass to their competitors/ will contribute much to the sum total of what the NSA data store knows about them.
> 1. Will there ever be a zero-knowledge option at Dropbox?
JungleDisk provides this. It offers a Dropbox-like native interface powered directly by S3 with support for client-side encryption. That is, your computer encrypts the data locally and then stores it directly into S3. You provide your AWS credentials to the client at setup time.
Not needing to depend on any company beyond AWS to store my data appealed to me. Beyond the trust that one must place in the JungleDisk client itself, at least.
It used to be available to buy as a single software program, but now it's a monthly subscription service.
I'm just a user of Dropbox and I don't even have acquaintances there. And I'm not an US citizen, I've blamed the US repeatedly for their external policies, so I can definitely sympathize with anti-war efforts and public shaming of the people that contributed.
But this smells like negative PR triggered on purpose by competition. It also happened with Mozilla's Brendan Eich as well.
One has to wonder, why doesn't this happen with bigger companies, like Microsoft, Google or Apple? I can tell you why. It's because they've got big PR and legal departments. But pumping money to avoid PR disasters is not the same thing as having a moral consciousness.
Plus the idea that Dropbox is more susceptible to wiretapping than the equivalents provided by Google, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon is absolutely laughable given that Dropbox is the only one on this list for which cloud storage is the product being sold and not something complementary. But yeah, fight the man.
He didn't leave Dropbox for Google, Apple, or Amazon. He switched to SpiderOak. Their selling point is that everything is encrypted client-side and they have no access to unencrypted files.
I have not yet abandoned DropBox. I am still paying ~$10/mo for their services. But I sympathize with the GP. Those questions are exactly the things I want answers to as well.
The team feature just totally hosed my reputation. I sent a team invite (because it was implied that this will be needed for Paper) and it's taken over a bunch of our team members' drop boxes, disabled 2FA, and permalinked people's personal files to a corporate-esque group that they can't unsubscribe from.
hey, i believe anyone can leave the team from dropbox.com/team. the team feature in Dropbox, in its current form, is meant to be used for "work" teams. Check out this help article -- https://www.dropbox.com/help/9124
Something you really need to fix at Dropbox is multiple account support. The frankenmonster where you psuedo-merge exactly one personal account into exactly one business account might have seemed clever internally, but is a mess and not what we want. Google do a good job on multiple account support - learn from them.
There is usually some pitiful excuse about free users being able to abuse the system, but screwing things up for your paying users (all my personal and business accounts are paid) is stupid. The major thing keeping me and related companies going with Dropbox now is that you support Linux. If Google or someone else fixes that then you are likely toast!
Check out https://github.com/odeke-em/drive if you are interested in Google Drive support on Linux. Its far from perfect, but has worked quite well for my uses.
Great perspective to hear. I sincerely hope your teams keep up the good work, and this announcement comes at a good time for me. I'm helping to build up a team and was telling a friend today that I hoped Dropbox would start releasing more email like tools.
Paper seems closer to what I want for my team. Release an email server on top and I'll buy as much Dropbox storage as I can.
Out of curiosity, would anyone know if Paper supports markdown? I like the fast lightweight formatting it provides. (edit: appears an earlier comment says its supports a subset of markdown )
My apologies for bring this up again, as I'm sure the developers worked hard on this feature, but since Rice joined Dropbox's board (http://www.drop-dropbox.com/) I'd have severe concerns using anything released by Dropbox.
With a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service.
I think all users should carefully consider if they are happy with using Dropbox in light of the views of their board members.
..and of course the data mining startup that Eric Schmidt is using in an attempt to get Clinton elected as president (the same one that worked for Obama):
Many companies in Silicon Valley are tied to bad politicians and politics. At this point, it's almost necessary to survive.
My point is that if you are using this as a basis for services that you will or will not use, you will be left with a computer running GEOS...and no access to the outside world.
I just don't put any data on any cloud provider that I don't want the government to see. Bittorrent Sync works pretty well as a personal cloud provider.
Not op. I don't trust Google. In a transition period I do use some of their services, but I don't recommend doing that, and I'm slowly migrating away. Except perhaps for using their crawler (as in, having my public content be visible through Google search -- I've recently moved to DDG for my searches).
I also consume some content from youtube, but frankly the UI isn't all that great, and I mostly do it for music -- so I'm moving off that to -- to a lesser degree.
