On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 2:14 AM, stef <[1]s@ctrlc.hu> wrote:

   On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 07:58:17AM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
   > Dropbox is pulling a Skype.

     no it's not, it's generating thumbnails.

   Dropbox generates thumbnails and optimized document views for
   smartphone clients. This could happen on demand, or it could be batched
   after the upload. Checking whether the embedded link is accessed a
   second time on displaying a doc on a smartphone might be revealing.
   It also wouldn't be surprising if they were working on some kind of
   content indexing as other sync services are. Cloud storage is a
   competitive space, and Dropbox needs to keep up in order to maintain
   their rather high price per unit of storage.
   Some Dropbox developers are visible in their forums if someone wants to
   ask first-hand.
   This level of scrutiny doesn't make sense for any service with a closed
   source, self-updating client, however. Even if they encrypted
   client-side, made every kind of promise and did everything else
   perfectly, they could be compelled to quietly change things overnight.
   That could happen for everybody, or for just a few users who get
   slipped a different version.

References

   1. mailto:s@ctrlc.hu