Losing their independence was from the beginning the most likely outcome of building something that's hard to monetize like Keybase on the VC funding model. FWIW, I doubt Keybase offering a paid plan would have raised revenue that's significant compared to their burn, so Chris was probably right to not spend resources figuring out a paid offering. For raising their next round, having $5K in revenue from a paid plan few people buy might well have been worse than having $0.
The VC funding model is terrible for most open source projects. With a few exceptions, you end up with an acquisition that ends or repurposes the project, or an Open Core project. And a VC-funded Open Core project will end up trying as hard as it can to have everyone need to buy the paid version, since that's clearly the way to optimize revenue and eventually the slippery slope will get you there. I don't blame folks for taking VC; it was easy to get, and there aren't a lot of alternative funding models that can pay the multiple fulltime staff that might be required to create what one wants to create.
I don't think VC funding as it currently exists is consistent with running an open source company according to my values, which is why we're not taking venture funding for Zulip. Obviously, being scrappy, applying for NSF grants, and spending my own money have very real downsides both personally and for our growth, especially when every competitor has VC funding, but it also means that I can ensure Zulip continues existing as a real open source project for the long run.
Don't founders often have the ability to overrule and make their own decisions?
Chris is already financially independent from the OKCupid sale, he could have open sourced the server code and/or reduced the overall burn to pivot to paid accounts.
Though the weird Stellar wallet addition implied some vision/product issues anyway.
Of course it's easy and probably unfair for me to say these things as an outsider with limited information and no real stake, it's definitely possible I'm wrong about important details that would change my mind. It'd be interesting to hear from Chris, but the sale probably restricts public communication?
This reminds me a little about the OKC sale actually, they had a blog post about why charging for dating sites made them worse that they took down after selling to match (they used to do cool analysis and publish them as blog posts, most of the details ended up in the book a different cofounder published called Dataclysm). That's more understandable to me though since I think it was their first exit.
Reading about Zulip - didn't you get bought by Dropbox before being open source? Is your current situation a lucky outcome - or was it a condition of the sale?
[Edit] - To clarify since there are downvotes, my questions aren’t rhetorical - they’re genuinely asking.
The power depends on the board structure and the ownership. But even if a founder owns 51% of the company, and so in theory can do anything, they still have an obligation to do right by the minority shareholders. This is generally known as fiduciary duty, and is a complex area of law. Here's a short summary: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi...
In a case like this, a founder can't just give away the source code. They'd have to believe that doing so was in the best interests of the company. And unless they wanted to risk a lawsuit, they'd have to persuade the shareholders of that too.
>they still have an obligation to do right by the minority shareholders
Fiduciary duty is extremely rare to be the subject of a suit against a, let's say, CEO. It's a complex area of law because it isn't actually a law, nor specified anywhere, and not a requirement for corporate existence. So, it's a set of court decisions that future cases are built upon, but in general a house of cards in that it could be invalidated by a) legislation; and b) adverse rulings at any level of a suit.
It's a myth that the only purpose of executives is to maximize profit for the shareholders. It's a canard. PBCs are a counterfactual here, full stop.
C-level executives are appointed and removed by the board. The board is appointed and removed by the shareholders. Yes, technically, executives are not required to act in the shareholders interests by law. But they are often appointed with the specific instruction to act in the shareholders' best interests, and can be removed from office for not doing that.
From my experience being a CEO and reporting to a board, trying to act in anything other than the shareholder's best interests would be... problematic, shall we say. I would need to be very convincing that what I was doing was in the best long-term interests of the organisation. Or have a board who agreed with the "not maximising shareholder value" goal.
It's only technically a myth that the only purpose of executives is to maximise profit for shareholders. That's definitely the most common instruction from the board, often implicit rather than explicit, and not doing that will get you into trouble in most situations. That trouble may not be a law suit, more probably just being summarily dismissed.
I agree with you that maximizing profit as the sole metric is a myth, which is perhaps why I didn't mention it.
However, in practice if one has taken $10m from investors looking for a big payday, one can't just do any old thing. Doing something sufficiently contrary to the interests of minority shareholders could certainly result in a lawsuit. Could the shareholders win? Who knows! As you say, it's a murky area. But winning in that case isn't what matters. The lawsuit will tie the company up for years, forcing significant spending. And if they include the CEO in the lawsuit, it will mean personal expense and an enormous headache. So in practice, the Keybase execs couldn't just say, "Fuck it, we won't sell to Zoom, everything is open source now." Not without talking it through with the investors, anyhow.
>Doing something sufficiently contrary to the interests of minority shareholders could certainly result in a lawsuit.
I suppose, but does it? Ever? Not to be antagonistic but your entire paragraph is a hypothetical which is substituting for anything from the real world, which leads me to believe that it's either not a risk at all, or such a small risk as to be invisible and still effectively not a risk. I mean, I'm sure we would have heard some cautionary tales by now!
What sort of examples are you finding yourself unable to Google for? There are plenty of lawsuits out there for breaching the rights of minority shareholders. Mostly with public companies, but private companies too.
If you're specifically asking about VC-vs-founder lawsuits, I think we don't see many of those because everybody has strong incentives not to let it get to that stage. Founders really want to keep on good terms with VCs. VCs want to be seen as pro-founder. Their incentives are generally aligned right up until things start going south.
And once we get to the on-the-brink-of-failure stage, the VCs hold all the cards. Any continued investment requires the VCs to at least approve. If a founder ever might want to do something venture-backed again, they need to stay in their VC's good graces. If the investors don't have majority control, they at least have board seats and the ability to disrupt any deals or other actions the CEO might make against their interests, both internally and by threatening deal partners. The CEO also probably can't afford a lawsuit either with the company's funds or on their own.
So I don't think we see the cautionary tales because few who have been selected by investors and spent years dancing to their tune turn out contrary enough to set those relationships on fire when it doesn't really get them anything.
Can you clarify your statement about the PBCs? I can't figure out if you're saying they are a good thing, or just a theatrical performance.
I am curious because B-corps have been popularized in the recent years, but when I looked into what B-corps are, it seems to me those are just bogus certificates that aren't doing any good, except enriching the people who print certificates for these types of corporations.
I don't really know whether I am right or wrong here, but I weren't able to find anything that actually makes a B corp different than any other. Would love to hear your thoughts.
I think they're a good thing that disproves the conventional wisdom that corporations are "required" to act only in the profit interests of shareholders, that share price is the only measure of executive performance.
Going further, I believe this canard is promoted by greedy assholes as justification for their bullying of "nicer" people who might have a more holistic view of corporate behavior, something which bullies are psychologically incapable. These people would call PBCs theatrical, "hey bro, good for you!" on par with starting a nonprofit.
I don't know a lot about B-corps so I'm generally talking out of my ass, but it seems like a "hey we tried" get out of jail card if they decide to shed it, which they can always do. If they don't wind up shedding it, do they go for PBC? Overall, maybe it's good for setting expectations, but since there's no legal committment involved I don't see much more to think about it.
I think it's less about the power relationship, exactly, and more about the way VC-funded companies are setup to be run. As part of raising a round, you prepare a business plan that involves aggressively spending the money over a couple years. You're committed both internally and to your board to execute that plan, and it's cognitively difficult to do something different as there's social pressure to do so (and one of your VC's greatest sources of power over you is they're the reference for your next fundraising round).
The result is that your company has planned to run out of money with potentially a multi-million dollar annual burn rate in two years. If as those two years are approaching, the company and/or market situation don't support raising more capital and the company isn't close to profitable, the momentum of that burn rate applies a great deal of pressure for a sale, destructive layoff, or total change in goals to "anything that improves the bottom line".
Also, the search for a story to help raise your next round can have a big effect on companies -- my view is most of Dropbox's problems when I was there (2012-2014) resulted from the search for a totally new business bigger than Dropbox Business that could justify a bigger valuation than $10B starving more obvious investments (Carousel, the now-dead photo sharing app, at one point had ~10x the engineering resources of Dropbox Business).
> Reading about Zulip - didn't you get bought by Dropbox before being open source? Is your current situation a lucky outcome - or was it a condition of the sale?
It's an extremely lucky outcome. There's a combination of factor that made this possible:
* Dropbox leadership prioritized doing the right thing by their users, and so we were able to get permission from both leadership and legal. I'm sure my personal position as a leader at the company who had a personal relationship with the people who had approve it made a difference (Though Luke Faraone made a big difference by asking legal if we could and inviting me to the meeting!). But I think Dropbox deserves a lot of credit, because they spend significant time from expensive resources (legal, etc.) making this happen, and I don't know of many companies that would ever do that.
* Our users were big fans, enough so that 10 of them flew to Dropbox HQ for a week to help us do the technical work required to do an open source release with all 10,000 commits of history intact and with a scripted installation process. This was essential to Zulip being usable after that release.
Thank you - I really appreciate the detailed answer.
I think I have a better understanding of how the incentives to cooperate would be hard to overcome even if you technically have the power as a founder (and even if you’re already financially independent).
The personal experience was also interesting - thanks!
> Though the weird Stellar wallet addition implied some vision/product issues anyway.
Stellar integration was weird indeed, but it blended really nicely into the chat, and it would totally work for Keybase if there was an easier way to cash in / cash out. That said, any cryptocurrency would do the job, but if this particular one helps monetize the product, why not?
I wanna say we don't know. Has there ever been an instance of any company getting their tranche(s) and saying FU to the VC, and there being any repercussions? It's a two- or three-level hypothetical, but I think it's worth exploring to give you a complete answer.
It is funny that Zoom was one of the companies that I flagged in my head as the worst (or rather, most dangerous) up-and-coming tech company and I considered Keybase one of the most promising up-and-coming tech companies.
Keybase solves a (to me) nontrivial problem: How to bring private keys into social media. Just a silly example: You don't use the same private-public key exchange in Whatsapp as you would use for your emails, or to sign your packages. It's a bit of the now infamous Dropbox situation: Most people can sign things with private keys and properly keep track of it, but they don't get around to doing it. It's only critical cases where the use is common (like signing packages). It took a long time even for HTTPS to become standard practise, though I guess the situation with your browser is a bit different.
I wrote Zoom off last year after the local webserver nonsense. Any company that can convince itself that is a good idea doesn't deserve my business. There's no path to redemption. Game over.
In the post Covid world I was forced to compromise a bit and I will join a Zoom call in a browser (when it works) or install the app on my phone if I have to. I trust iOS to not get totally owned by a rogue app more than anything else I have available. Although recently that's not an entirely safe bet either.
Keybase was not critical to my daily life so it will not hurt to get rid of it. It's about risk management. There are no upsides to Zoom and almost no upsides to Keybase (for me). With the growing list of downsides it's an easy choice to make.
It could be argued that acquiring a whole security-focused company is a signal they’re seriously reconsidering their approach to security and deserve a benefit of the doubt.
They also lied about having end-to-end encryption. The awful security practices could be chalked up to incompetence but the fact that they lied has taken it too far, in my opinion. I too have deleted by Keybase account because of this.
Zoom is, or was, collecting a list of running applications on machines. Keybase requires that you run it on multiple devices for security. It would be reasonable to expect that Zoom would love to embed such data harvesting in the Keybase client.
Do you have a reference for this? Were they confirmed to be sending the info to the server? I would note that it wouldn't be uncommon for a program like zoom to have the relevant api calls in it to allow the user share a specific app with the conference call.
Well, they are pitching this as bringing secure stuff to the masses. So it's arguably not all that inconsistent with what Chris etc have been saying about Keybase.
Honestly if at this point Zoom hasn't lost all credibility in your eyes I don't know what to say.
Zoom already has end to end encryption according to some of their other press releases and public statements (we know they don't), so why on earth would you believe this one?
I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.
I don't quite get the purpose though, why would I post something in public only for a group of people to be able to read it? Why not post it in a private chat then (encrypted, naturally)?
Sad. Very sad. It was such a great approach to associating GnuPG keys with social media. And their chat etc were also pretty cool. But Zoom is beyond the pale.
So what now? Maybe someone could clone the GitHub repos. And/or are GnuPG keyservers safe enough again?
For chat, Session looks most interesting. It's got the Signal messaging bits. Plus anonymity via the Loki onion network. And it's available for all platforms.
However, it's very new, and often buggy. And the Loki Foundation is Australian. So at some point they'll likely get pressured to backdoor stuff. And they probably won't be able to disclose that, unless someone leaks.
There's also Tox, where each user runs a Tor onion client. That's secure enough in Whonix. But the Whonix user base is miniscule, and I wouldn't trust an implementation in Windows. But then, maybe Session in Windows is too iffy as well.
Anyway, I'll be deleting my Keybase account, as soon as I've negotiated alternate comms with my contacts.
So, yeah. Zoom did bad stuff. But Keybase is designed so that all those things would obviously be detectable (Keybase client code is open source), and the ways in which the Server could mess with data are much restricted. If that spreads to Zoom, there's a chance it'd be a good service in a year or two.
PGP keyservers have a fundamental issue that demands a solution like CT logs or Keybase-style merkle trees.
The only way to prevent getting Loki backdoor issues would seem to be a development so clearly in-the-open, that any secretive addition of significant code/suspicious PR behavior is obvious.
Tor does not use Tor by default. It works with Tor, but that's it.
They are also kinda buying a social graph of mostly IT and security professionals, sprinkled with some journalists (and not the kind that usually does the "10 things" articles) and general tinfoil hats.
My tinfoil hat tells me this information could be somewhat valuable to their Chinese overlords...
I've seen some examples of GNOME keyring being required because it implements the freedesktop secrets standard (which I admit to knowing nothing of) where other secret managers do not. Presumably meaning there us no common interface, so we just pick the one that implements the spec. One example:
> I use Keybase to talk to my friend in China since it's one of the few services they don't block.
I think the vital question is why was keybase not blocked?
Maybe it was owned by someone high-up in China. That is why maybe Chris Coyne refused funding. It was free to just to onboard maximum number of users. Seems like "users" where the products that bought value to keybase.
I am glad you mentioned China. Many people are too afraid to acknowledge the reality of that authoritarian country, for fear of reprisal from liberal do-gooders.
"Zoom is based in California’s Silicon Valley, but it owns three companies in China that develop its software. The Citizen Lab said the structure allowed the company to lower its development costs, but added “this arrangement may make Zoom responsive to pressure from Chinese authorities.”"
The implication is that China is hostile and leverages their power to censor/collect communication information from companies and their people without checks on this power.
