Bob Maxey

Do not panic, just interesting. This link is one of many.

Dropbox Tries To Kill Off Open Source Project With DMCA Takedown | Techdirt

"Dropbox is a cloud storage system that's pretty useful. However, one of the ways it attempted to save some costs was that if you sought to upload a file that was identical to a file on someone else's shared server, it wouldn't actually "upload" your file, but just point you to the single file. There were clear security and privacy questions about this.

Of course, some noted that it could also represent an "opportunity" of sorts, and out of that came a project called Dropship -- which used a little hack to use this deduping tech to make Dropbox think you were trying to upload specific content that you might not actually have, and then the actual file (if already stored in someone else's Dropbox) would automatically appear in yours as well. Obviously, one key use of such a technology would be to make unauthorized copies of music and movies. Dropbox, for obvious reasons, didn't like that aspect, but its response to this was pretty troubling: it focused on censoring information about Dropship."

Apparently, Dropbox has turned off this feature because of abuse and privacy issues. Just interesting to learn about the lengths clever people go to to find ways to damage us.

9to5cynic

I remember reading about that a while back, but I thought it only applied to your own storage... Guess not.

I wish I was the person responsible for the name "Dropship". I like little puns like that.