dropbox reconsidered

Dang, do you have a link to this announcement? (maybe post it in dropbox :^) All my old shared links are going to stop working! (what a pain...) And I can't make new shared links? (That doesn't make any sense... what's the point of dropbox then?)

George H.

On Friday, December 16, 2016 at 11:13:57 AM UTC-8, George Herold wrote: ...

...

As I read the email I received the shared links will be ok but the Public folder will not.

It seems a rather subtle difference.

It is explained here:

kevin

It's an email. It says

Hi John,

Public folder was the first sharing method we introduced, and since

together with your team.

Dropbox Pro users will be able to use the Public folder until September 1, 2017. After that date the files in your Public folder will become private, and links to these files will be deactivated. Your files will remain safe in Dropbox.

create new shared links. Just make sure to send the new URLs to your collaborators.

In addition to shared links, we have a number of sharing options designed to make collaboration easier and give you more control. To learn more, visit our Help Center.

The Dropbox team

Why are the idiots going to break the existing file links? They don't need to do that.

Yes. Complain to them!

You can make new shared links somehow, but all your old links to the public folder will stop working.

Can you see these? They are in a non-public folder.

yes because you have given out the links

the terminology is confusing but I think it is thus:

public folder = ANYONE can see it even without a link. They can find it using some search tool.

private folder = ANYONE can see it if they have the link.

Since you have given us those links, we can see the contents.

If you don't want anyone to see the contents except yourself, then don't give out the links. (I always wondered about the ability to "guess" correct links at random to someones random stuff?)

If public folders are going away, I think that means the files can no longer be found by a search but still ANYONE with the correct (new) link will be able to see it.

Why can't they honor the old links?

Thanks Kevin, I found that page, but to be honest it made no sense. I think because I never made or had a public folder, everything is OK (at least for me... for now....) George H.

he

work

Yeah those work. It sounds like only the "public folder" is going away. (I don't have a public folder.. so I'm OK.)

George

The "file name" portion of the link is completely superfluous. E.g., try:

Probably they have uncovered some bug that potentially enables others to guess working links in the old scheme, and they updated their link structure to solve that.

Now, they have to phase out the use of old links to finally close that hole.

he

work

as they claim, it will 'improve the Dropbox sharing experience' to break it .

Drop them already. They keep looking for ways to shoot themselves, let them do it alone, that seems to be what they want.

yes.

NT

yes. "

I see a little black box and a diagonal set of arrows. Also it wants me to sign in.

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I don't know what you mean by "*You* internet" vs "the internet". As far as I am concerned, there is only a single internet and it does not make difference if I connect my own or someone else's server to it.

My experience with outsourcing is that while the salesmen cannot stop talking about the great staff they have, the security practices they have, and how good it all is, it is usually way below that level in reality. You may think that your service company has someone always watching the logs and the security news sites, but that is really not happening or they guy who is doing that is the one going out when costs need to be cut.

When outsourcing offers you peace of mind, good for you. Myself, I rather know the state of affairs and know how good/bad it is rather than trusting some company whose interest it isn't.

1. If you host out of the folder/tree being shared, there's no sync necessary. (This assumes you accept and manage the risk of serving FTP on a networked computer, potentially with access to your intranet and other important networked files.)
2. Lots of FTP clients/servers support sync, and there are an infinite number of convenient and variously palatable hacks to solve it. Examples:
   formatting link
3. Or you can mount the remote FTP directory as a network drive, and sync on that. Any regular folder or network sync tool will do the job. (Obviously, it won't catch updates in real time.)
4. If you had *nix anywhere in the building, you could do it with a couple magic lines of script, I'm sure. (But who would want *nix?)

Tim

Shaw is retiring their member webspace in March of this year.

That's a lot of keystrokes to reconstruct links with absolute addresses.

RL

Use 'Search and Replace' to convert it. I keep a local copy of websites that I built, so that I can test changes before they go live. The web server doesn't need absolute addresses.