They are aggressive in stealing IP from other companies and blocking software they can't control. They have history of wielding their power to pressure organizations to deny or ignore aspects of their history that they dislike (Taiwan, Cultural Revolution) and they pressure companies to hand over PII on people they find to be political threats without due process.
This is not a country you want to be a steward of an encryption identity standard.
Isn't the US actually at least as bad if not worse? Thanks to Edward Snowden we know without speculation that the US "is hostile and leverages their power to censor/collect communication information from companies and their people without checks on this power" (ok, supposedly there is secret judges that secretly check on this power, but that doesn't really do any good does it?). The USA also "pressure companies to hand over PII on people they find to be political threats without due process" (so called "National Security Letters").
The just get disappeared into Belmarsh and extradited to who knows where for telling the truth about the US military murdering civilians including journalists from a helicopter gunship.
Criticisms were/are made against NSA surveillances and in the case where government tried to silence such criticism (Snowden), opinions that support Snowden's actions were made and published, even made into books and movies, without repercussion. Bloggers that support Edward Snowden did not disappear. Movie directors and screenwriters are not made pariah by their industry or sent to Guantanamo.
This sort of whataboutism does not surprise me but it's getting tiring when made repeatedly in disguise of intelligent discourse. It's dishonest because the difference is blatant.
I think that while both countries have the technology to facilitate censorship and oppression, the US is much more careful about how they do it. China isn't afraid to use their control over information to assist the oppression of Uighurs in 're-education' camps for example.
I don't think it's true that Zoom has its "entire dev team in China"; doing some research myself reveals Zoom definitely has engineering operations in the US[0][1].
I'm not disagreeing with you on the implications of having engineering teams in China, I think you would like to put that paragraph in your original post to give some context.
The vast majority of the Zoom software development team is based out of companies in China.
They do have support people in the US and a handful of non-support engineering which is why I said thanks and immediately updated the comment to say "majority" instead of "entire" since it's more correct.
That technicality is less relevant to the main point of the argument.
As of January 2020, they had 2,532 full-time employees. Of those, 1,396 were in the US and 1,136 were in international locations. Within the 1,136 is "more than 700" employees in R&D in China.[1]
A LinkedIn search for "engineer" working for "Zoom Video Communications" in location "United States" shows up 558 results.[2]
Their entire management team is in the US, and of their 17 data centres, only 1 is in China.[3][4]
If the original claim was "100% of the dev team is in China", and the reality is "only 80% of the dev team is in China", then that'd be a 20% factual error, mathematically speaking.
Or would it be a 25% error, i think it would make most sense to calculate the error-difference in relation to the actual value instead of in relation to the erroneous value.
Haha. Do you also calculate levenshtein distance from true to false and say false isn't entirely false but a bit of true? And is it almost factually correct to say that 10 equals 8?
> And is it almost factually correct to say that 10 equals 8?
I mean, from a certain point of view, why not? If you're thinking in terms of 1, they're wildly different. If you're thinking in terms of 1,000,000,000,000, they might as well both equal 0.
> We also operate research and development centers in
China, employing more than 700 employees as of January 31, 2020.
You can find more stories from last year talking about that was how Zoom had such a large engineering staff, is that it was cheaper for them to pay for R&D in china than in the US[0].
Not even that. All encrypted traffic in china needs to be decryptable by CCP. Which means if your call in zoom was routed to one of their China servers, then CCP has access to it.
That is on top of the fact that Zoom encryption is weak af.
(And before we get whataboutism concerning {insert other country's wiretapping laws}, wiretapping through an independent judiciary is fundamentally different than via rubber stamp)
"China" isn't a race, it's a multi-ethnic state with laws that heavily restrict communication. It's relevant to bring up in a thread about building encrypted communication technology.
Given the security concerns around Zoom, and the apparent lack of QC that might have prevented those concerns, this news is appalling. I love Keybase, it's used by many people, but I suspect it will now die a quick death. More accurately I suspect it will slide into a coma - not quite dead, but not in wide use anymore either.
I don't have much respect for zoom's security practices, while I do have much respect for the keybase team.
Perhaps this is Zoom's way of admitting that there is no way they can just solve the problem internally by keeping doing what they're doing and they need to get some fresh blood and build upon good practices designed outside their current culture.
> why not look at the problem the other way around?
Because no one ever buys or hires a conscience. If you thought a conscience was worth having one, that implies you would already have one and thus wouldn't need to outsource it in the first place.
Ethics always rolls downhill. If Al Capone goes out and hires Mr. Rogers, the power imbalance between them means Mr. Rogers is going to get dirtier than Capone will get clean.
On April 1 the CEO basically said they messed up and would pause all feature development and focus exclusively on security & privacy for 90 days.[1] They've also done weekly video AMAs that are summarised on their blog under the 90-Day Security Plan posts.[2]
They've made a lot of progress.
The Keybase acquisition is absolutely about helping to build a security team that can help them implement end-to-end encryption across 1000 person meetings. You can see that from this Twitter post[3] from Alex Stamos and this interview[4] with him.
I always try to work with people smarter than me, more ethical than me, and more productive. When we associate with people we want to fit in with, we adapt to be more like them. We can adapt in bad ways, but we can also adapt in good ways.
Essentially, on some level we never stop the role-model based adaptation we did as children, when we modeled our behavior on what our parent(s) did.
Well put! But it depends on how you approach the issue.
If having a conscience means prioritizing security above all else, then Keybase is doomed.
But security isn’t the only thing that matters. Zoom seems to have focused on making a very user friendly product. Keybase focused on making security more user friendly. In many ways, the user focus of both apps is their Prime selling point.
Perhaps they weren’t buying a conscience, they were fixing a blind spot.
I actually love Zoom as a product - far and away the best product in its class and this move likely makes sense for Zoom.
The disappointment comes from the loss of Keybase and what it could have been.
The main problem is Zoom having most of its development done via companies based in China. This means it is no longer possible for Keybase to achieve its original goal (and whatever encryption they add cannot fix this core problem).
It's one thing to accept the risk for video conferencing, but it's another to accept for an encryption ID standard.
I agreed with Chris Coyne's comments on HN a while back when he argued that the closed source server code didn't matter because of how they handled the encryption (when compared to Signal). While that's still true from a technical security standpoint, it looks like it does matter in a larger sense because this kind of sale shows that you can't really trust a company to act in its user's interests long-term.
It seems that we live in an era where if you made bad decisions in the past, you can never be trusted to make good decisions ever again. Even if you own your bad decisions and show lots of improvement.
Zoom's decisions did not feel like mistakes so much as an expression of their values. The company repeatedly prioritised ease of use while doing the absolute minimum on the security front. Are there any grounds to believe that that calculus has changed?
No, but now they see that the minimum is not where they had thought. As someone who does security professionally, of course a business wants to do the minimum necessary for security. The point of security systems is to break things that would otherwise work.
TLS is there to break sessions that would work under TCP. GPG is there to tell you to discard some mail.
The fact that they hired Alex Stamos and probably just spent a bunch of money on buying Keybase seem like a sign that things are changing.
They prioritized ease of use above all to get adoption before. This is appalling to me, but I believe they are seeing enough pressure to change course. It’s believable to me that they would intend to as they have already captured much of the consumer (non-B2B) market mind share and can afford to invest in this area.
Will I be using it now? Still a no. Maybe I’m time though.
Call my cynical, but "hiring" a bunch of infosec celebrities and critics as part-time consultants or contractors should be considered nothing but a (brilliant and silencing) PR move until the day that product updates and analyses reveal otherwise.
> until the day that product updates and analyses reveal otherwise.
The product (and their poor installer practice) has been updated several times in the past few months alone, and each move has made Zoom a more secure product, with the vast majority of the hubbub having been addressed. So are you simply ignoring that, or are you setting your own personal goalposts?
I'm doing neither. I'm pointing out a logical fallacy in the parent comment. Hiring people part-time and buying a company does not, on its own, convey anything about improvements to product quality, security, or the corporate culture of either. I can only infer from your comment that you might think I have some beef or issue with Zoom. I said no such thing.
At this point, I'm confused, and I'm not sure what point you or the other commenter are looking for me to concede. Zoom is paying some security consultants, pushed out some product updates, and bought Keybase, so it's a story book ending?
Just as your comment was aiming to narrowly point out a logical fallacy in the parent comment, I'm pointing out a flaw in your own: I disagree with your claim that investing in security practices is just theater, and that more concrete efforts in the same direction are irrelevant. The concrete efforts are Bayesian evidence that the newer investments are more than theater.
You said that those things are theater until the day the product updates. We are beyond the day when that happened. So for it to be a fallacy you have to reject the context in which it was presented, which nobody but you is doing.
I am not looking for you to concede anything. You said nothing has been done to show you that the calculus of their priorities has changed and I listed some things that could possibly show that. It’s up to you if you believe that is significant enough to convince you.
Frankly, I don’t care if it does or not. I was just providing some visible signs of investment.
You're absolutely right that past decisions focused on ease-of-use over security.
For evidence that they've changed their focus you can see their April 1 blog post[1] and the weekly video AMAs they do that are summarised in their "90-Day Security Plan Progress Report" blog posts.[2]
They're making a lot of progress.
The Keybase acquisition is about building out a strong security team that will help them implement end-to-end encryption in 1,000 person meetings, which currently isn't possible anywhere.[3]
Zoom is getting the shining light of attention globally. Even human beings, in these situations, start to act more conscientiously, and then believe their own morality after the fact!
I believe the keybase acquisition demonstrates this a bit - because they will get zero public goodwill from this - nobody on Main St. knows are cares what Keybase is, this won't be on CNN so they are probably very much trying to make things better.
Owners of the company want money - now they are popular, they have to behave well to get that money. Wanting money usually transcends everything else including loyalty to state. A Chinese CEO with a popular Western product is going to realize that if his customers are way for CCP grabbing their data, it's a problem to his business. He doesn't want CCP snooping and one of the better ways to do that is to have better encryption as well.
Doing slightly suspicious things doesn't matter if nobody is watching and therefore nobody cares, now that people care ... it matters. Just as a matter of pragmatism.
Calling it an interpretation is nothing short of revisionism. Nobody considers the hidden web server to have been an oversight. It required forethought and effort. It's not as if they didn't know what they were doing.
Organizations are not people. It is very straightforward for an individual to change their ways from bad to good. We should have mutual empathy and forgiveness towards each other. Conversely, it is typically very difficult for organizations to change course (keep in mind the spokesperson has no real power and a strong incentive to lie) and there is zero reason to feel bad if people abandon them. The people who work there perhaps, but there should be no mourning for an entity that exists only as a legal construct.
I agree that there should be opportunity for individuals to learn from mistakes and improve. People can be stubborn and slow to change, but they should be given a chance. It seems reasonable that the same courtesy should be extended to organizations. However, organizations are an order of magnitude slower to change than individuals.
Ultimately, an organization's policies are a reflection of the policies of its leaders. The bigger the organization, the more leaders have to change before the organization itself can truly change. It's much more likely that those who change just move on to another organization instead.
Besides, the end-to-end encryption incident wasn't a "mistake". Zoom's response was to say that their definition of end-to-end was just different from everyone else's. They clearly knew exactly what they were doing.
Zoom can change, but given their size and past I want more than a corporate apology and pinky swear before I trust them. They are making plenty of money and aren't going anywhere. There's plenty of time for them to earn my trust. However, they haven't yet earned enough of my trust to make me comfortable with this acquisition.
“Microsoft sexually discriminated in executive hires because ‘women will get pregnant and quit’, stifled completion in multiple categories, expected free overtime or you’d be stack-ranked out of a job. Be careful before trusting.”
> It seems that we live in an era where if you made bad decisions in the past, you can never be trusted to make good decisions ever again. Even if you own your bad decisions and show lots of improvement.
I've seen this turn out for the best literally one time, and that was Microsoft.
All the other times the bad company just continues its horrible slide into madness. It doesn't die either, just silently keeps churning out billions of dollars of shareholder value.
You see Microsoft’s mediocre reliability making its way into GitHub. Has MSFT changed or are things breaking on the web just more accepted than your desktop?
I really hope that's the case, for Zoom's sake. Unfortunately, that means less than nothing to me; I don't use Zoom, whilst I do use Keybase.
I don't trust Zoom to be custodians of the Keybase company or software. This has been a real blow to my confidence in them and I'm not sure I'll continue to use Keybase :(
You are probably right but I wouldn't discount the keybase server/client IP and user base completely. If Zoom could use keybase for identity verification and adding participants to a call via social graph connections of everyone on the call that could radically improve the UX of onboarding and securing a meeting to only approved participants.
It's possible, though I think it's optimistic. Nobody really has a problem with Zoom's UX as it is now. The only people complaining about Zoom are us techies who know about the security issues. So my guess is they're just gonna quietly work on the security stuff in the background with this new team, and leave the UX largely as-is.
In general, when it's between fresh blood and old management, old management will win every time.
If Zoom is acquiring Keybase because the C-suite is pivoting culture around security, then it'll probably work. Otherwise, not much will change. So until I see more evidence that Zoom's upper management had a change of heart (creating a CISO council is a good start), I'm going to be skeptical that this will actually move the needle.
That, and this is probably in large part a marketing/PR move.
Public perception of zoom/security is "beyond horrible", thus visibly spending lots of money on an acquisition of a very well respected name in security helps them polish that image at least a little.
And who knows, maybe they'll even work on actually improving security. Always the hopeless romantic/optimist, me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd say you overestimate that. Perhaps 0.01% of the public knows that Keybase exists and has a bad opinion of Zoom security. Expert's opinion is important, but does not automatically become general perception.
(Anecdatum, I'm far from a security expert. I know that Keybase exists, even have an unused account; I use Zoom for work and don't blame them for not locking up tighter. Their blog post on the topic sounded reasonable to me.)
> Perhaps 0.01% of the public knows that Keybase exists and has a bad opinion of Zoom security. Expert's opinion is important, but does not automatically become general perception.
This is true, but perhaps a bit short-sighted. Expert opinion on Zoom is "avoid it like the plague". This does not automatically become general perception, true, but:
- Over time, expert opinions have a marked effect on adoption by non-experts in their vicinity. See the adoption of Firefox, or Google Chrome, for example.
- For a social networking platform, powerful well-connected never-adopters can pose a problem both to growth and to a budding monopoly. If CIOs and CISOs say, "Zoom over my dead body", that will tend to discourage adoption and encourage development of good alternatives.
Zoom may be also managing the perceptions. Some users will jump to conclusions that the aquisition means integration, like an plug-in, bam! the bad part swapped with a good one.
Hiring consultants may be perceived like starting an investigation, not getting the fix now.
