On a single-user machine all the interesting stuff (personal documents, configuration, browser history etc) is in userland anyway. And people are already entrusting Dropbox with their personal files.
I'd say this article represents Twitter-fishing -- search the comment-ome on any recent event and you'll find somebody panicking, or being crude, or whatever else you want to write an article about.
I guess when a program asks to read a file, dropbox has to intervene at quite a low level to get it from a remote server rather than the local file system where the program thinks it is.
Fuse filesystems on OS X are user-land applications entirely outside the kernel. However, I believe OSXFUSE itself, atop which the filesystems are built and operate, requires/includes a kernel extension.
(Edited for better explanation than initial wording)
That's right. OSXFUSE includes a kernel extension (https://github.com/osxfuse/kext). There is no other technical way to achieve this without a kernel extension on both Windows and OSX.
Wow. Pretty garbagey article. Yes you can find some people on twitter that wouldn't want to load a kernel extension from Dropbox. Back in reality: nobody will even know, nobody will care, everybody will be happy if "it just works".
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 18.4 ms ] threadI'd say this article represents Twitter-fishing -- search the comment-ome on any recent event and you'll find somebody panicking, or being crude, or whatever else you want to write an article about.
(Edited for better explanation than initial wording)
But given their ties to the US National Security establishment I would definitely pause before giving them blind kernel access.