> My point is that if you are using this as a basis for services that you will or will not use, you will be left with a computer running GEOS...and no access to the outside world.
Fortunately we have some recourse between Replicant and Cyanogen (helped by Google using open licenses, even if their ASOP effort is... not all that friendly towards enabling all users to compile custom distributions for their handsets) -- and most other services can be self-hosted.
There aren't really any viable trusted/open hardware, so the degree of trust we can put in our computing/communication equipment is bounded -- but it's certainly viable to have a much more trustworthy (IMNHO) experience than relying on services designed on a business model that has spying on users as a core business model.
For "cloud files", I'm planning to use http://www.sxdrive.io/ backed by a rented server. Not perfect privacy, but a far cry from just pushing things to a random SaaS. At some point I hope git annex and/or IPFS might be a viable alternative. I don't see much point in using closed source software as an alternative, if the goal is to move to a "less untrustworthy" platform.
> My point is that if you are using this as a basis for services that you will or will not use, you will be left with a computer running GEOS...and no access to the outside world.
That's extreme and unfair, and a little like telling someone that if they oppose American drone warfare, torture, or the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, they should move to another country.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We should encourage as much protest as possible.
People like to criticize Dropbox's appointment of Condoleezza Rice for much more substantial reasons than American party politics. 'Drop Dropbox' [1] offers an overview that, while biased, does address that accusation in particular.
A lot of my personal moral concerns with Dr. Rice's appointment are as a result of actions she condoned or advocated for during her time in government. Don Knuth's letter to her in 2002 expresses my feelings on this topic much better than I think I can myself.
For what it's worth, that page gives Dropbox and Apple the same score. (5/5: 1 point on each of 5 questions.) If you find this surprising, check out their evaluation criteria; they might not be the same as yours. I find the 5th criteria somewhat arbitrary for instance, although I sort of see what they're trying to do with it.
Have you seen Apple's designs, code, and fabrication plants? Why wouldn't Apple capitulate to possible demands to claim privacy, while actually spreading compromised devices?
Upvoted. I personally don't care enough and I really, really find Dropbox useful, but I also support holding companies accountable for whatever decisions society deems controversial. Thanks for reminder!
It's tempting to criticize the decision to hire Rice based on weak spots in her track record, but we should resist the urge.
In reality, Rice could've been recruited because of her relationships with top govt. security officials, in the hopes of facilitating more conversations, in which Dropbox has more leverage, to push back against mass surveillance.
If something like this isn't the case, then firing Rice wouldn't be a resolution anyway.
I stopped using Dropbox after the Rice appointment. Here's the thing - I'm not concerned that she's going to spy on my stuff or let the govt spy on my stuff any more than, say, Google. I'm concerned that she lacks integrity. Now, either the board knows this and doesn't care (b/c they lack integrity) or doesn't know this and doesn't care (which makes me question their judgment). Perhaps they appointed her b/c of her ties to govt and academia in the hope that she could help open new markets. OK. Has she? Perhaps they appointed her b/c they want to see more women and people of color on startup boards. Bravo! Wrong choice. And this is coming from a person of color.
There seems to be this misperception of board members as individually highly influential on the actions of a company.
Rice was probably hired for several of the reasons that you mentioned above. Ultimately though, it's hard to make useful speculation from outside of the company, with little knowledge of the company's long-term goals.
Considering that she's a well known apologist of mass surveillance, what you're saying is that maybe they are simply using her and abusing her trust to undermine her own positions.
That's not exactly reassuring vis-a-vis their ethical character.
Leaders of large companies usually have to manage a wide array of disparate and sometimes diametrically opposed interests.
The guys at Dropbox are smart; isn't the "obvious" assumption that Rice could be useful in helping them to better manage some of these interests (e.g. potentially reducing govt. snooping by facilitating a more level playing field for comms. and negotiation)?.
If by reasonable, you mean "rational" in the sense of rational choice theory, and if by "utilitarians" you mean "maximize of their own individual utility" rather than "adherents to the philosophical school of utilitarianism", then, yes, all reasonable people are utilitarians, by definition.
Also see Rice's partaking in justifying torture, holding people without charging them with a crime, and indefinite detention. And that is just the things that have come out. Any company willing to associate with such a person deserves to go under.