The question remains how soon and how true this will translate to the stated goal of true end to end encryption.
Yeah holy crap. I've been a big fan of Keybase since they launched, but this is a deathknell. I guess I'm not too surprised, Keybase didn't seem to have a business model, but still, disappointing that they're going to go into death this way.
Attention people starting businesses: VC funding is fun and all, but please, have a business model. Your users and employees depend on it.
The plan was to get acquired. As much as I've liked Keybase the product, their steadfast refusal to ever come up with a way to make money has always made me suspect they were doing the typical Silicon Valley thing: just burn funding until a bigger company notices and buys you.
> So perhaps better advice is, start a business even if you don’t have a plan and someone may buy it anyway.
A better world for your personal pocketbook maybe, but certainly a worse world for the rest of us. I wouldn't characterize that as "better" in any general sense.
Sometimes, acquihire is the business model. It makes money for the VCs and money for the founders. It's just the fools^wconsumers who bought in early (and the non-essential employees) who get the shaft.
What's our business model, how are we making money? Umm... don't ask me - I'm just the founder!
The sad thing is that you need to remind people of it. I would never start a business without an idea of a viable business model for it. What do they expect? Growing until they are too large to fail and then ... Godot arrives and everything is fine?
Yeah for the few people in the world who actually used Keybase and understood (at least partially) why it was a neat thing... most of those people are also those who have been following the Zoom debacle, and will likely consider abandoning the platform.
Even as an information security practitioner that cares a great deal about privacy I am just not willing to jump on this "Zoom is bad" band wagon. "Zoom is bad" is a tech media narrative largely driven by the large players that have something to gain by seeing Zoom stumble. There may be QC concerns, but in general the product has been great for our team and our consensus was to give them some time. Their response has been positive and they seem to have handled it transparently. Reality says this: Zoom works well enough. When we started using it several years ago it was far ahead of the competitors. Maybe they are catching up? Anyhow, I will give Zoom a chance to do the right thing over the next 6-12 months regarding Keybase, and their product in general.
> Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice.
> So, our shortest-term directive is to significantly improve our security effectiveness, by working on a product that's that much bigger than Keybase. We can't be more specific than that, because we're just diving in.
They're not even making the usual "Zoom is committed to keeping Keybase alive" promise :(
Hi dang, are there any plans to introduce a marker of some sort so that people know whether the current URL is the same as the one it was submitted with? I find that often I have no idea what the comments are talking about
It's not clear to me whether that would add more signal to the comments or more noise.
If you have specific links to cases where this has been a problem, you'd be welcome to send them to hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. Or keep that in mind for the next time this comes up.
They are buying Keybase to shore up their security, why would they still give them time to keep it up unless, they want to also integrate their message service into Zoom chat.
If so, it would be in the unusual shape that it is a top-dollar one rather than cover-the-failure-with-a-pretty-ending one. But in this case, Zoom is probably actually interested in the security tech that Keybase has apart from the talent, they're just not interested in the product.
No, you didn't miss anything. As you probably expected, it's just my deductions from context. I may be completely wrong. I still do believe in them, but obviously no one else needs to.
Keybase helped me to identify a trend in the software industry: using a pretty UI to cover up the disruption of an open ecosystem with a closed, centralized replacement. Keybase seemed cool on the face of it - making encryption easier is a laudible goal, and PGP certainly could use the improvement. But, thanks to Keybase, now I ask different questions upfront. Beware the Keybase formula:
1. Integrates with an existing, open ecosystem
2. May have open-source clients, but server is closed source and does not federate
I don't know how many people here remember the excitement when Android was new and, OMG, it's Linux! Open source! Finally we have a Linux-based, free and open phone platform!
I actually think that this played a non-trivial part in Android getting early traction - similar dynamic to Gmail where tech people got excited about it eventually "my friend who's good with computers recommends this" becomes a factor.
Not the exact same formula as you formulate above, but I think there are parallels to draw.
I was very excited about first reports on Android. I was young, starting to earn my first money, and I wanted to spend that money by getting myself my first, awesome, Linux-powered smartphone by Google - a company I heard only good things about.
Fortunately, I've decided to go with Openmoko instead back then. I'm so glad I did.
Same happened with Telegram: from a crypto messenger for geeks (who were excited by new crypto – I know, I know – and promises of end-to-end encryption everywhere coming some day) to just another messenger with cool stickers and stuff.
Really sad because I personally recommended it too, and was hoping these things would work out somehow. Lesson learned: they don't. The next messenger I will promote with my friends would be one without the server at all.
Keybase packed together many different technologies in one place. I don't think any of us who moved to Keybase had delusions that it would be around forever. But it's an amazingly comprehensive suite for its small scope and the open source product that replaces it will only exist because Keybase existed.
If the writing is placed on the wall (the marker cap is open right now) then replacing each of Keybase's features with existing technologies won't be difficult -- just time consuming, which is why they have market fit.
Each of us using Keybase saw the potential for the tech. We supported and evangelized Keybase because we wanted to see a world where the workflows enabled by Keybase were more common. There were no false pretenses: Keybase was openly flailing about for a revenue model, and the client was made open-source as a display of goodwill so that leaving would not be impossible.
If Keybase completely shuts down, I have hopes the team will be able to convince Zoom to let them pack up and release parts of the server code not being shared with Zoom's products.
on the other hand, it was actually usable by somebody who isn't a privacy advocate.
the trend exists because "pretty UIs" and usability are actually valuable features to users, and the existing open ecosystems tend to fail at that aspect.
https://protonmail.com/about indicates they're funded to some extent by Charles River Ventures (https://www.crv.com/). They were initially crowdfunded, and also get funding from a Swiss nonprofit foundation.
This is a good point. As far as I understood, Keybase's main offering, i.e. key discovery for accounts you knew little about, was never about "the best crypto that scales to Zoom levels".
Though what the main features were got very muddled anyways, especially with the odd Stellar cryptocurrency wallet implementation. I'm very interested to see what they do with the existing tech, or whether there will be open-source forks that are somehow compatible.
I essentially didn't have a private key prior to Keybase, and I think it's still the only place I use it, so I'll end up rolling a new one if Keybase becomes fundamentally untrustworthy.
That’s Zoom. Post acquisition Keybase is tied to some of those, but not all. Their dev team is not going to move to China (at least not immediately) and past security issues in Zoom are no indication of Keybase safety.
I signed up so long ago that I'm not quite sure what you mean. I remember posting a bunch of public keys (like on my profile here). I think the keybase app generated them along with a private key but it has been like three years.
I don't remember at all uploading one or where to find it if I did, can you explain the issue you have in mind a little more?
You can optionally have Keybase (generate and) store your private key for you.
It's designed to lower the barrier to entry, but is obviously less secure than managing it yourself outside of Keybase (e.g. in GPG keyring, or a physical OpenPGP smartcard such as a Yubikey) - and some consequently wish the storage had never even been offered.
That optional GPG/PGP private key storage was also re-hidden (and almost but not quite removed) functionality by Keybase over the course of the application's life as they moved away from using traditional GPG/PGP-style keys to a more complicated but more secure system based on device-specific keys (and chains/webs of those keys and their derivatives), around when you needed another device to onboard the next device rather than just needing to sign in with username/password.
It was actually a really nice stellar wallet implementation. A bad bet perhaps, in hindsight. Unfortunately, this acquisition means I won’t be using it anymore for the foreseeable future.
Keybase was always a de-anonymization platform, and there have always been spam/phishing concerns for the platform. The crypto wallet was a dumb way to force them to address some of the spam/phishing/harassment issues inherent in the platform as a "social media" with ties to nearly every other social media through its validation checks, but it was past time needed for spam/phishing/harassment control (as some minorities had said for years prior to the crypto wallet forcing such things).
> Zoom does not and will not proactively monitor meeting contents, but our trust and safety team will continue to use automated tools to look for evidence of abusive users based upon other available data.
> Zoom has not and will not build a mechanism to decrypt live meetings for lawful intercept purposes.
> We also do not have a means to insert our employees or others into meetings without being reflected in the participant list. We will not build any cryptographic backdoors to allow for the secret monitoring of meetings.
One court + gag order and all of these promises are out the window.
What do you expect them to do? Hire a PMC and fight a war with the police when they come around to raid the server room? Go into hiding so that the security agency can't steal the upgrade signing key from them?
We can't expect all of the internet to operate like Wikileaks and The Pirate Bay. If the justice system is broken, then the people aren't safe.
>What do you expect them to do? Hire a PMC and fight a war with the police when they come around to raid the server room? Go into hiding so that the security agency can't steal the upgrade signing key from them?
No, we want them to assume the same thing we are assuming. That if their service becomes successful, they will be coerced to compromise their users, regardless of how frequently they promise that they would never do so.
If they are even bothering to make public announcements like this, then that means they believe the security of their system can be founded on the honor of their employees. It's important to recognize that this isn't even true if you assume every member of their team is an uncorruptible seraphim.
Instead, where possible, the service should be zero knowledge, where not possible, it should be considered insecure.
Building reasonable end-to-end encryption in the first place isn't rocket science. In fact, Keybase have done just that. As well as WhatsApp, Signal, and many others.
I thought warrant canaries had to be in financial reports because those are one of the documents where companies are legally cannot lie under SEC rules?
warrant canaries must be written in the past tense. This is future tense. So they can monitor millions of calls, and give your information away at every second. This text only tells you about the next second (a promise they will break too, but then the text will be about the next second)
I think yes: they lack the technical infrastructure to decrypt the meeting in real time (which totally makes sense), rather than they have no plans to buid any infrastructure to decrpyt it afterwards (which cannot be guaranteed against a hostile actor).
And how long of a delay counts as no longer "live"? After the meeting ends? Five seconds? A millisecond? Does the latency to the server mean it's not "live", since it happened in the past?
The statement about lawful intercept can only be considered a blatant lie. It’s a requirement in China and CALEA applies in the US. Europe, India and Australia have their own laws around this.
It also does not say that they have not provided key material or RNG output, or that they have not deliberately weakened any aspect of their design other than "cryptographic backdoors" to accommodate law enforcement desires.
These kinds of statements are typically most usefully interpreted as a template for the kinds of things they plan to do, just maybe not exactly in that way.
> > One way to pay, if you want to help ensure their success & longevity, is to evangelize for them, and get other people hooked on their product. Getting other people hooked on it like you are and seeing the potential and get over the adoption humps... that's valuable! They're not taking money because it raises the barrier to entry, and growth is most important. Pay them by helping them grow.
> It's valuable, but not in the capital sense. Each person you get hooked on their product increases their burn rate, and both makes them more attractive as an acquisition (which is scary for users) and more desperate for cash (which makes acquiescing to acquisition more tempting).
> Without a road to profitability (or at least a road to revenue) even attracting equity is difficult; investors who enter with that knowledge will be looking to exit through acquisition, since that's basically the only way to exit, other than just getting more capital.
Most people here seem to be making a self fulfilling prophecy of keybase's death.
But I like to think that Zoom intends to reuse large parts of keybase codebase:
> Logged-in users will generate public cryptographic identities that are stored in a repository on Zoom’s network and can be used to establish trust relationships between meeting attendees. An ephemeral per-meeting symmetric key will be generated by the meeting host. This key will be distributed between clients, enveloped with the asymmetric keypairs and rotated when there are significant changes to the list of attendees. The cryptographic secrets will be under the control of the host, and the host’s client software will decide what devices are allowed to receive meeting keys, and thereby join the meeting. We are also investigating mechanisms that would allow enterprise users to provide additional levels of authentication.
Will the founders be interested in releasing parts if not all of the server code to the public? I believe the founders' mission is still achievable and can be carried out, should they be willing to release the code in public.
This outcome is almost certainly seen as a failure by the VCs. It looks like an acquihire. If so, it's quite possible that the VCs didn't even get their money back. Acquihires generally do not return money to VCs -- obviously, given that the employees are free to work anywhere, the acquirer's interest is in paying as much as possible to the employees and as little as possible to the now-worthless acquired company.
It's likely the employees are the ones benefiting most from this outcome, in that their pay has probably gone up considerably and they are no longer nervous about their job security, after many years of high stress and low pay.
It's possible the VCs were even offering some more cash to keep going, but at unfavorable terms, and the team said: "No, we'd rather take the big paychecks from Zoom."
Given Keybase has only had one funding round (according to crunchbase), the founders certainly still had a controlling stake in the company and the VCs couldn't force them to sell or not sell.
You can blame VCs for a lot of things but this kind of outcome is just not one of them (except insofar as that it allowed a company with little viable business strategy to exist in the first place).
(I am the founder of a failed startup. We had multiple "acquihire" offers, none of which offered any money back to investors.)
Wait what? That's called PGP. And people like to hate on it because it's a decentralized web of trust. The whole point of Keybase is to pave over the problems with web of trust by creating a social identity layer that more accurately reflects how trust relationships actually form.
An open source social identity attestation layer that people can operate and federate. Now that sounds cool!
The fact that the ultimate goal of most startups is to "exit" says an awful lot. It's an obvious signal that they are not prioritizing your needs in the long-term.
My two cents: that's part of the game in today's marketplace. It's pretty difficult to 'disrupt' firmly cemented market footholds and play with the big boys with seemingly endless streams of capital (though it certainly is possible, tech is more notorious for this than most industries, though highly improbable).
You really want to lock down some strategic IP that stands in the path of a behemoth and hope they'll want to aquire it under their growth goals or attempts to stomp out potential competitors (by throwing money at them and not through litigation or other paths). The big boys win because they buy out proven effective solutions/IP and models while failed startups eat the market high-risk exploratory costs.
Ghost (blogging software) chose to incorporate as a Company Limited by Guarantee [1], which doesn't have shares and can't be acquired that way: https://ghost.org/changelog/moving-to-singapore/
It only really works for bootstrapped non-profits, and for projects that are entirely volunteer-driven. No VC would be able to invest in something like this (unless it's a grant like what YC does for non-profits [1]).
Even Mozilla Foundation [2] was spun off from Netscape, and heavily supported by AOL in its early years.
That definitely cannot be acquired. No sane business would want to convert actual money into fun bucks and put those into a buggy script that would lock everyone out if someone pwns it.
What is more 'fun'? USD in bank account, USD as cash, DAO, or gold? I would think those are monotonically decreasing in 'fun'-ness. "Actual" money is not a good word for printable items of arbitrary scarcity. Not arguing for or against GP, just saying.
