stupid cloud- Dropbox hacked.
this is why i never use cloud services. apparently the hack was from 2012, but surfaced today, thus if you havent changed your password since 2012, you prolly should! clicky
Forum Discussion
Hacking aside, I find cloud services to be useful but ephemeral. Five of the nine places I've used (since 1990) to upload, share, and potentially "archive" and share image files and other documents have gone defunct, discontinued the services I was using, or changed terms of service in ways that they were no longer useful to me. For image files or photos, there are probably another dozen or so that I never tried, that have come and gone.
I don't depend entirely on any "real" cloud server, I run my own to share among my computers and digital devices, but I do use (five, currently) external service for sharing with others (different folks have different strokes), but only two for sharing among my own devices, chosen on my own estimates of likely longevity and operational competence. There is a third one on my standby list, but I am too multi-platform to make much use of anything exclusive to Microsoft platforms and protocols.
I've found Dropbox to be a good platform for sharing non-critical, non-sensitive information with others. A couple of my email providers (four currently) use Dropbox as their way to forward large files, so I am kind of stuck with it. It works, and the price (free) is right for what I do. It bothers me little that their encrypted password list got hacked once, I use different passwords and IDs in different places and don't put anything I might be ashamed of or of financial value into the cloud.
While I am at it, why do I have four email providers? Because I have had more than a dozen since my ARPANet days, and they come and go. Four accounts at a time keep me comfortable that maybe one will keep going until I can find a new provider.
Don't let a hack of a services provider scare you, just practice safe Internet: use different IDs, different passwords everywhere, changing passwords frequently. And while I am on that subject, despite all the advertisements from service providers, a smartphone app or online service is not the place to keep that identification information, as those are hack targets. The right place for me is a notebook I can keep on my person, or at home when not traveling, because my home or my person is a lot less likely hacker target than anyplace storing security information on the Internet.
I don't depend entirely on any "real" cloud server, I run my own to share among my computers and digital devices, but I do use (five, currently) external service for sharing with others (different folks have different strokes), but only two for sharing among my own devices, chosen on my own estimates of likely longevity and operational competence. There is a third one on my standby list, but I am too multi-platform to make much use of anything exclusive to Microsoft platforms and protocols.
I've found Dropbox to be a good platform for sharing non-critical, non-sensitive information with others. A couple of my email providers (four currently) use Dropbox as their way to forward large files, so I am kind of stuck with it. It works, and the price (free) is right for what I do. It bothers me little that their encrypted password list got hacked once, I use different passwords and IDs in different places and don't put anything I might be ashamed of or of financial value into the cloud.
While I am at it, why do I have four email providers? Because I have had more than a dozen since my ARPANet days, and they come and go. Four accounts at a time keep me comfortable that maybe one will keep going until I can find a new provider.
Don't let a hack of a services provider scare you, just practice safe Internet: use different IDs, different passwords everywhere, changing passwords frequently. And while I am on that subject, despite all the advertisements from service providers, a smartphone app or online service is not the place to keep that identification information, as those are hack targets. The right place for me is a notebook I can keep on my person, or at home when not traveling, because my home or my person is a lot less likely hacker target than anyplace storing security information on the Internet.
