LA has as many bus stops as New York City, but about a third of the daily riders. It has as much subway track as Washington, D.C., but about half the daily riders. The city just isn't suited to traditional mass transit—it's too sprawled out.
The US is #2 in large dams with about 9,000. China is #1 with nearly 24,000, but their dam construction has almost all been since 1949. So my guess is that it's a combination of the US having many dams, and having had them for many years.
I should say, Ben, thank you for coming out in public and sharing your team's perspective. Your users are angry—and I think rightly so—but it does help that we are being told why it was done, that it was merely poor judgement rather than deliberate misbehavior, and that you are working to make the Dropbox client a more responsible citizen. Is it as good as not having done it in the first place? No. But it's much better than radio silence.
> - We never see or store your admin password. The dialog box you see is a native OS X API (i.e. made by Apple).
To clarify for others: In /Library/DropboxHelperTools, you'll find a folder for each user full of setuid tools which run as root and do various privileged things. I assume that the client is presenting the normal OS X "ask for elevated access" UI and then using that elevated access to configure and install these. (I don't work for Dropbox or anything; I've just been poking around.)
> - We use accessibility APIs for the Dropbox badge (Office integrations) and other integrations (finding windows & other UI interactions).
@newhouseb, I don't have Office, so I've turned off the badge. Is Dropbox now going to leave my accessibility permissions the way I set them? Or is it going to reactivate a permission behind my back that it no longer even needs?
I understand the desire to make your features "just work", but circumventing the user's privacy controls to do that is never acceptable. Especially accessibility, which is basically a general warrant to snoop on everything the user does. You wouldn't be on my system anymore if my work didn't require Dropbox. You're going to lose a lot of trust over this, and it won't even be half of what you deserve.
And it's not even in your interest in the long term. This fiasco has probably made it more likely that Apple will further lock down the accessibility APIs, possibly even making them unavailable without an Apple-issued, potentially App Store-only entitlement. Since Dropbox can't really do its job when it's locked in a sandbox, I really don't think that's what you guys want to happen.
Teams like yours are why we can't have nice things.
(P.S. plz respect NSFileCoordinator this isn't Tiger anymore kthxbai)