Wow. This is news to me. I have been a long time paying customer of Dropbox. This makes me uneasy. Time to start migrating away from it. Does anyone have recommendations on Dropbox Alternatives?
I use ownCloud [1] on a pretty low end VPS and the recent released are greatly improved over the earlier versions. The clients (mobile, desktop) are also much better now.
I liked SpiderOak a lot for its security, but sadly, it was never very reliable as a backup or sync service. I spent more time troubleshooting and rebuilding databases and clearing serverside caches and so forth in 8 months there than I have in almost 5 years of other services. And because of that, I never really felt like I could trust it as a backup.
Also, realize that SO is a poor substitute for Dropbox, as it's only really a backup service. Although it includes a sync option which works passably, the moment you access your files from a mobile device, you upload your keys to the server, and zero-knowledge goes poof. And even if you're willing to give that up, I've never met a mobile app which allowed you to access and manipulate files in the ways Dropbox does. You can do some basic "share just this file" stuff, but it's a very different product.
I really hope that was just because I was on it when they were growing massively due to the NSA leaks, but sadly, for me, they were a textbook example of "Great idea, bad execution".
> Another benefit of SpiderOak is that they de-duplicate your data, so you may end up using less space on SpiderOak than you do on your own machine.
This benefit soon disappears due to two reasons:
1. If your files change, SpiderOak saves versions of them indefinitely, with each taking up space (of course, all the deltas and stuff). There is no simple way to set it up so that file versions older than X days/years get deleted. The SpiderOak client is completely useless if you want to delete older versions of files because you'd have to wade through all your directories and subdirectories looking for files with multiple versions.
2. The SpiderOak client has also been buggy and ends up creating file versions of unchanged files too (like photos you may have saved once on your computer and never touched). So there's no easy way for you to get to specific places where files have several versions stored and do some cleanup.
This cleanup of older versions matters a lot more if you have a smaller account quota, lesser free space on your account, and you're not willing to pay for the $129 a year 1TB option that is heavily pushed (compared to the other tiers) by skewed pricing on SpiderOak's part.
Overall, SpiderOak is still better though. Dropbox is more dishonest in its approach to deduplication. Dropbox dedpulicates data across user accounts (so if you and I store the same free eBook from Project Gutenberg on our Dropbox accounts, Dropbox saves only one copy) and deduplicates data within your user account for files you may have replicated across folders. But in both the cases it treats your space quota as if deduplication is not done at all, effectively charging you for more than the space you're actually using.
Dunno about SpiderOak, but the way Tarsnap does it, is that as blocks are encrypted and uploaded, the client keeps metadata about them locally (presumably an hash, size, etc). Then that metadata is also encrypted and uploaded to the server. When it wants to upload more blocks, it just looks at that metadata and skips duplicated blocks, updating only the metadata to point to the existing block.
You can share files with other people, similar to the way you can with Dropbox. That might indicate that encryption is done per-file (which is actually a little less secure, so who knows).
I haven't researched it, but it could work like this: scan the local machine, find duplicates, upload unique files, and then create links to any place a file is duplicated. It all happens locally, so only encrypted data is ever uploaded. Some tiny bit of info about the structure of the file system might be transferred and known by SpiderOak, but I can't conceive of a situation where that matters.
Check your connections. I moved away from Bittorrent Sync because I couldn't easily stop it hitting external trackers, or if I did, sync stopped working completely (especially on the Android client).
It is possible to turn off the tracker and use "predefined hosts" instead - see details here: http://help.getsync.com/customer/portal/articles/1901264
Note that the "predefined hosts" must be able to access each other (once you turn off the tracker for a folder you also disable NAT traversal)
Yup, I love Unison. Been using it for years at home. Though I've been worried that it's not being actively maintained. But I guess as long as it works...
I think their position is they no longer have someone paid to work on it, as the research phase has ended. But it is still maintained. Albeit, slowly. And them using a rather outdated website and svn to host doesn't really do them favors. They need to get someone in there to modernize it a bit. Switch it to git. Doesn't even have to be hosted on github, but somewhere more visible would help.
After trying out Unison, Sync, and plain old rsync, Syncthing turned out to be the best of the bunch for me. Open source, modern interface, relatively simple to set up, seemingly quite secure... Hard not to like it.