So if I'm reading this right... the participants of the DAO can band together and sell their company to a company as well? It looks like a DAO just requires some kind of cryptocurrency to participate, and then the participants get control over the operations of the DAO. So ownership is transferable at any time by these parties.
People are expressing they will stop using Keybase because of this. That's fine, probably a good idea.
But reading this, Zoom+Keybase will make sure of this themselves. This press release indicates that this is a 100% acquihire. There's only talk about what the Keybase people will be tasked to do, and there isn't any talk about Keybase's services in the first place. There's no real reason Zoom would be interested in keeping Keybase's services up and running anyway.
Let's hope they make it a swift death. Shame about Keybase, loved using it so far. It's somewhat encouraging to see a change in direction for Zoom, too. Hope the acquihire works out.
Looks like it wasn't a good idea to leave your private keys in Keybase's servers was it?
Perhaps the moment that Keybase took VC funding a while back, it was over to begin with and the principles of being a "Slack competitor" and respecting their users privacy went straight out of the window and into the bin.
I really had high hopes for Keybase as a Slack competitor, the cryptocurrency stuff I actively ignored, but this is a disaster.
Or, maybe Keybase needs video, and Zoom needs chat and security, in order to compete with the new wave of “productivity” suites. Why would Keybase suddenly be a failure or get worse in the security department because they are owned by a successful video conferencing company?
It's deeper than "Chat Security". There is current litigation against Zoom marketing of the misuse of 'end to end' encryption. This is the best way forward of claiming ineptitude and their path to rectify.
No, they didn't. There is an option to have Keybase sync a [backup] copy of your private key(s) between your devices for you but the key is encrypted by you. And, none of their stuff like chat or git etc. depends on using/accessing those keys in anyway (they built out their own domain-applicable pki for that—in other words, chat doesn't use pgp). It’s just a convenience option for those who want it and it’s not the default.
It was well-intentioned. For a time, Keybase provided users the option to upload their private keys so they didn't have to maintain them themselves. You could just log into Keybase and send signed messages, decrypt messages, etc without the hassle of managing your keys locally. It was definitely a bad idea and I think they dropped it a few months/years later, but it at least wasn't totally out of left field.
They don't have access to your unencrypted private key, it's just a backup of your private key which is encrypted by (hopefully) a very strong password.
Well, you still have to trust them not to ship a website update where the client side scripts would leak your decrypted private key :)
To be fair, you also have to trust native apps and browser extensions the same way. But with websites, the risk of a sudden and targeted (not noticed by the general public) update is much greater!
Which is why they push you towards not using the website, and also explain how they (through some steps) put their application version's hashes into the bitcoin blockchain.
And the client is open source, which iirc includes being built by distribution's maintainers/build servers instead of Keybase.io.
I believe the argument is that a private key encrypted with a password is not cryptographically different from a plaintext private key. The password is more of a "keeping honest people honest" kind of thing, than true security. If it was truly secure, then you'd be using a new private key to encrypt your real private key, and then you're back to where you started. Cryptography is hard, which is why I was such a big fan of Keybase trying to fix it for real people :)
Edit: This has a received a few downvotes. If I'm wrong here, I'd really like to know why! I thought this explanation was correct and clear.
> I believe the argument is that a private key encrypted with a password is not cryptographically different from a plaintext private key.
You have it backwards. On principle an encrypted anything (key in this case) is of zero value to anyone. It does’t matter if you tweet encrypted messages every 30 seconds to millions of followers or not: they're encrypted.
When you use a password to encrypt, and you (or your client/agent) selects an appropriately sophisticated suite, you end up seeding a KDF with your password and then using the resulting data as the actual “private key” (its just a symmetric key, no public/private). If your password has enough entropy, then the resulting key is perfectly secure.
In practice people are paranoid. “If the key is on Keybase’s servers, someone could get it and brute force decrypt it.” It’s almost pop culture fallacious, though, because if you believe someone can do that, then they can just as easily brute force the actual key. In practice people use shitty passwords, and crypto weakens as time moves forward, there are good and bad algorithms, and the whole point of a public key infrastructure is to keep private keys off the wire. So it’s generally seen as bad form to copy private keys around, even if they're encrypted. We’re still pretty far on the spectrum here because if your crypto breaks you have to rey key everything anyway. Not just re-encrypt unchanged private keys.
At the end of the day you're either copying a private key around or you aren't. And you should probably avoid situations where you need to do that because there are better ways to PKI. If your threat model can tolerate encrypted key backups and key sharing, then go for it. But that should be something you control.
If people have bad passwords, that makes brute force recovery of the private key on a Keybase server plausible, right? At least a lot more so than the whole key from scratch. I'd assume that a machine generated key has more entropy than any password that a human can memorize.
If sharing a password-protected private key is perfectly safe, why bother having them? Why don't PGP users just password protect everything?
Above all else though, is there an authoritative source that can answer these questions? As a run-of-the-mill programmer, I don't really understand how crypto works well enough to trust my own common sense here. It's been drilled into my head that there are certain rules to follow set out by people who do know what they're doing. And when people say "it's all good, it's password protected", and I'm not sure what their credentials are, I get a little nervous. I did notice that Werner Koch uses Keybase, but if they could simply point to an "okay" from him or Zimmerman explaining the situation, it would be settled. To me anyway, it's not simply an abundance of caution ("paranoia"), it's that something seems fundamentally wrong with the approach and I just don't know the actual cost.
I think people are confusing things a bit here. Sure, you can protect your pgp key with a password, but I don't think that adds a whole lot of security to your uploaded private keys. When you upload a pgp key to keybase, it encrypts the key again, using your keybase device key. So its double encrypted, basically.
The keybase model revolves around devices. Device keys are private keys that are tied to a particular device (your phone, pc, etc) and never leave that device (unless it gets compromised somehow). The only way you can decrypt your data on another device is by registering it using another authenticated device. These keys don't have passwords.
Its basically like encrypting a pgp key with another pgp key, and uploading it somewhere, like people upload all manner of secrets to github or s3 or whatever.
Keybase just provides an easier flow to register new devices and to import and decrypt your secrets (like via a QR code scanned by your phone, for example). Your private keys are as secure as any private, encrypted piece of data that you might send out over the wire, so long as your devices are secure, that is.
If one or more of your devices gets owned, all bets are off, AFAIK. Even if you set a passphrase on your pgp key, all it takes is a key-logger to get it. And since your device is already compromised...
This is where hardware keys win out (yubikey, etc), that require a physical touch to unlock.
DISCLAIMER: I really only have a layman's understanding of crypto.
> When you upload a pgp key to keybase, it encrypts the key again, using your keybase device key.
Except that long time ago, when device keys didn't even exist, there was a feature on Keybase website that allowed to upload a PGP private key encrypted only by your account password (which was never transmitted to Keybase in plaintext though – it was scrypted in browser when logging in, too – but this still means your private key was as secure as your password, which isn't a good practice in my opinion).
Thank you. If that's true I wish they would have just said so when people started complaining about it on Github. Everybody seems to have a different take on this.
Assuming what you're saying is correct, it seems much more sensible. It almost makes the PGP key seem superfluous, though I suppose it help with legacy this way.
It still seems not ideal, in that having one device compromised would give away your main private key and thus your whole identity. It would be nice to have it be some sort of subkey situation. I'd have to think about how that would work.
>It almost makes the PGP key seem superfluous, though I suppose it help with legacy this way.
This is actually one of the best "features" of keybase. They've backed everything by some strong pgp crypto roots, but none of their stuff really "operates" using pgp. The fact that they have abstracted it, in my opinion, is part of why people have adopted it so easily.
At the end of the day, your keybase device key is, itself, simply encrypted with your keybase password. The point I've been trying to make clear is:
> Your private keys are as secure as any private, encrypted piece of data that you might send out over the wire, so long as your devices are secure, that is.
> If sharing a password-protected private key is perfectly safe, why bother having them? Why don't PGP users just password protect everything?
What’s “sharing” here? You “share” an encrypted private key with Keybase so you yourself can recover it back from anywhere using the password that you know. PGP, meanwhile, is used for communication with people who are not you.
> If people have bad passwords, that makes brute force recovery of the private key on a Keybase server plausible, right? At least a lot more so than the whole key from scratch.
Yes. If you want to upload an encrypted copy of your key to someone you wouldn’t trust with the key, you should use a strong password.
> I'd assume that a machine generated key has more entropy than any password that a human can memorize.
That’s not a correct assumption, but your password doesn’t have to be more complex than the key to be safe against brute force anyway, especially when work is added with scrypt (which is what Keybase uses).
Hmmmm... so wouldn't you agree that a percentage of keys would be decryptable by iterating over all encrypted files of all accounts using password dumps? Seems like a good way to decrypt maybe 10%. Still sounds like a major problem, though.. not at the individual level, but at the systems level.
honestly the real security fail in keybase seemed to be users flocking to add every single social media identity to their keybase account, allowing anyone using the public API to remove all doubt that greg1234 on twitter == karl5912 on reddit == john1005 on HN, etc.
scrape all those social media posts, reddit subs, etc. and you've probably got a solid idea of who that user is. all under the guise of public FLOSS stuff.
I would participate in (and could provide resources to) the creation of an open foundation that had as one of its goals the writing of an open source keybase API[0] compatible server.
If anyone else is interested, please contact me directly (email in my profile).
I'm not sure what profile you're referring to. But feel free to contact me on keybase, or via encrypted email. You can find a suitable key via keybase, even without creating an account/installing a client.
While there are likely limits to the extend of my potential involvement in these efforts, I'd not want that to be in the way of further communications.
> Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice.
> So, our shortest-term directive is to significantly improve our security effectiveness, by working on a product that's that much bigger than Keybase. We can't be more specific than that, because we're just diving in.
Their original purpose — tying identities to keys — could have been a nice small non-profit. But there aren't fortunes to be made from managing GPG keys, so they had to pivot into shark jumping.
We have letsencrypt and permanent.org as non-profits. An idea of a identity and key non-profit sounds like another critical piece we would need for a free, open web
That's fair. We'll see how well they execute their vision.
However, after playing with it, checking out their board of directors, and deconstructing their app design, their vision is not really "cloud storage", at least, not the way we typically think of it.
Their long-term mission is preserving a digital legacy, oriented around relationships, families, and organizations. You don't use permanent.org to store things in the cloud that people normally think as "cloud storage", not for the day-to-day stuff. The kind of things you want to store in there are the things you want the world and your descendents to have access to after you die. They won't have to (directly) pay upkeep to keep that legacy preserved. I think that is convincing enough for me to see it as a critical piece of free and open web, even if this doesn't seem obviously connected to the idea of preserving a legacy.
For example, an indie musician wouldn't have to rely on SoundCloud to keep their recorded music around. SoundCloud is not in the business of preserving the creative work; they are in the business of aggregating users and they use user content to do it. Placing those music files in permanent.org has a much better shot of preserving that creative legacy for future generations than leaving it on SoundCloud.
Why? PGP works. (That alone puts it above its supposed alternatives.) It has existed for 30 yrs. That's 30 years of being exploited and patched.
PGP (GnuPG at least) is lightweight. I don't need an Electron dependency or a multi-megabyte chat room in the same application (address space too?) that supposedly keeps my private keys safe.
PGP is spoken by everyone, every programming language, having implementations on even ancient operating systems and architectures. Every email client worth its salt can use PGP. Emacs can decrypt and encrypt GnuPG-encrypted files seamlessly; other editors have plugins to do the same.
It sucks because the UX is so bad that people don’t use it, even when their lives depend on it. [0]
Even when they do use it, it’s easy to mess up.
The biggest flaw though is that in person key signing parties were never a viable or realistic thing for identity verification and web of trust based on that works poorly as a result. The use of multiple signed public social media accounts for identity instead as a way to fix this was Keybase’s main innovation.
For UX, even Snowden couldn’t get Greenwald to set up PGP and after multiple attempts Snowden eventually gave up and tried Laura Poitras with better results, the burden on the user is too high.
Not to mention it's notoriously slow and has been shown to be an insecure method of distributing keys (due to the fact that anybody can upload any key).
Anyone can upload a key to keybase dot com too. You should never trust a key belongs to someone unless you have verified the fingerprint by other means e.g. speaking to them. This is basic security we have known since the 80s. Keybase dot com is a step backwards if anything because of the false sense of security it creates, as if they don't have a giant attack surface.
The whole point is that you don't just use it to upload a key. You link various verified identifies of yours across the web to your Keybase account so people know the PGP key there is the one of the verified person. It's a way to tie all your verified identifies together.
If someone would manage to compromise a bunch of identities of someone on the internet, and then create a Keybase account with them and then upload a compromised PGP key that would be a problem if you don't verify the key. But that's a bit of a stretch.
In reality: I used keybase for a while. When I allowed a domain to expire and the DNS record disappeared, keybase threw up warning both in cli and their website that my identity verification couldn't be completed. My only problems I ever had with keybase was related to the cloud storage they offer.
My real wish is that keybase supported ssh keys and would provide them as an agent.
You can revoke the DNS signature. I'll assume your keybase account name is the same as on HN.
I do agree on the ssh key feature being nice, and, here's a link: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-ssh-ca
You could also just use the keybase file system to keep ssh keys around.
Lucky for us it is open source? I was hoping to use it to replace Dropbox but they kept not taking my money... small wonder they went for the acquisition.
Not exactly. The clients are open source, but the central server isn't. See https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/6374. It might be possible to reverse engineer the server, but it would be a lot more involved than just forking the project.
That's unfortunate. I assume Zoom would have no interest in open sourcing the server software now that they've paid for the cryptographic expertise and code, but I think the previous owners might have been willing to... surprised they never did, maybe they decided they'd never get bought if they did.
A shame, it seemed to work really well. Maybe Zoom will be willing to take my money to be a DropBox end-to-end encrypted cloud sync service instead, they seem to be fairly on the ball with responding to complaints and that they decided it was worth buying Keybase to improve their service maybe they'll come out alright.
Ability to assign roles(groups) to heterogeneous users.
So imagine being able to add user@domainA.com, user@domainB.com, and name@nonprofitname.org to cool-dev-group and them being to instantly be able to access the relevant chat rooms, git repos, shared folders, etc. If password/secret management had been added, then access to that too could have been allowed. If SSO/Oauth had been added, then any service could be covered by this sort of role-based-access-control-for-anyone.
So no user has been created, they're using their existing identity to access new resources. With some extra coding, triggers and events could have been added to do things like auto-sign public keys.
