Hacker News Reader

My understanding is Dropbox used to first hash file, then see if a copy was already uploaded. That was removed as it was being used for piracy.

Does Dropbox still upload everything, even if the user has uploaded it before?

if a user has uploaded a file in the past and their desktop client can prove they have access, then they can avoid uploading it again

> My understanding is Dropbox used to first hash file, then see if a copy was already uploaded. That was removed as it was being used for piracy.

How's that work? Somehow modify the client to say that you have a file with a user-provided hash even though it doesn't actually exist on disk?

Yes, that's exactly what people were doing -- then you could pirate a film by only distributing the hash.