Friday, May 14, 2010

Dropbox blocked in... that big Asian country that keeps blocking stuff, you know which one

This evening I was in touch with some people I work with in the capital of that big Asian country where sites that people find useful are routinely blocked...  you know the country...  and now it turns out that Dropbox is blocked there too!  We needed to transfer some work-related files and lo and behold the client was no longer working there.  It couldn't connect to the Dropbox servers.  I checked in the Dropbox forums and on the web and it seems to be confirmed. 

We're looking into workarounds right now, but this is soooo stupid.

I can understand -- though I don't sympathize with or approve of -- why that unnamed government would block Twitter and Facebook and some social networking services.  That government knows very well that their system is a skyscraper built of cheap balsa, a house of cards.  Given the seething anger and resentment on the part of the population about widespread corruption and widening inequality, sooner or later some initially local incident could trigger an uprising and the whole thing could come apart.  Services like Twitter and Facebook could be the medium through which the equivalent of a 'color revolution' like the ones in Eastern Europe and some other former Soviet Republics would most likely be coordinated.  So I get why they block Twitter and Facebook.  The government is afraid that they could be used to organize an uprising, or a 'color revolution.'  I don't like it, in fact I detest it, but at least I see the logic.

The question is, therefore, what in God's name does any of this have to do with a service like Dropbox.  I'm a pretty creative and imaginative guy, but I have a hard time figuring out how anyone could use Dropbox to organize a revolution.  Gee, I'll put the .pptx file with all the secret plans for the revolution into the folder I have shared with my 10 friends and wait for to sync with them, and then they can copy it over to the folders they have shared with their friends?  I just don't get it.  The whole point of Twitter and Facebook is that you could spread the news about a plan for a protest march to hundreds of thousands of people in a few minutes and thereby coordinate mass action. 

In other words, how do you organize a revolution using Dropbox?  Why would anyone be afraid of Dropbox?  I guess I'm missing something here, folks.  Somebody help me out here.  I just don't get how Dropbox is a threat to anyone.  Oh well.

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