I don’t necessarily read it that way. Keybase is 100% functional and has worked well for a long time. Zoom needs people who know how to make modern client software and chat if they want to compete with the Slacks and Teams, etc. You can’t even screen share on wayland... it’s that bad. If keybase ultimately gets secure video, and zoom a security architecture overhaul, how is that a bad thing?
Well, it's pretty clearly an aquihire. Zoom gets a team of highly skilled cryptographers and Internet protocol experts. Good for them. But that means the team that created Keybase as an innovate PKI store won't be working on that anymore. That's not Zoom's business, and probably won't be, as Keybase themselves never figured out how to turn it into a business.
Keybase seems like something that should be small, isolated, FOSS, supported by a foundation, etc. They could have built a business _around_ Keybase I'd imagine, but all they managed to do with this is invalidate Keybase and make people like myself, who feared their business motivations, feel vindicated for being paranoid.
I'll never blame anyone for wanting to make money, to make a business, etc. But if you make a product that walks talks and acts like a FOSS project, but keep it to center your business around... I'll always be longing for a real, true FOSS replacement.
In this case a good looking FOSS alternative came out a few months ago iirc. Though for the life of me I can't remember the name.
As someone who works at an open-source-focused business, I respectfully disagree. Unlike proprietary software, open source software doesn't depend on the broken window fallacy. As a result, it's really hard to make open source profitable. There's lots of different avenues to get there, and I don't like to fault someone for their efforts if the bulk of their work goes towards improving open source software, as I think Keybase did.
Sure! The idea is that each proprietary project is wasting effort implementing their own clones of everyone else's software. To use your example, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Yandex etc etc are all developing their own search engines. Instead they could all be contributing to one search engine to push the state of search engine software forward, instead of all spinning their wheels re-doing what everyone else is doing. How many devs are employed doing what someone else in some other company has already done? That's the broken window: someone else has already done the work, but it must be wastefully re-done because of the license. There's a lot of room for profit in all that extra waste.
Aside from whether this matches the typical meaning of "broken window fallacy," I think the substance of what you're saying doesn't match reality.
Open source is famous for fostering a bunch of different approaches to the same problem, and slightly different forks of the same concept. That's the "bazaar" in the famous metaphor, as opposed to the "cathedral" of monolithic, hierarchical, linear proprietary development within a closed-source company.
"Everyone working on the same thing" only works well when there is broad agreement on what that thing should be, and strong governance to resolve disputes. National highway systems, militaries, and power grids are good examples.
I don't think search engines are a good example of where this would work; it's not clear in advance what will make a given search engine better. Thus we benefit from a variety of competing approaches, essentially to expand the space in which we're searching for the optimum.
That's not what the broken window fallacy is though. It references the idea that breaking a window generates economic activity which is good for everyone.
Open source software is (I would argue) even more driven to fragmentation by political, ideological, and personality conflict driven squabbles than proprietary software, as there is no profit motive to also satisfy.
Also, the broken window thing asserts that small amounts of criminal activity lead to larger amounts of criminal activity via signaling that being bad or neglectful is OK, which is both not proven and irrelevant to software writers being prone to reinvent the wheel for whatever reasons they have.
You're describing the broken windows theory. The broken window fallacy is the claim that destruction or waste is good for the economy because the cleanup generates economic activity (with the attendant multipliers). It's a fallacy because it leaves out that the original spender (by the owner of the broken window), on average, displaced other economic activity.
While I'm no fan of these companies, I'm not convinced by that particular argument for FOSS either. Imagine the world where we would be always iterating on one lineage/model of refrigerator, each automobile type etc. instead of many companies rebuilding basic stuff. I don't believe we would be better off. Not all progress can be driven by consensus and iteration, some needs to be done by competition, divergence and outright discontinuing old approaches.
I think you would be right about the greater good being served by everyone being aligned on the same search engine ONLY IF we understood search engines so well that we knew there to be only one mathematically optimal way to build search engines.
Since we don't understand search engines that well, there is a LOT of value in the exploration over the space of search engines that these different companies represent.
The broken window fallacy argument is that those speaking of the benefits of the broken window are mistaking maintenance cost for generated value. That doesn't seem to be the case here. This is society implicitly investing in exploration over exploitation.
Well, in reality there wouldn't be one optimal product, there would be many, for the reason that you said -and for human reasons.
However they would still be able to borrow good bits from each other and gain insight on how things could be done differently, so arguably the end result would be a win. From a technical standpoint that is -I think where it gets messy is when we try to factor in the business implications.
Possibly, but in this case I didn't expect them to make Keybase profitable, if anything I expect the opposite. I expect Keybase to be a FOSS, foundation for profitable extensions that the company builds and sells.
Arguably I think they agree with me, about the extensions at least. As seen by their seemingly random directions of feature extensions that Keybase was prone to. My issue is not that they chose random features to try to make profitable, but rather that the core premise, a public keystore, was tied so closely to a for profit company.
It would be like losing Git because Github went under. (Though, terrible example because Git works without a centralized repo, but it's just the first company <-> FOSS relationship that came to mind lol.)
Keybase was a centralized key storage with value-add services such as file storage and chat.
That was absolutely comparable to github, as you could've just gone back to manually syncing pubkeys and encrypting msgs. If github went away, you'd be without a lot of value-add services as well such as wiki, issues user management etc
Realistically speaking, nobody is going to do that... And tbh, it was already dead in the water when they added crypto currencies... Just took a while for their money to run out.
The actual difference is that there are enough competing products for github, not for keybase however, as that is just too niche
I mean, there's a fatal flaw in the broken window fallacy anyway:
>
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.[1]
Capitalism is about acquiring capital, i.e. money. There's no such evidence that people with money actually spend it in ways other than investment, and the sole purpose of that isn't to donate to companies that need it, it's to profit off it and essentially hoard more capital. Sure, poor people with either very little or no capital spend that capital on necessities, and thus drive the economy, but there's no evidence that people with large amounts of capital spend that on anything at all, there's more evidence that they hoard it and seek only to acquire more capital. The entire system is built to favour those people.
If you have to pay to replace a window that should have lasted, say, ten more years, that's money you now cannot spend on improving your factory somehow.
It is still economic activity (and the glazier doesn't mind the work) but it's remedial rather than generative. (The glazier that repairs the window could have been installing a new one in a new factory, eh?)
We're getting way off topic here, but you have a horribly misguided premise here. A typical shopkeeper is not in the .1% 'cash hoarding' class. Small businesses are mostly run by people with average resources, and their capital is typically spent on their business and personal needs.
That feels like strict oposit of the falacy claim, which would hold in case of perfectly stable and suppied currency is employed. Still would be rational to invest research, diversify against theft etc.
How was their product ever marketed that way? They have open source clients because that security table stakes. They’re a solution to crypto anarchy because they help link your crypto identities to your social ones. None of that has changed. You talk like all valid software is free of corporate ownership/sponsorship. Why is zoom’s money somehow worse than e.g. softbank’s.
Oh I didn't mean to imply it was, maybe my "walks talks" bit was unfair. Rather I merely meant that Keybase, like Keys.pub, seems like a great isolated tool for the internet. Something exceptionally well suited for a foundation.
keys.pub doesn't have the single most useful feature Keybase has: The ability to verifiably establish a secure channel with anyone given their Twitter/Github/whatever username.
Their homepage advertises 'keys pull username@github' as an example. Is the missing piece you describe here simply the command 'keys chat username@github'?
I'm not very familiar with the service, but AFAIK they don't. It would be great if they added it.
EDIT: It looks like it might, from the front page, I will try it out to make sure. If it does, that'll be great!
EDIT 2: It sort of does, but it's on a per-key basis, not an entire identity. You can publish proof on Twitter/Github/whatever, but it's only for one specific key, and it's one key per service, which means you can't only have one identity and multiple services.
The biggest challenge with acquihiring is retention. Allowing the acquired team to continue what they were doing is the only somewhat foolproof strategy to deal with it. It's a question of pocket depth and expectations. How much will the new team contribute to the "home" product? If expectations are too high chances are that much of the team won't stay and the acquisition will turn out to be a waste of money. With lower expectations however, continuing to fund the project in question can be bargain for getting a pool of in-house consultants to occasionally tap into for the "home" product, if they are really as good.
And even if retention wasn't a problem at all, skilled people are not inherently skilled, they need to keep challenging themselves in their area of expertise to stay sharp. If the "home" product was failing to foster in-house expertise before then chances are high that it's a problem based on culture and priorities and experts injected from outside would quickly lose their edge. Keep them on the project they became experts on and they stay experts.
Retention isn’t going to be a problem in this market. Hiring in general has almost disappeared. And if you get hospitalized with coronavirus without health insurance, it will almost certainly lead to bankruptcy. It’s too risky not to have a job right now.
I don’t think hiring has disappeared - I got contacted by four recruiters just yesterday alone asking me to apply to vacancies they’re trying to hire for.
I wouldn’t quit my job (and I’m not looking anyway), but there’s plenty of hiring going on.
My experiences with acquihires have not been good.
People went to work for this company based on the domain, the people, or the culture. With the acquihire they change the domain first, and the culture about a year in. Then the people start to leave, and it's just a job, and one you didn't even apply for.
On my worst days it felt like I was sold like cattle, and I would have seen more upside by hiring on someplace else.
Who gives a fuck about Wayland, honestly? It seems like it was designed by people who didn't like the few good things about X and wanted something to further fracture the Linux desktop. Well, they got it.
> Zoom needs people who know how to make modern client software
It's the best video client available on Windows / Mac and works acceptably on Linux, what exactly needs to be more "modern" about it? Slack's video call thing is way less featureful, and Teams is still the abortion that is Lync / Skype for Business under the hood which is and always will be shit-tier.
> chat
I don't want my video app to be my chat app. There's any number of reasons why separation there is a good thing. I can start a Zoom call from Slack in 1 second, what more do I really need on that front?
Wayland was designed by people who didn't like the features of X that almost nobody used (X forwarding, for example). And X is still around for those obscure use cases, while Wayland can serve almost everyone with a much simpler and cleaner system.
Now, why Canonical decided to go off and write Mir instead of collaborating on Wayland development, I have no idea.
> people who didn't like the few good things about X
Since these were also pretty much the only people who were putting effort into maintaining X, I think it's reasonable that they decided to replace it instead.
The history of X is a history of forks. But we've not seen another X fork appear to compete against Wayland. Instead we see the people who are writing Wayland continuing to retrofit the new technologies they're able to bring back, back to X.
If Keybase acquired Zoom (haha), then, sure. This is a PR move for a public company. They'll probably gut Keybase, move their Chinese server generated AES128 keys to AES256 keys generated by you and uploaded to their Chinese server, then call it a day.
I can't think of a single instance where acquisition of a smaller company like this resulted in an improved version of the original product. How many of us are running RHL? Skype is now close to Microsoft spyware that's impossible to remove from a Windows installation. Facebook purchasing Whatsapp, another service that formerly stressed encryption, resulted in things like plaintext backups of your texts on Facebook servers being aggressively promoted as soon as you loaded the app.
It's pretty much always cheaper to gut the original product, ignore the problems with your software, and enjoy the enhanced price of your shares while effectively spending no more money than you had for the original acquisition. As far as I can tell, Keybase has never had a business model or constant source of revenue.
> Facebook purchasing Whatsapp, another service that formerly stressed encryption, resulted in things like plaintext backups of your texts on Facebook servers being aggressively promoted as soon as you loaded the app.
Ia that the case? AFAIK WhatsApp gained proper end to end encryption after being bought by Facebook and pushes for backups to Google (and maybe iCloud?) servers.
Wikipedia writes:
> WhatsApp was initially criticized for its lack of encryption, sending information as plaintext. Encryption was first added in May 2012. In 2016, WhatsApp was widely praised for the addition of end-to-end encryption
Whatsapp announced encryption to the world in 2012. OWS helped secure their app further after the 2014 acquisition by FB, but encryption was something stressed by Koum and Acton from the get-go. Integration of E2EE into Whatsapp/FB Messaging is one of the few examples of Zuck being on the right side of things.
Long term it ended up pretty good, with Koum and Acton taking their acquisition money bags and pouring them into FOSS projects like FreeBSD and the Signal Foundation. Maybe malgorithms will do the same.
> pushes for backups to Google (and maybe iCloud?) servers.
Yeah, I was incorrect. They backup to Google servers. Not sure if that's better or worse. :)
Since then, FB has offered willingness to cooperate with foreign governments to break encryption. I guess we will see what happens with the EARN IT Act.
Zoom uses a proprietary gnome API / hack to do it I believe. It works on Gnome only. Note that with pipewire, wayland screensharing already works on Chrome/Firefox (for all of the video chat apps), and it will come to electron eventually. I imagine in a year or two screensharing on wayland will become seamless for most things.
If you know how to make that work I’m all ears. I run Debian testing, wayland, gnome. I tried to screen share yesterday and got a popup about how its not supported. Maybe mu zoom client is out-of-date?
Zoom works without a hitch on Ubuntu here. Even plays nicely with the tiling WM with multiple workspaces (somehow, a thumbnail window follows you through as you flip through workspaces).
Zoom works great on Linux, it's a proper native app and the quality is excellent. Screensharing is notoriously tricky on Wayland and has been a shifting target that is just now starting to settle, I'm sure it'll eventually work.
Well, my personal experience running the zoom client on Ubuntu was very satisfying. It worked out of the box, just a deb to install. I am on kubuntu 18.04LTS X11 though, not wayland (which I am glad because on 16.04 I was often victim of that stupid copy/pasting bug freezing firefox or the whole gnome env.)
They aren’t. They are making a lot of money which is what the business was made for.
The post is actually refreshingly honest that keybase is now abandoned and will probably die at some point.
The idea that companies were stupid enough to place their internal identity on some random 3rd party is so incredibly stupid that it’s hard to feel too bad for anyone.
Thank you. Keybase had investors and I’m sure the premium Zoom offered was unbeatable. Zoom can effectively pay infinity with equity. Those investors knew that this was the best way they’d ever have to realize gains. That’s why they invested in the first place.
Well, when FB bought WhatsApp, its founders stayed on for a bit to vest his shares then founded Signal with his "screw you" money. Maybe some of Keybase's founders can do the same thing.
> They are making a lot of money which is what the business was made for.
I miss the days when businesses existed not just to serve investors but also their employees and the common good. It's like a 1%-er meta profit model where the actual business is in buying and selling the business and the core business is really just a temporary front that is designed to never make a profit, just create fancy looking charts and eventually bait and switch consumers when it is sold to the highest bidder and the employees all eventually lose their jobs.
