Google Pulls a Dropbox

Apologies to those who are already tired of this–it’s threatening to become a hobby horse. Looks like with Google+, Google is going where every stupid lawyer has gone before: claiming “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute …

You Are Not the Customer–You Are the Product

My gripe session about Dropbox’s new TOS and my presentation (wherein I all but came out and shouted that it’s stupid to use a free cloud-based backup service) understandably rankled a healthy percentage of the commenters. My fellows in the hacking community, who eat, sleep, and breathe security issues, described …

Update on the Dropbox Situation

Dropbox has posted a public explanation for their rapid TOS changes today. As suspected, the email they’ve gotten from concerned users hasn’t gone unnoticed–that’s a good thing. Am I now recommending them? Hell no. Assuming the best of intentions, I think they are in error about the kind of license …