It wouldn't provide much in the way of plausible deniability, but please tell me about how easy it is for them to mount it without the keys. There definitely wasn't a federal case with some guy from South America where the FBI admitted after a year that they couldn't crack his encryption.

Not quite sure what you mean by this...as a dynamic file, it's only going to have one "mount point," and while encrypted at rest it's more or less (less) indistinguishable from entropy except for the headers.

Personally, trusting the closed-source Dropbox desktop client to do your encryption for you and not ever transmit your keys back to the mothership for the inevitable NSA demands is more trust than I'm willing to give. And you remember the hullabaloo where it turned out that their desktop client auth was horribly, horribly insecure?

Just make a dynamic TrueCrypt volume.

Then they aren't actually "offering strong encryption." They're just offering an endpoint for the user to hook into? How is that different from what they're already doing?

1. Dropbox implements server-side encryption.
2. NSA/TLA drops by.
3. Dropbox gives them your keys.
4. No profit.

You are utterly failing to understand the issue. Have you been living under a rock for the last several years?

If by "worst response of all time" you're referring to your comment, yes :)

You need to buy the Finglonger peripheral, yeesh.

Isn't hipsterism about rejecting commonly-accepted conventions? E.g. the desktop interface we've been successfully using for the last 25 years?

Why would you want to use a scripting language for OOP? Use an "actual" language. For scripting uses, use a scripting language.

How about a more direct comparison--bash vs. batch scripting. They were both around 20 years ago.

*Multics.

And this was before they had to slap an "OS" postfix on everything for some reason. "PCLinuxOS" -- seriously?! So massively redundant.

No, Multics was the predecessor of Unix. The guys who worked on Multics had the philosophy of "do the exact opposite of Multics where possible" when they worked on Unix. Look it up.

Then after awhile everybody started branching mainline Unix and while they were fighting about restandardizing them all together, Microsoft came in and ate their lunch.

Microsoft: Metro
Linux: Unity

I don't like it either but it's already been done to some extent (tablet-interface-ifying the desktop).

Cf. sig

For the kneejerks among us who will undoubtedly not understand the subtlety I was trying to convey there, the saying can be interpreted to apply to both the Israelis and the Palestinians alike.

The Mandate ends and the Israelis get invaded...
so they take up arms to defend themselves...
and after doing so successfully they go on the offensive and capture more territory...
then the Palestinians take up arms to resist and try to get their territory back...
so they keep sending suicide bombers and launching rockets over the border...
so the Israelis retaliate with helicopter airstrikes...

And on and on and on.

And it depends where you are online. I'm a member of an online RPG called Kingdom of Loathing with a pretty active chat system.

The moderators are *very* active. Say what you will about heavy-handedness, but recent events have proven that if you start throwing around anything with a flavor of misogyny to it in open chat, you will be banned with much prejudice. May be partially related to our uncharacteristically high female playerbase but the game creators are all guys.

Well damn, I sure wish somebody had pointed that out sooner than halfway down the page of 600 comments.

The pragmatic argument is, do any such laws protecting J Random Group protect the group better than they cause other problems.