One day, VC funding will either be illegal or required. considering the flow of money in this exchange, I'm betting on the second.
> I miss the days when businesses existed not just to serve investors but also their employees and the common good
Uh when was this? For-profit businesses have always been created for the primary purpose of making money. Any side effect like employee well being happened to coincide with what maximized profits at the time or due to regulation.
Pre-1970 or so. Before Milton Friedman, there was a general sense that companies existed to fulfill some mission, with profit as a means. The CEO of Kellogg commented on this in an interview ca. 1980, that money for a business is like a gasoline for a road trip. You need it to get where you're going, but the point of a road trip is not to accumulate as much gasoline as possible.
Is this a joke? The bulk of the labor movement happened before 1970, and it was not because workers were so well-treated and well-compensated that they had a lot of free time on their hands.
I'm a big fan of business and entrepreneurship, but let's be clear here: there is a reason we invented government. There was never a time when we could 100% count on the beneficence of business leaders to advance social goals.
Edit to add: I'm not trying to demonize all business leaders here. There are some bad actors, but even business leaders who desire to do well have to succeed in the marketplace--even against bad actors. Unfortunately, doing bad things in business often confers the benefit of lowering costs, which is a competitive advantage. This is a known structural issue with a marketplace economy and why we need more than just business to have a good society.
Of course, there have always been bad businesses. The difference between pre-1970 and now, is that we've not only socially legitimized the maximization of profit, we've also all but legally mandated it. Now even "decent" business leaders like the CEO of Costco have to continually answer to their shareholders as to why they're not lowering wages and reducing benefit--and in Costco's case, the shareholders may try to take legal action to force them to lower costs, even though Costco the business is already quite profitable. Due to lack of labor regulation and the mantra that "business are required to maximize shareholder value", Costco's decency is fully dependent on its CEO's (unusual) fortitude to fend off those shareholder demands. When its leadership changes, its ability to care for its employees will likely revert to the mean, which as we see in today's environment is abysmal.
So really, it's not that "there are some bad actors", but that "the system strongly encourages businesses to install these so-called bad actors as their leaders". I agree with you, that we need strong government labor regulations to counter this mentality, but this mentality is why these regulations have deteriorated over the past 50 years.
> The difference between pre-1970 and now, is that we've not only socially legitimized the maximization of profit, we've also all but legally mandated it.
I'm sorry, but this is just not true. If it was legally mandated, then the Costco CEO would not have been able to resist such shareholder demands. Your example proves the opposite of what you think it does.
Nothing has changed in the legal structure of corporate governance since 1970. Do you think that investors never demanded greater returns from business leaders prior to 1970?
They can still demand all they want, but the law remains clear today that corporate directors and managers have the power to run the business as they see fit, and shareholders' sole remedy for their disappointment, in the absence of outright fraud or gross negligence, is to sell their stock.
In February 2014, Tim Cook was the CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world. At Apple's shareholder meeting, he directly told his shareholders that he does not even consider ROI in some of his decisions. Legal consequences to Apple and Tim Cook for this statement? Zero. He's still CEO. Because there is no legal mandate to maximize corporate profits.
Honestly, by buying into this myth that the law changed in the 1970s, you're lending power to a fake idea that you seem to be opposed to. There is a group of people who wish such a mandate existed, and by acting like they're right, you're kind of helping them.
Business leaders might make anti-social decisions because they feel competitive pressure to succeed in a marketplace where customers are free to choose and are price-sensitive. That's not nearly the same thing as saying that corporate governance law forces them to make such decisions. It doesn't.
I know, that's what I'm trying to say: it's not true that CEOs are "almost but not quite" legally mandated to maximize profit or shareholder value. The law says plainly that they are not.
"All but" is handy phrasing if you're trying to create the impression that something you prefer is true. If you don't prefer it, I think that using that phrase is like shooting yourself in the foot rhetorically.
I think it's more constructive to point out that such a mandate does not exist (regardless of what some shareholders seem to believe), and there are good reasons it doesn't.
Need to keep in mind we now remember this endeavor as ethically challenged, but was it literally 100% for money or did want of these goods play a role:
> was it literally 100% for money or did want of these goods play a role:
> cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, and opium. Surely access to those provides some benefit other than making money, which it also did for them.
This is an utterly meaningless distinction. Money is fungible with all of those goods.
I am not sure you are using fungibility completely correctly because the goods have a condition, are perishable, they can be bartered or traded or maybe are fungible with respect to each other but are not literal money and literally interchangeable with money.
Anyway, if you want to go down that path you can easily conclude that literally any good or activity is just money, that you live a money-dominated life and we all exist for money all the time and while useful in some contexts I don't think it's particularly apt, but I hope you enjoy it.
In the grand context of life, no (despite the vast majority of large scale events that we learn about in history being usually a result of conflict over money/power) , but in the context of business, as this thread is, yes in a for-profit business literally every good and activity is about money.
Some businesses may choose to sacrifice money for things like employee well-being or community contribution, but that's a choice they make, or more likely are forced to make.
Yes, that's exactly the point...it's meaningless to say (as you did) that the EIC wasn't motivated by money but instead motivated by goods. Even leaving aside that they sold those goods for money....the distinction is meaningless, as money is just a store of value and lubricant for the exchange of goods (and services).
It's not a meaningless distinction. The goods are consumable. The British public didn't want access to spices as an investment vehicle. Using them was a quality of life improvement.
No, when businesses were owned primarily by single individuals, their priorities were much more aligned with the goals of a single individual. The owners cared not only about profits but respect in the community, influence over politics, etc. and made choices that today’s publicly traded companies would and do not.
> The owners cared not only about profits but respect in the community
I think you need to read a little more history. People haven't changed their core nature in the past 40 years. Look at Carpetbaggers, the Triangle Shirtwaist company, and William Hearst for relatively recent examples. Further back you can look at The Dutch East India Company, the Knights Templar, and the various and sundry monopolies that have arisen throughout history.
People are driven to acquire capital initially to meet their own needs, then for power. There always have been people and groups of people who strive for the latter, not being satisfied with the former. Romanticizing long dead business owners may play well in movies and books, but it isn't reflective of human nature.
I miss the days when businesses existed not just to support free users but also their revenue model and profits. It's like the 0%-er meta profit model where the actual business is in building and marketing the userbase and the core business is really just a temporary front that is designed to never make a profit, just create fancy MAU charts and eventually bait and switch free users when it is sold to the highest bidder and the free users all eventually lose their service.
One day, revenue models will either be illegal or required. Considering the outflow of users in this exchange, I'm betting on the second.
Software exists for its users business exist for its owners more precisely its stakeholder, further divide stakeholders into the various rights, control, claims on cash flow, claims on assets, give users the first then watch what happens.
I think you have a rose-tinted view of what old-timey businesses looked like. We moved past mom-and-pop subsistence industry like 400 years ago. No one ever said “I’m going to create a sheet metal production company for the common good.”
No you’re confused. He’s asking for a history in which there is no company motivated by anything other than profit. Since there exist many companies motivated by things other than profit, no such history can be provided. Hence the GP is wrong. Hence the irrelevance of downvotes on this cunty website
Unless I imagined it, they previously said publicly that they were unlikely to pursue a sell like this because they had succeeded at previous companies and cared more about the impact this product could make than the profit they could make from selling it. I based my decision to agree to the terms of Keybase around this statement which I can conveniently no longer find. I suspect it was in one of their airdrop announcements, and conveniently those links don't work in the Wayback Machine.
"Yes, we sold our previous 2 businesses. But I want to point out that (1) neither of those sales ever hurt (and arguably both sales greatly helped) our users, (2) Keybase deserves special consideration which we are aware of, and (3) both Max and I are happy in a world where we never try to sell a company again, and only build things we like."
I feel silly for falling for it too. Even very wealthy people enjoy extra money.
They’re not oblivious but two things; you don’t bite the hand that feeds and it’s easier to get someone to see your side of things when you agree with them. Confrontation will not help to fix Zoom’s culture of insecurity.
>How can they be so obvlivious though? Their own blog post doesn't even mention the tarnished reputation Zoom has acquired lately
I'd say, don't overestimate the tarnished reputation (= some news stories for a while, most didn't read or care about -- including corporate users).
And of course they wouldn't get into it in a press release/blog post for an unrelated to the issue acquisition! Doesn't make sense to sabotage themselves this way...
That's probably why Zoom is buying them, to double down on security and repair their reputation. They genuinely seem to be putting all their focus on improving security. Seems like a smart buy to me.
There hasn't been enough time since the noise about Zoom's security, for a company to inspect the goods, audit the books, negotiate, draft paperwork, share cocktails and all other stuff that come before announcing an acquisition. Especially in the middle of a disruptive situation. The process must had started many months ago.
> doesn't even mention the tarnished reputation Zoom has acquired lately
I'm interested to know if you thought keybase doing the whole unsolicited Initial Coin Offering was a reputation tarnishing or polishing event for that company. (I'm circumspect about both of these outfits to be honest.)
I remember thinking they were neat a few years ago, I made an account and tried out exchanging some keys. It’s slick but I don’t see how it was ever going to be a mainstream product for non technical users who mostly don’t even understand what encryption is. Haven’t heard anything about them since, I kinda already assumed they were dead.
It doesn’t have to be mainstream. A niche product can be viable.
Unless you begin to accept investors money who want an exponential growth at all cost. But if that’s what you want as an investor, no idea why you would invest in Keybase.
You can also have investors that buy into a company because it is counterproductive to their goals. Not all investments are meant to produce financial profit.
Honest question, why does Zoom’s security reputation matter more than Keybase’s? There’s so much pessimism in here but I really don't get it. I disliked zoom long before any of the security issues because frankly it’s rough, unpolished, software that’s never really worked well for me. I, for one, would be excited to get a functional Zoom with better security integrated into Keybase as an option for UI so that you have a serious “productivity” app. Why does the fact that zoom needs help in the security department automatically spell the end of times?
Just out of curiosity, what was it about Zoom that never worked well for you? I work with oodles of academics, and that was the singular reason they flocked to Zoom - out of box ease of setup / ease of use that trumped WebEx and GoTo Meeting.
Privacy considerations were secondary and only came to light (from their perspective) during the increased scrutiny brought during COVID-19.
Their client software locks up my machine every other day. You can’t screen share on wayland. My coworker can’t run a build while on a zoom call or his machine just dies. The UI has never scaled properly on my displays. The zoom icon is distorted in my task switcher. You can’t use zoom in the browser. It’s a lot of little things that add up. I’ll admit I’ve never used zoom on Windows. Perhaps they've invested most of their effort on that platform. And credit where it’s due, when the video calls work, they work as well as any.
Zoom running on Plasma in X has worked fine for me for years. I would suggest that the problem (like so many others) is a Wayland ecosystem maturity thing, not a zoom thing.
The missing piece here isn’t a factor driven by technical logic, but a factor by human logic.
It was “cool” to use Slack until it became widely used, and then it was “cool” to use Keybase instead. Zoom is currently seen as “uncool” (E2EE screwup + widely used), so when they purchase “cool” Keybase, now Keybase automatically becomes “uncool” as well and people will look for something “cool” to migrate to next.
This isn’t a complete explanation of all possible reasons, but it’s absolutely a contributing factor.
EDIT: I predict Riot/Matrix will be the replacement “cool” for Keybase.
Keybase was useless for the most part anyway. It became a vehicle to airdrop and shill shitcoins. Anyone saying it was some kind of bastion of user privacy is being overly nostalgic.
Rough and unpolished, perhaps... but zoom is super popular because it's dead simple and gets the job done, and all the big players could learn a lot from them about putting end users first and not trying to leverage them just to push other products. To me the only question is whether Zoom will screw it up by emulating the mistakes that the big players have made.
I've been juggling a lot of meetings between Zoom and my kid's school on different platforms, and the difference between Zoom and Google Meet is night and day. Schools are mostly switching to the latter because of the security concerns, but damn is it terrible. It's like Skype from 15 years ago.
What I want is PKI that works for real people. Keybase was trying to be that, and I was really excited about it. But, that's not what Zoom is selling. So Keybase being acquired by Zoom means what I wanted is dead.
Thats fair. And it‘s a much more interesting discussion IMO. Why is Keybase only really used for chat? I mean you can `keybase pull` all your friends’ pgp keys into your local keyring. It’s way way better than reading off fingerprints at a key-signing party. And yet that still didn't lower the barrier enough for people to actually use crypto for shit. Maybe the key is email. Maybe Keybase missed an opportunity to bring email into the equation so everybody could do “web stuff” backed by social pgp without a second thought.
Keybase is sitting on a potential vidconf goldmine heading to our brave newcov world. Keybase was sitting on top of a VC flush trapdoor opening to the abyss.
Tech doesn't matter nearly so much as market. Marrying better tech chops to better market potential is a rather better investor storytime.
(Doesn't mean it'll work, doesn't mean Keybase tech will, or won't, survive. But the plave to be is Zoom's niche with Keybase's clue.)
> Honest question, why does Zoom’s security reputation matter more than Keybase’s?
Because Zoom is the buyer and they have the power. Sellers can make whatever promises they like (see: Whatsapp, Instagram) and it is reasonable to assume the buyer will have their way in the end.
Zoom will certainly use Keybase to improve their security overall. However, the rather obvious lack of commitment to existing users means there likely won't be any longterm.
My prediction: Zoom integrates well with keybase, there's a blog post that keybase is shutting down external services in a few months, the keybase founders leave and 1-2 years later, we hear of a new company they've founded.
One scenario in which Zoom's rep matter more, to me, is that they keep keybase alive, but now Zoom's slop infiltrates keybase.
In one way, good job Zoom for looking into security. In another way, I'm still looking at this awful UX that's buggy as hell and thinking it's gonna be a real slog for the keybase team to overcome that momentum.
The negativity here is astounding. This really comes down a company putting their money where their mouth is. Think about the reasons you'd decide to acquire Keybase. It certainly isn't for PR as most people have no idea what Keybase is.
What we are seeing is that Zoom is truly concerned about how their security posture is hurting their business. Remember they aren't the only game in town and there are plenty of competitors. Buying Keybase is an investment in their culture and longterm outlook.
Should it not be? I love Keybase, I've been using it for a long time and it's such an important part of my daily workflow that I would be more than happy to be a paid subscriber. Now it's most likely gonna shut down. I find it hard to find any positivity in this.
I couldn't agree more, and am disappointed that your comment is (right now) apparently quite downvoted. Zoom deserves credit for what they're doing. It's fine to reserve final judgment until we see how it all plays out over the next couple of years, but these are extremely good signs that Zoom is implementing a massive turnaround in security.