Be careful with rsync, whose original purpose is mirroring, not backups. Specifically, if you're using it as a backup system of any kind, you want to use the --delete-after option, or else your receiver might delete the file before the sender even finds out the hard disk is corrupt (--delete-before is default, which is dangerous for a backup system).
You may also want to set the --max-delete option, to avoid the scenario where the sender doesn't have the volume mounted, resulting in the receiver deleting everything.
Be also aware that rsync is completely unencrypted, so you need to use it in conjuction with sshfs, ecryptfs, or some other method if you want security.
I haven't "moved" yet (which is to say most of my data isn't synced, except for what I keep in Mercurial repositories, code, configs and notes) - but at the top of my shortlist (mainly for convenient access on mobile devices) is:
For syncing a mix of files, I'd probably not go for rsync, unision handles "real world" (messy) syncs across files better. For backup I personally use duplicity driven by backup ninja (encrypted with GnuPG). But I've yet to do any restores, so I don't really have backup yet ;-)
For anything tex-ish, Mercurial works fine for me. I'm not sure if git (today) is any less capable of handling small binary files -- I'm guessing not. But mercurial text UI/UX is much friendlier IMHO.
I have great hopes for IPFS, but personal/private use is still on the roadmap, so it's not usable for what I personally would need most. But I'm more and more confident they'll get there.
Sharing information under pressure from the government is different from asking for leadership from a war criminal and co-architect of an incredibly shady administration.
In the first case, it's something that companies can fight back against (and some have) as long as their hands aren't tied by unconstitutional, secret pressure.
In the second case, it's the company actively going out to ask for that kind of influence on their organization. And, furthermore, Dropbox's reason to exist is to keep your privacy. It's not like a gaming site or something. Leaking your Dropbox information would almost always compromise your privacy/safety.
Personally, I consider all data I store in "the cloud" volatile and non-secure. I am confident I can retain IP for the data I upload to services but that's about it. I have no guarantees any of the devices I use are not compromised so the security of my external data feels like a moot point.
Don't apologize. Bring this up every single time. It's relevant every time Dropbox is mentioned, and easy for them to change.
> the views of their board members
It's not just the views. It's also the basic resource of trust: Dropbox is not a trustless vendor - their basic service requires trust. And yet they have a board member who has unambiguously and without apology violated client trust in her previous engagement.
I disagree. If the thread is about Dropbox in relation to their security/privacy, then yes, it's relevant. In a thread announcing a new service, with no other mention to privacy? Not so much.
That said, I'm not saying it's not important to bring it up. It's very much important to discuss the implications of something like that, and people clearly didn't know about it judging by the comments here. But I disagree that this is the right place for it; a repost of that thread from 2 years ago I'd consider more appropriate for this discussion.
I mean, if we're going to be that vague, we can say the internet is relevant as a discussion topic because Dropbox's business relies on it.
The security of this one feature might be relevant, but the security of the company, especially in the context of a completely separate decision that isn't at all related to this product is, IMO, not relevant here.
My concern is that such a topic is going to dwarf the discussion of this feature, which is really what we should be discussing here. You can already see it happening; the comment thread is the top thread here, and most of the comments on this story are related to it. So while that shows people are interested in that particular topic and its implications, it's also by far dwarfing the real discussion topic for this link, which is the Dropbox Paper product.
> Dropbox's business is enabling users to share content.
It's worse than that. If sharing was their only business, as opposed to backup, storage of data -- then it wouldn't matter as much if you could trust them or not. If your intention is to share data, then that data shouldn't be considered as secure any more -- even if you trust the person(s) with whom you share it.
But as Dropbox does more than just enable sharing of data, trust is paramount. Without trust, docker isn't a service, it's a liability (I don't necessarily I think the addition of a pro-surveillance board member makes much difference for how much I trust Dropbox, I'm making the point that trust is/should be a core business value of Dropbox -- if you can't trust it, I don't see how you can use it (without engaging in doublethink).
It's not her views on abortion or gun control or whatever else are the issue. It's her views on privacy and the company being trusted with very private data.
Fair enough, but I think the context of Rice versus the public outcry against the Mozilla CEO's personal beliefs is a worthwhile distinction to keep in mind.
This is something I'd personally use. A lot of alternatives exist on the market but none of them look as refined as Paper.
Paper looks really similar to http://onword.co (by Daniel Eden at Dropbox) regarding the minimalism and limitation on formatting. I guess Hackpad team is working on the backend.