> a brand that is untarnished and loved in security circles.
It was just tarnished and unloved. Got notified this morning that I won't be able to access the public files of most of my 'security circle' on Keybase because they deleted their accounts.
I worked at OkCupid long after Chris Coyne and Max Krohn abandoned it. From the vestigial remains of the founders' code and features it was clear what their main objectives were: have fun with cool tech, on the dime of VC funding. As soon as they got bored, they moved on to the next thing. KeyBase is the same pattern. I mean, good for them, they're successful by any measure - how they spend their time and how much money they have. But this outcome was to be expected.
It's kinda ironic that Keybase disappears into Zoom the day after Matrix/Riot enabled end-to-end encryption by default, with cross-signed device verification similar to Keybase's concept of connected keys - see https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing....
In other words, a fully open source (and open standardised) alternative continues to exist in the form of Matrix.
It's funny, but I think I get most of my Riot/Matrix news from your comments scattered about hacker news.
Anyway, I run a matrix server for my family (and we all use the Riot client) and the number one issue is encryption and mysterious "Unable to Decrypt" messages. (Closely followed by how rough the Android client is.) This fixes all of that (well, once RiotX replaces the standard Android client) and I think it will remove a lot of friction.
Holy crap, the Matrix/Riot teams have been busy! Congrats on the progress, it's very exciting to watch. Although I have a Matrix account I have had trouble getting friends/family to switch with me (mostly non-technical folks, and Signal was much stickier for them), it might be time to convince them to try again.
Interesting. I've turned quite a number of non-technical friends/family into Signal users, just by telling them, "Here's the messaging app I'm using if you want to talk to me..." without mention of encryption until they're already hooked. Uniformly comments have been favourable concerning ease-of-use and quality of voice/video calls (at least compared to what they're already used to -- generally Zoom or Skype), and several of them have pushed it out to their networks in turn.
Ease of use is the big elephant-in-the-room issue for Matrix.
The only way I've found to join a room is the `/join` command. There's a GUI search, but it doesn't work.
Users have to pick their identity provider, their home server, etc. Lots of choices, scary messages, and generally annoying to set up. Services that depend on someone who is technically inclined setting things up never become widespread outside technical communities.
If users pick an unreliable server to connect to, or there's a network split, things break, just like IRC does.
There are several clients, all slightly different. It's up to the user to pick which one they want, when they've never used any of them and just want something to work.
It's better than IRC, but that bar is so low you'd have to bury it to get any lower.
It's true you have to pick a server to use, but we try to provide decent defaults (although it's true matrix.org has been overloaded recently).
We're trying to simplify onboarding via P2P Matrix - by default, you'd start off entirely P2P, and only pick a server if you want to 'anchor' your account somewhere.
I last used it for the recent (Thursday, April 30th) Rust Zurich meetup. I've got it installed via apt, and updated to
riot-web version: 1.6.0
olm version: 3.1.3
Search didn't find the room. /join did.
Also it just took me over a minute to find the version number, because the client settings are hidden in a dropdown menu under my user name, not in the gear icon (tooltip "settings") on the upper left or the hamburger menu that says explore, and even in the right dropdown it's under "settings->help & about" instead of just under "help" where the "about" box has lived in every single program since the '90s...
Well, if search didn't find the room, it sounds like a plain old bug. (Or was the room marked ex-directory?) If you can file details at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues we'll dig into it.
And noted, in terms of the version number being in the wrong place on Riot/Web.
Oh definitely, my experience is similar. Sorry if I was unclear: by Signal being "stickier" than Matrix I meant that I've had better luck getting friends to continue using Signal than continue using Matrix. So far, anyway.
Hi! I use Matrix a lot, but a privacy-sensitive group of my friends recently switched to Keybase largely due to the per-room/per-message retention policies. This might be a good opportunity to convince them to jump ship, and I know something similar has been in the works for Matrix, but do you know where it is on the list of priorities?
(Congrats on the cross-signing release though, it's been a long time coming and it's been working really well!)
We've had per-room/per-message retention policies in Matrix for months now (although Riot hasn't exposed UX to configure them yet, as we were drowning in cross-signing work).
Hmm, that document seems to indicate they're disabled by default in synapse though?
>Note that over every server in the room, only the ones with support for message retention policies will actually remove expired events. This support is currently not enabled by default in Synapse.
Hijacking this: Does anyone know if there’s a Matrix client (out or in dev) that has the UI/UX of old 1on1 messengers (ICQ, MSN) and not chatrooms (IRC, Slack)? Specifically not the weird list of bubbles on the side, but instead a list of accounts/rooms and a window per chat.
I guess Pidgin has that UI, although its Matrix support is alpha sadly. Not aware of anyone else who's done that sort of UI yet, but it's only a matter of time.
I'm not sure I understand, because neither IRC nor Slack have the bubbles thing, that's something you'll see in Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp. Also, Riot doesn't have those bubbles, and has the list of accounts/rooms on the side.
However I'm not aware of any client that opens conversations in different windows.
The thing I like about Keybase is that keys are always generated client-side and never leave the client, and all of the functionality associated with adding/removing devices is done in a way so that there's no way for a server to tamper with it (aside from denying service).
Is that true in Matrix? Several services advertise themselves as "end-to-end" encrypted, but then when you poke harder it turns out either there is some sort of TOFU (so an opportunity for the server to insert itself) or else there is no device continuity (which means in the case of e.g. Whatsapp that keys are reprovisioned almost promiscuously to avoid bad UX). Whatsapp is a particularly bad example because (a) I lose chat history when I move devices, and yet (b) the UX does not require an old device to authenticate the new one, so I can compromise conversations (at least moving forward) if I can compromise a server.
How end-to-end is Matrix really, and how similar is the new support to Keybase's key management flow?
All keys are stored clientside, with the exception of if you enable serverside key backup, when they are then encrypted and optionally stored serverside to allow you to recover your history if you lose all your devices.
Just to confirm, if I turn off backup, does anything stop working aside from needing at least one device to be operational at any given time?
Edit: Specifically, is key backup tied to the ability to recover account history on a new device, or can I still get that with key backup disabled as long as I have at least one other device active?
Edit 2: Can you address this paragraph:
> One point for super-paranoid users: currently the private key used to sign your own devices and the private key used to sign other users are encrypted by your recovery passphrase/key and stored on the server to allow recovery if you lose all your devices. We also allow signing keys to be shared (gossiped) between devices, but right now the implementation also stores them encrypted on the server too. This restriction will be fixed in future, but for now if you don’t trust your server with encrypted keys, you may want to hold off on using cross-signing.
If I understand correctly, sounds like security is based on the complexity of your recovery passphrase and an implicit assumption that the passphrase doesn't get transmitted to the server... is that correct?
If you turn off message key backup, all it means is that if you lose all your devices (and thus your keys), you will lose your history. Otherwise, if you have at least one device active on your account, it will receive your message keys and gossip them (if needed) with your other devices. You can always do a manual offline backup too for safekeeping as a workaround.
> If I understand correctly, sounds like security is based on the complexity of your recovery passphrase and an implicit assumption that the passphrase doesn't get transmitted to the server... is that correct?
If you use cross-signing, then yes - your signing keys are stored protected by the recovery passphrase on the server. We also support gossiping them between devices (same as message keys), and there's no reason for them to have to persist on the server. We just need to hook up the UI to expose that as an option and we ran out of time to do that before shipping the initial release. It will follow shortly.
I was about to complain about your desktop Electron app but it seems that spectral[0] is already usable without any hassle (build from source, ...) at least on Fedora, time to reactivate my Matrix account, keep up with the great work
I've been looking into Matrix as a "personal IM bridge" and I'm thinking this could be a way for Matrix to get traction.
Let's say you're in a position that I think may here are: You would prefer to use IM in a secure way. Let me qualify "secure" for this purpose meaning: Encryption of communication in rest and transit; not relying on a single infra/network/service provider; being able to communicate with new peers easily without having to sign up with new providers; not requiring sign-ups leaking PIIs such as phone numbers; being able to sync message history across devices; all of this should hold for group conversations.
matrix.org seems to be on the right track towards that. Feature-wise there's some missing pieces in terms of federation but the roadmap looks like the ambition is right.
But in practice, it's realistically years until you can meet a random person in a bar and ask to join you on matrix to stay in touch, so many of us will still keep our accounts on the not-as-great platforms such as FB, Skype, WhatsApp, Signal.
Given that, wouldn't it be nice to facilitate using those platforms in a way that 1) absolves you from the behavioral tracking that comes with most of the first-party web- and smartphone apps and 2) integrates them in the same UI?
There are, of course, solutions to this end. Bitblbee (IRC gateway), libpurple (pidgin, finch), third-party clients like franz. I'm sure there are many here who have or are using libpurple or bitlbee for this.
But matrix also has bridges!
I'm thinking one potential way that matrix could really get traction and seed the network infrastructure would be just that. Given stable gateways for the IM networks people already use, it's suddenly a much easier sell to get enthusiasts and power-users to self-host matrix servers just to solve their own bridging needs and get a unified flow for disparate protocols.
As that grows, eventually there's a large spread-out flora of matrix servers that can become part of something larger.
I think if there's one thing that can make matrix succeed in it's mission, it's stable, feature-complete (or at least ticking the important boxes for the majority) bridges to mainstream services such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Signal, LINE, Skype, Google and Keybase.
I think this should be a focus for Matrix, and amazing it would be to have these be the fruit of voluntary contributors, some funding is likely required if it's to be sustainable as proprietary protocols and endpoints will inevitably break.
What's your take on that? I realize it's a long comment and I'm in a bit of a rush, but I'd be really curious to hear how you think about these things.
We're working on making bridges better integrated in Matrix to help with this use case - it's certainly a good way to drive uptake.
On the other hand, bridges are always an impedance mismatch - you have to keep up with new features on both side of the bridge, and the system you're bridging into doesn't always want to be bridged.
So, we think bridges are a key thing for Matrix (it's where the name comes from - matrixing together different comms platforms!) - but it'd be wrong to predicate the success of the protocol on bridges. They're useful, they have their place, but they're not the sole reason to use Matrix.
On feature-mismatch, I don't think it has to be that big of a deal - as long as
* delivering messages and file/image attachments work reliably in both directions
* stickers and other native attachments (location, audio clips, etc) can be received, not necessarily sent
, that's absolutely Good Enough for daily use for me and I imagine many others.
Reactions and sending of stickers etc optional, but if that's there, that's basically full parity of what anyone in the target audience mentioned above could expect. Actual parsing of non-plaintext data is obviously up to clients and should be approachable for the average casual contributor.
> the system you're bridging into doesn't always want to be bridged.
This should be the crucial and challenging part to maintain.
> This should be the crucial and challenging part to maintain.
More than that, some of the system explicitely _don't_ want to be bridged, because retaining users in their silos brings in more money than maintaining a window to the world outside the silo. It's tolerated at best today, but you can be sure that if a bridge ever get traction, the Whatsapps/Facebooks/Wechats will do what they can to block you.
Rather than betting on the bridges in the long term, I believe it's in your interest (as a Matrix user) to host a bridge to Whatsapp, and tell your Whatsapp friends that it kinda works but it's gonna fail at some point, so they better have a second account for the future. Install the account for them even, that removes some of the friction. But ultimately you have to realize that Whatsapp doesn't want to talk to Matrix (the situation is completely different for an open protocol of course, like IRC or XMPP)
I'm not Arathorn (and not even a Matrix user yet, barely ever on Signal too), but the problem with bridges to 3rd-parties is that you're effectively allowing these non-Matrix users to keep doing what they're doing, instead of incentivising them to switch. The walled gardens know this very well - that's why they've discontinued their XMPP gateways.
Matrix isn’t a company, it’s a non-profit foundation, expressly set up to protect its users: see https://matrix.org/foundation for details.
Riot is a Matrix client made by New Vector (https://vector.im), the company started by the team who originally created Matrix. The endgame there is to sell Matrix hosting (https://modular.im), support and other value-added services for Matrix. We are categorically not going to sell out our userbase - and we have no reason to; if we did, they’d just move to a different Matrix service provider.
I think a key difference here is fully open and collaborative specs, with Apache-licensed reference implementations for server and client that they dogfood themselves. It's also getting federated. So protocol, tech and network can live on regardless of who's running the servers people are using or driving the development of implementations.
Until one day the foundation decides federation is not in the best interest of the community, the standards and reference implementation start to reflect closely the interests of the leading player[s] with other implementations having to play catchup. It would have been a very cynical take if it wasn't business as usual in our industry.
That would be like the W3C declaring that interoperable hypertext is not in the best interest of the Web community. Or the Linux Foundation declaring that the Linux being open source is not in the best interest of the community.
It would be utterly sabotaging, and in the case of the Matrix Foundation, the Foundation is independently regulated by the UK Government as a Community Interest Company - and so anyone would be welcome to complain to the regulator (via https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-the-re...) that the Foundation was breaking its charter, and the Directors would face fines and/or legal action.
This is why Matrix is in a fundamentally different situation to Keybase, or Zoom, or pretty much any other communication project out there, and why we spent so much time (and money) setting it up properly as a non-profit Foundation.
Matrix and Keybase have entirely different goals and functionalities. There's barely any feature overlap besides end-to-end encrypted messaging, but it's not like XMPP hasn't had that for years. I think it's silly to even compare the two
Anybody else having trouble deleting their account? When I go to /account/delete_me, I get redirected to /?next=%2Faccount%2Fdelete_me, which is just the home page. Also, I get the logged out navigation bar even after logging in. Logging in seems to just redirect me to my own profile page. (I've got my content blockers disabled, etc.)
Edit: deleting my cookies and re-logging in did the trick, in case anybody else hits this issue. After re-logging in I now have one fewer cookie than before, so I must've picked up an extra cookie that was screwing with their auth handler or something.
Although I would consider myself to be a technical person in general sense, I was definitely a non-technical light user of Keybase. More specifically, I was not really concerned of how they did their encryption, as long as they did it well, and I had Keybase just in case I needed to encrypt, rather than than actually using it daily like some here.
Looking back on my usage of Keybase, I realize that encryption to me is a feature, not a tool or an app. I prefer my conversations encrypted, but I don't seek out an app that does it. I would like my files to not be tampered with, but I just kind of assume that's the default on Dropbox at el, even if it's not.
From this view point, it might be a good thing that Zoom acquired Keybase. I would have rather it be Slack or Google or Microsoft, but Zoom will have to do. If they don't murder the acquisition right away, there is a chance they turn Zoom and all their future tools into a more secure environment, in which case it's a win-win for all.