I just hope this project will not end up like Mailbox. I've been using Mailbox on OS X for half a year. Although once in a while I encounter some bugs, it's still very usable. A few months ago, they released an upgrade from 0.4 to 0.7. The UI became uglier in orders of magnitude and many basic functionalities just broke. After experiencing it for 3 days I switched back to Mail.app. I have sent quite a few bug reports and suggestions, but got no response. I wonder if they still care about Mailbox at all.
Not Dropbox employee, but I think they don't care about Mailbox. Especially since Gmail Inbox now has support for Google Apps hosted mailboxes (my primary Mailbox use case, though the org hasn't activated Inbox), and that app is probably superior to Mailbox in every way.
My first thought - don't know if it's an issue for them, but with all the "Papers" and recently Pencil by Apple their product names are becoming less unique by the day.
I'm really surprised that only one person has mentioned Quip this whole time. Quip is already solving this problem and -- i have to say -- is doing a stellar job at it. Simple and minimalist approach to collaborative content/document writing. Ive been using Quip for over a year now across multiple organisations. Its probably the most important tool for my company in terms of knowledge sharing.
Dropbox should buy Evernote, especially since they're in trouble, and fix one of the biggest problems with that service by making it sync using Dropbox (and making its data easily accessible).
Culturally speaking, Dropbox and Evernote do not fit. I've been a long time Dropbox user and in the process I've also used Google Drive and played with OneDrive.
If there's something that sets apart Dropbox from its competition is that (1) Dropbox is simpler (2) without compromising on the really important parts, like having a history or Linux support and (3) the set of available features work really well. Not sure what the right word for it is. Minimalism?
At times it's annoying of course. For example Dropbox's native client is the best, but their web interface sucks. Like for example if a folder is too big, the web interface will refuse to move it. Comparing that web interface with Google Drive is not even funny, though the native client and the cross-platform support more than makes up for the shortcomings of the web interface.
But going back to Evernote - seriously, it's a piece of shit and I always wondered why people use it. I would rather have Dropbox build something minimalist by themselves than to acquire Evernote. Or let others build things that integrate with Dropbox. I just bought licenses for 4 different operating systems for 1Password precisely because it integrates with Dropbox.
A neat development, and I am consistently intrigued and impressed by collaboration tools for teams. As an internal tool, I could see it being constructive in some limited scenarios. If anybody can mention instances where using something like this or Google Docs with multiple people at the same time, I'd love to hear your stories to level-up my understanding of use-case scenarios.
But...in my business experience with teams across a few different industries, however, I'd say "No" so fast you'd think I had some kind of inherent bias.
Well, I think I do. The modern conference call, speed of data transfer, and online presentation tools that exist should - and do - work just fine when there is one expert at the controls. Usually that expert was me. Taking disparate pieces from different people and getting them in right, often in real-time, was part of my job. Another part of my job was helping people "talk through" what they intended to communicate, and help phrasing and spelling along the way.
Examples include responses to RFPs in a Word template, or any one of the development phases in a PowerPoint 11x17 or slide deck. These would eventually be client-facing, and could be done on the fly if so desired (rather than input/output versioning, often hosted on SharePoint). Then, when finished, it was suitable for production.
I don't see how Paper is an improvement on this process, but rather, a situation of allowing too many cooks in the kitchen. Again, I'm only speaking from my realm, and take pride in learning about new things (like JamKazam) that are still developing or even ahead of their time. YMMV.
I used to swear by Moleskine A5 notebooks but the quality seemed to change so I switched to Leuchtturm1917 [1] several years ago and haven't looked back
They are but I prefer the Silvine A6 twinwire pads, quality isn't as good but they work out about a pound each in bulk, paper quality is excellent and pages are easy to tear out.
I absolutely love the feel of a gel pen, and tried out the Pentel Energel Liquid Gel Pen (picked it up at Walmart on a lark). Its phenomenal. I still get the gel feel while writing in my Moleskin, but the ink dries in under a second (I've tested this!). Very satisfied (its the only pen I purchase now).
I'm using the 0.7mm point, but intend to try the 0.5mm point in short order, as most of my writing is diagramming infrastructure/code/etc.
After the disaster that is Carousel (particularly on iOS), I am extremely reluctant to use any other dropbox apps.
Carousel has had major bugs in their iOS client that have not been fixed in nearly a year. I'm talking core features, like background upload of photos not working, which could have led to the loss of priceless photos of my kids, had I not been more vigilant before taking my phone in for service.
Its a fair bet that a goodly number of dropbox customers have lost photos due to this bug. No fix in sight.
As a counterpoint, I quite like Carousel, and I haven't noticed any problems. Background uploads work for me, although it seems to wait until I am on wifi to upload.
I think Dropbox would really benefit from integrating something like Pushbullet. Both apps are concerned with syncing. If I need to send a file to one of my devices, I use Dropbox. If I need to send a link, I use Pushbullet. There's no reason why it couldn't be a single app.
Somehow simple note taking is something that really hasn't been done right by anyone. This seems like it could be nice, but I'd like it a lot more if I could host it myself.
this ^^^^ especially with regard to companies. At least in the company where I work, the inability to self host is a deal breaker. Is this different for many/any?
Really? If so I'm interested. I would love to help with a project like this, I'm tired of passing word docs, excel sheets around to customers with the chance that I might have something out of date.
Another Dropbox employee here (but not part of the Paper product team or engineering). We're all super excited about this beta launch because it totally has changed how we work internally and liberates you to be creative I feel (and we've had and still do have access to a lot of different tools). Happy to answer any questions around the productivity aspect of questions curious people may have about the product who don't have access to the beta yet!
I was a relatively heavy Hackpad user (still using it, actually) and have been beta testing Notes/Paper for a while - it started off very Hackpadish, but has evolved a bit, enough that it may actually be suitable for my small company to finally migrate off of Google Sites.
For me, the biggest missing piece for Hackpad, and why it was always a non-starter for any serious knowledge collection purposes was its lack of hierarchical structure. A few weeks ago, Paper finally added support for folders, which while still a bit clunky/not-ideal (the sidebar doesn't give you a tree nav, there's no way to see the whole structure), it at least meets that minimum bar for organizing say, more than 20 notes.
I haven't done much group collaboration work (the teams/org stuff was just introduced, and honestly, the thought of Dropbox completely messing up my/my coworkers personal Dropbox accounts terrifies me - the horror stories posted in the thread don't help assuage my fears, and I am not sure I have a conceptual understanding/trust of how Dropbox models accounts/teams), and while Folders have permissions, I can't figure out how to assign/inherit permissions (crucial for working with clients, contractors), but on the bright side, it's not literally insane like Google Sites' permission system (it involves modifying global inheritances to give access to specific sub-trees).
In most other ways, it is like Hackpad++ - mostly like you would have expected it to evolve: great feeling typeahead search, instant editing, OT-based multi-user editing, and improved/extended embeds, and adds annotations, which I can see being conceptually pretty useful.
The biggest thing missing for me now is offline editing - it's not strictly a requirement for our office use, since that's online-only as well, but there are so many times traveling/offsite where it's a huge pain. The other things are mostly niggles - ways to actually see the site/document structure, the option to attach files (especially images) w/o them being directly embedded, a way to view/track embeds/media/files only, but overall it may be the best wiki-like app out there for small groups now, especially those that hate traditional (modal editing) wikis.
Dropbox two account works great. It's specifically designed to keep your personal Dropbox completely separate (and unscrewup-able) from your company assets. We built it because people had been intermingling personal Dropboxes with company assets and it created messes for them when they left the company, etc.
Anecdotally, I've had my personal Dropbox account since 2007 (was one of the first 1000 beta users), and my family manages tons of stuff in it. I started using two account in 2013 when joined Dropbox (the company), before we released it publicly. Your existing Dropbox gets moved to "Dropbox (Personal)" and a second folder gets created called "Dropbox (Your Company)". Nothing changes about the behavior of "Dropbox (Personal)".
No problems whatsoever with the separation of personal and company--and that reflects the vast majority of our users' experiences as well onboarding a team.
As another user in this thread mentioned, Dropbox doesn't support 3+ accounts, so if you work for multiple companies (who all use Dropbox), that might be a problem.
Just a guess, I think the other problem report in this thread was someone who wasn't expecting Dropbox "for teams" to create a completely new type of account for everyone at his/her company. They probably use basic or pro accounts in an ad-hoc way at their company and were unfamiliar with the teams product and the fact it is distinct.
It doesn't support Markdown in the sense that your document isn't saved as plain text, but just about every feature of markdown is available: headings, lists, code blocks, inline code, and horizontal rules are all supported. The only ones that aren't are the inline formatting options (bold, italic, underline, links), but these all have the standard Cmd/Ctrl keyboard shortcuts, so it's basically just as good.
Your answer to my second question is interesting because I kind of understand the tin-foil-hat argument, but I don't totally see how Rice would create additional pressure to violate privacy. She's a civilian now and, presumably, completely locked out of the current administration.
To me (someone without a tin-foil hat), I think the issue is more symbolic. Rice is a terrible human being and a seasoned deceiver of the public. It's almost like we're asking ourselves, "If you'd allow her to be part of your leadership, what else would you do?"
When I've thought about it, that wasn't enough to counterbalance exactly what you mentioned -- the idea that a single privacy breach at Dropbox could mean the end of the company. She's barely a part of the leadership and may have almost no say in what the company does. The ultimate decisions are probably still in the hands of the executive team. That's why I was a customer until very recently.
All that said, I don't understand how Rice is valuable enough to counterbalance the bad PR from the tech community. Tech-y people get small companies to adopt certain brands over others, and then those small companies grow into large companies. Maybe I'm naive, and Rice offers some amazing connections or something?
Either way, if much of the Dropbox team has your attitude and values, I can honestly say I hope the company has a prosperous, breach-free future ahead of it.
> Rice is a terrible human being and a seasoned deceiver of the public.
This is a pretty callous thing to say, even for HN. I think there's a real discussion to be had here about data privacy and the power of law enforcement agencies, but demonizing Condoleezza feels like creating a straw man. She's just a board member-- it's not like she's VP of Product or CEO or something.
I get your point, but calling her a "terrible human being" is kind of extreme, don't you think? Not sure that statement adds to a well-reasoned argument. I personally don't agree with all her politics or behavior, but I don't think she ranks up there with the truly "terrible" humans. She was a professor at Stanford, is an accomplished musician, has done a lot for international US diplomacy, was the first woman in many of her roles, etc. etc.
As part of senior leadership pushing for the war in Iraq under false pretenses, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, thousands of Americans, and burned nearly 2 trillion dollars, I'd say she's earned the adjective of "terrible human being".
Yes, we may not agree with his decisions - but I guarantee that if you go through history, you will find many political decisions that each of us would disagree with.
I may not like a lot of the decisions my political leaders make (I'm Australian).
However, I don't pretend for a second that political leadership is an easy calling - it's a tough job, and a lot of pressure - which can affect people in different ways.
I dislike armchair pundits who will dissect every decision, and then try to force it into their own black/white view of things.
At the end of the day, they made the call to topple Saddam Hussein, and take out Iraq.
I don't think anybody will argue that Saddam was a great human being, or that his regime wasn't responsible for atrocities - for me, the question was more that did we (well, America and its allies) have better things to do with their soldiers and money?
And look, we took out one dictator and put in a democratic government - and gave them aid and training - but it remains to be seen what they can make of it.
Agreed! People forget that the majority from both House and Senate voted to authorize the war in Iraq. I've read one of her biographies (she released a few of them), and came away very impressed with her honesty and accomplishments. By the same argument, you should consider almost every president's administration liable for committing war crimes, for example:
Roosevelt -- WWII -- Carpet bombing of almost every city in Japan and Germany.
Truman -- WWII -- Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Eisenhower -- WWII commander and Korean war.
Kennedy -- Vietnam
Johnson -- Vietnam
Nixon -- Concluded Vietnam
Carter -- MIA -- didn't do anything, attacked by a rabbit.
Reagan -- Some small conflicts that everybody already forgot about.
Clinton -- Bombing of Kosovo
Bush -- Afghanistan and Iraq
Obama -- Drone attacks that have killed thousands including innocents
This wasn't about cheating - this was about war leaders making decisions during times of war or conflict (or what they believed was war).
As a President (or political leader) you will need to make hard decisions.
And you are guaranteed to annoy some sub-section of the population by your decisions.
And like it or not, conflict (or war) is a part of our world - and as a leader, you need to make tough calls.
We can dissect those decisions afterwards - and offer our own commentary. But I am not arrogant enough to think that I would make a better President or political leader - I don't have the stomach for those sorts of decisions, or a thick enough skin.
My question to you - do you think you could make better calls in each of those cases?
Personal opinion - I didn't agree with a lot of Bush Jr's decisions. However, I think he did the best with the information and advice he had. Whilst some people may not like him, I don't think anybody has actually ever accused him of being outright deceptive, or misleading? (Stupid, perhaps, but he was anything if not earnest).
Another thing - often on HN, we don't understand that we aren't really the majority - we're in our own little echo chamber here (for better or worse).
Most of us are fairly affluent, technologically advanced - and let's face it, out of touch with the average person.
And some of us are also part of the tin-foil hat crowd =).
Take the Snowden leaks - a lot of us are up in arms about the invasion of liberties (and possibly for good reason).
But for many average people, Snowden is nothing more than an American traitor - and the fact that we're spying on other nations? "Gee, I thought that's what our government was meant to do?". A lot of the people outside of tech don't really care that much about the invasion of privacy - they are so far removed from that sort of thing that it doesn't really impact them (or so they think).
"has done a lot for international US diplomacy" is what we're talking about here. As of 9/11, the US enjoyed unquestionable moral superiority and absolute world support. Then Sec. Rice squandered that by lying to the world, invading Iraq, and creating the current quagmire, which includes the deaths of probably hundreds of thousands of innocents.
These attempts to blackball people in their professional lives for their political opinions (see Brendan Eich at Mozilla) and political decisions (this DropDropBox stuff) are really no better than the Hollywood Blacklisting during the McCarthy witch-hunts that we all look back on as a dark chapter of American history. It really goes against the spirit of tolerance and plurality that America has embodied at its best. I can only hope that just like for McCarthyism, we will all wake up from this binge in a few years and realize just how far we've strayed from our best ideals.
Rice is not being attacked for her “political opinions”, and euphemistically describing torture, assassination, indefinite imprisonment without trial, war under false pretenses, mass surveillance, etc. as a “political decision” is disingenuous.
Direct participation in war crimes is not comparable to being vaguely associated with American leftists during the mid-20th century.
What Rice contributed to was a violation of American and international law, a betrayal of her oath of office and of the public, and a shameful episode in our history.
I too hope we can “wake up from this binge in a few years and realize just how far we've strayed from our best ideals”.
If we had any such ideals, the justice department would have aggressively prosecuted the criminals involved, up to the highest levels of government.
> These attempts to blackball people in their professional lives for their political opinions (see Brendan Eich at Mozilla) and political decisions (this DropDropBox stuff) is really no better than the Hollywood Blacklisting during the McCarthy witch-hunts that we all look back on as a dark chapter of American history.
In this case her political opinions directly affect the business she joined.
"Tolerance" should never apply to bigotry. Fifty years ago, we'd be having this debate about the version of Brendan Eich that believed black and white people shouldn't get married. Society didn't tolerate bigotry then, and it shouldn't tolerate it now.
Brendan Eich has the right to his opinion, and his employers (and customers) have the right to fire him for them. Political beliefs are not a protected class.
(As for Condoleezza Rice, she participated in war-mongering, which is totally different from "political opinions".)
To the credit of Mozilla's board, Eich wasn't fired. He quit because the hoopla made doing his job impossible. It was the right move on his part because his presence became damaging to Mozilla.
To your point about it being fine to fire people for their political beliefs, the legal right to do something doesn't say much about whether you should. I think everyone would be appalled if it became common practice for employers to look through every campaign you ever donated to, every cause you ever lent support to, to find something to disqualify you over. It also does nothing but further alienate and divide people.
Going back to the McCarthy era, there was nothing illegal about firing communists. And the people doing it had lots of reasons to think they were doing the right thing. The US was in an existential battle against an empire that had worldwide gulags and purges as its goal. Stalin was a proven master of infiltration and palace intrigue. More recent evidence shows that McCarthy's paranoia was not ill-founded -- Soviet intelligence had infiltrated large parts of American society and government. It was still morally wrong to fire people for their political opinions. Especially if they aren't loudly advertising them.
I'm on the infrastructure (storage) team, so I haven't really had anything to do with its development. My team's use started out as "dog fooding", like most internal adoption, but now we'd all be pretty pissed if it disappeared because it's simply way better than the array of tools we were using before. Great usability, speed, etc. Feels lightweight but powerful at the same time.
Anyway, hopefully you all like it too.