Keybase was cool tech that for years I hoped would find a profit model and more everyday use case. I liked being able to prove I was in control of something on the web. I use Zoom for work and think it's been one of the more stable video conferencing solutions out there but I certainly can't trust them to maintain something like Keybase in a secure manner. Bye keybase, I know you had bills to pay and that this is a tough economy :( I hope your core team will be able to regroup after cashing out at Zoom with some new projects!
From the headline, I didn't understand why Zoom, a videoconferencing company, would want to buy a secure messaging/sharing app.
But after reading it, duh. It's an acqui-hire. Zoom definitely needs to improve it's security, because of recently publisized problems. These are the right people to work on that, the security problems are similar in keybase and zoom, and an outside team with an established track record will help Zoom regain credibility. And Zoom probably had lots of cash on hand to buy whatever they wanted.
So that all makes sense. I wouldn't expect the keybase product to stick around though.
Not because, as other commenters had said "Zoom doesn't care about security." Because they did an acqui-hire to get a team to help them with security, not because they wanted the product. I expect this will result in Zoom's own security improving, it's not some kind of smoke and mirrors trick. It's not that they don't care about security, I think they are presently prioritizing it. They just don't care about the keybase product. Obviously, why would they? It can't have revenue or profit anything close to what the zoom product has.
This sounds like an acquihire, or am I reading it wrong? If so, I doubt anyone at keybase is necessarily thrilled about this.
I’ve enjoyed keybase for many years, it made a lot of annoyances of encryption and key management easy. I particularly liked its encrypted git repo feature—now I’m struggling to think of an easy alternative.
Surprised they took the path of acquiring Keybase and hiring Alex Stamos (ex FB CISO) vs. hiring Moxie Marlinspike and other respectable professionals. Keybase's reputation has become eroded with their recent crypto currency signing nonsense.
Zoom's problems aren't really a matter of having security talent, they're a matter of the company as a whole not prioritizing security. Fixing the former doesn't fix the problem, it just makes for good PR. The latter is a requirement for the former.
Assuming Zoom is really trying to fix the problem, it makes a lot of sense to bring in management (and/or teams) who have experience with bringing security into engineering culture, as opposed to individual security experts who may not even want to work for Zoom in the first place.
Exactly. It was part of their 90-day strategic move in Zoom Security.
From this article: [0]
> Within days, Stamos was on the phone with Keybase co-founder Max Krohn, and the teams started working toward a deal. Yuan said after he talked with Krohn and dug into Keybase’s software, he was convinced this was the right deal.
Will this mean Keybase will be killed in the near future ?
From the blog
Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice.
So, our shortest-term directive is to significantly improve our security effectiveness, by working on a product that's that much bigger than Keybase. We can't be more specific than that, because we're just diving in.
Zoom trading at ~1,700 P/E which to me seems absurd. Wonder if the acquisition involved much stock! Seems like a good time for Zoom to make transactions like this.
I think the thought GP was expressing was that it would be a good time for Zoom to make an acquisition of Keybase paid for in Zoom stock since Zoom stock is trading at a very high multiple of Zoom's earnings.
Some people would regard this stock price as unsustainable compared to historic/similar earnings multiples, and that the stock will likely decrease in value in the "near" future. So from Zoom's perspective they may as well buy as much as they can while their Zoombucks are worth a lot since they'd be parting with fewer shares now than if they made the transaction later on.
Sounds like: stock price is high so use its value to its full extent while the price is high and more valuable. Allows selling/granting of fewer shares of stock too.
PE is price to earning, but if you look at earnings when is very low(barely making a profit), the number will be very high. So people tend to project the Earnings a year or so, and it would fall drastically.
This is precisely why Zoom is acquiring Keybase. Zoom seeks to become the single "remote work tool", challenging Dropbox, et al. directly.
I'm particularly disenchanted with the growth of these multipurpose tools, but I am not their target audience. (Nor, I suspect, are many HN participants, but this is a baseless guess.) I suppose I'm more of an adherent to so-called "UNIX philosophy"--the best, single-purpose tool for each task, preferably that can be combined with its like for a solution customizable to how a specific user gets work done.
> Zoom seeks to become the single "remote work tool", challenging Dropbox, et al. directly.
Maybe they should work on the fact I can run Zoom in screen share and just about nothing else. Just entering a call for me takes ~75% of my CPU and I beach ball regularly when screen sharing lightweight text editors doing barely more than scrolling and typing.
I've used Keybase for a long time but I never quite understood the purpose of it. It never "just worked" for me and my experience was mostly chats being unreadable, my account having to be reset, and a lot of new functionality that seemed like it did what other products already did, just not as good.
I always liked the idea and the people behind it seemed like good people, but I'm sad to say I won't miss a worse version of Slack, Bitcoin and Dropbox.
Argh, yet another for the list. Certain cycles in the tech world are both extremely predictable and regrettable, yet for most of them the sting seems to fade a bit as the decades go by. But the acquisition-for-the-talent/IP-now-great-product-is-toast one somehow never, ever manages to lose its capability to be depressing. On the contrary new ones just make me think back on previous dearly departed that never got an equivalent replacement. It's part of what's made me particularly suspicious about new non-OSS "free" offerings, because that's generally just not sustainable. And the better it is the more I beg them to have some sort of decent paid tier. I guess some though just plain are aiming for a buyout from the start and that is in fact their planned profit/exit strategy, and fair enough but still ouch each time.
I don't quite know how to feel about this. Perhaps it is my mistrust against Zoom, but I did enjoy the run Keybase had as a semi-independent key and ID manager.
Yeah, with the recent issues they had after doing the cryptocurrency stuff (which didn't really bother me, but it definitely seemed to generate some negative feelings in general), this feels like a poorly-timed move.
Zoom is presumably going for "look, we are bringing on-board this team of trusted people who understand privacy", but I think most are just going to assume it'll work the other way and Zoom's culture of poor security practice will bleed into Keybase over time.
Looking forward, none of that seems to matter due to this acquisition/acquihire - it seems clear that we'll not be able to count on Keybase in any meaningful way from now on.
This is the most disillusioning acquisition to date for me.
I use it for shared network storage, frictionless private git repoisitories, basic static web hosting, personal and work chat, and I make heavy use of the teams feature. Not a day goes by I don't use it for something.
First, a huge congratulations to the founders of Keybase! Running a self-founded messaging company can't be an easy feat.
For me personally, this is of course worrying news. I'll suspect that Keybase will die a rather quick death, as most of it's users are security minded that wouldn't ever trust Zoom.
Well, I guess that's it for Keybase. I distinctly remember expressing my worries about them spreading themselves too thin and not really having a clear monetization plan, so an acquihire was the easy way out.
Say, anyone got any Keybase alternatives that are focused only on identity management?
Likewise. My friends and I have been using it throughout the pandemic to chat, I've been using it for years, but we're all deleting our accounts this morning. All around unsettling news as far as keybase software goes. Congratulations keybase team, though.
I used to use Telegram and I really enjoyed it, but it's a bit limited in its professional uses. I'd use it for chat again for sure. I'd love to find something a little more 'work friendly', though.
Wow, it didn't take them long to dumb down https://keybase.io - no mention of all of the cool nerdy crypto stuff, git, etc at all, now it's just another chat app.
This might be an exaggeration, but this feels one of the last nails in the coffin of PGP. Keybase felt like it could become the thing that finally starts making PGP more widel-used by giving it some new powers (verifying social network identities, etc.) and from the way this acquisition looks, it won't last much longer or at least won't improve much.
It's a shame, really. The web of trust idea from PGP could've been really cool and useful to apply to modern social networking and communication services - one that I can imagine even some normal users using. But it seems that Keybase were one of the last willing to try...
Well they had better sort out their security ASAP. The South African parliament's Zoom meeting just because a porn stream. Second time that has happened in <month. Can't really see why anyone is still using it for serious work.
So does this mean getting marketed sketchy cryptocurrencies during your teleconferences, sending your PGP keys to random servers in other countries, ... or both?
So, the company that got bribed by a shitcoin promoter to backdoor the keybase app so it can abuse your secret keybase identity keys to place permanent, non-removable shitcoin ads on your profile[1] (and then immediately denied that it was a backdoor and also lied about implementing the ability for users to remove the ads keybase got paid to place[2]) is now joining up with the company that has shipped sketchy backdoored client software[3], consistently lied about having end to end encryption (and even doubled down on their lies when confronted about it!)[4] and delivers their encryption keys from generation servers in China[5].
I'm sure the result of this will be lots of good and secure trustworthy software that I'll be eager to install on my computer. It's totally legitimate and accurate that people are reporting today that this acquisition will bring real end to end encryption to Zoom as if buying a company causes software to spontaneously manifest out of the ether with zero delay. Don't worry, everyone: Zoom is secure now because they wrote a check!
What is it with cryptographic charlatans these days?
My apologies; I thought it was on this side of the line, if a bit sarcastic. I do my best to comply with the guidelines and keep it on topic here.
Please delete/kill the comment, it’s actually irrelevant because their old product is probably toast now (as is implied in TFA). My delete button timer has expired.
After reading part of [1], I have no idea how you draw the conclusions you do.
I was playing around with a bunch of different crypto currencies when Keybase did the airdrop with Stellar. At every point in the process, it was opt in. Then I received ~$60 and that was it.
It seems your article was going for sensationalism and was highly disputed by all commenters on HN, not covered up by some capital driven conspiracy.
You're wrong. There is an opt-in for wallet key generation. The opt-in does not say that when you opt-in to generate a wallet keypair, it will also do a second operation and use your existing keybase identity keys to sign an attestation that will then be permanently affixed to your profile.
The text alludes to that being possible, but it doesn't tell you it's going to actually do that, or that it will then be impossible to remove the ad from your profile after you do.
The specific opt-in consent text matters. It says a thing, you click ok, but then it does that thing but also a second thing.
Ultimately this doesn't matter though, because keybase is toast now.
As an average user, can you explain where I’m “supposed” to be upset according to your interpretation of their alleged deception?
Your writing comes off quite accusatory but is also full of technical jargon that I can’t parse so I’ll naturally side with the majority. That’s not saying you’re wrong, but I’m sitting in a camp where I have 60 bucks and don’t feel slighted by their practice in the least.
It seems pretty clear from that description that the user consents to signing...
I think it’s annoying to see wallet and chat when all I really cared about was a discoverable public key, but it doesn’t appear to be a backdoor signing method.
The guy you're replying to is the one who wrote the misleading blogpost that was (rightfully flagged) in link [2]. I think it's likely that if he's still grinding this axe 7 months after a very reasonable explanation was given by Keybase, he's not going to change his mind now.
No, the consent modal is for generation of the wallet keys. It says nothing about the fact that if you agree to make a wallet, it will then use your keybase identity keys (different keys, not the shitcoin keys you consented to generate) to sign the attestation and permanently affix the resulting ad for Stellar to your profile.
There's a petition for them to open source the backend, much as that seems hopeless we should do something (and this is preferable to going back to gpg for everything:)
Congrats to the team for having a nice exit. I myself removed all my data from keybase und stopped using it. There is just no trust left on my side for Zoom and those who join Zoom in a business relationship. Indistinguishable from malware it has been for me. Disrespectful of my privacy and hard to remove from my machine. No, thanks. Nevertheless, wishing all the best for keybase.
Good thing I already finished my coffee before seeing this headline. With no disrespect to Zoom, who might even have the best intentions, seeing Keybase just get acquired spooks me, and makes me glad I wasn't seriously invested in it. I had been under the impression (as a very casual user) that it was using a foundation finance model to ensure its independence.
I love(d) the idea of Keybase but I always had in the back of my mind that it was too good to be true. I'm guessing this will be the end as they announce in a few months that Keybase is being retired as it's "best security features" have been integrated into Zoom. Seems to happen to just about every good product that isn't fervently open-source.
Keybase went from ranking 30,000 to 65,000 in 3 months. What happened here? It seems like Keybase has been falling in traffic already for the past 3 months and it's reputations has been tarnished in HN for months now.
The product is simply not good in its current form. It's a strange mix of instant messaging, web of trust, and cryptocurrency scam. It doesn't strongly give any particular goal. The tools are shiny, pleasant enough to look at any use, but isn't going in any direction.
A lot of push recently has been into making it a "team chat" platform, which is great except that all of the participants are public, and tied to their name. It makes for hideously bad opsec if any company were to seriously use it.
God, that cryptocurrency scam. If ever there was a clear message screaming "we have no idea how to turn this into something profitable/sustainable," that was it.
The truth is that sharing money in the same way we share messages and images (i.e. chat) is a good idea, and in my opinion is absolutely inevitable.
Now we don't have to do that via cryptocurrency, but the reason we don't already have it in the west is because it's a coordination problem, and there are entrenched interests that won't care about giving the user a good experience until forced to by competition. Cryptocurrency lets you avoid that problem, and given that it is entirely around managing keys, it's a very natural fit for KeyBase.
I thought the integration into keybase chat was genius, and the user experience of transferring money in that way was much better than anything traditional banking has ever offered me.
> It's a strange mix of instant messaging, web of trust, and cryptocurrency scam.
They ended their Stellar airdrop early, but I guess it didn't help that bots were joining the platform, and affecting the other parts of the Keybase community, just to get a share of it.
There were local, volunteering missions to help healthcare workers, the homeless, etc all done by some "non-profit" in europe. Those missions had state-sponsored ads, and I volunteered online.
As soon as they required me to use zoom, I told them I would not use zoom. I just go on their whatsapp thing, so of course I get less info, etc.
I really fail to understand how Zoom became so popular, and I was recently wondering the same thing about TikTok, which by the way, was just a clone of Vine.
Essentially, with apps like that, advertising and adoption is critical, the tech doesn't really matter that much. I would really be interested in understanding what are the strategies in place to make people use those things. Of course the virus played a huge role, but I'm certain there are specialists about how to gain users rapidly.
Can't help you with TikTok or Vine since I don't understand those either (I believe the target market for them is mostly people around age 21 or younger, so if you're outside that group that's not surprising).
For Zoom though, I feel it's quite trivial to see how it became popular. Of all the various video chat/conferencing software that exists, Zoom is the easiest for the layperson to setup and use while also tending to be the best performing in terms of audio/video quality, latency, large numbers of users on a single call, etc. My girlfriend was able join a Zoom call with her parents a few days ago without even telling them how to do it; yesterday I overheard a 30 minute phone conversation while she tried to explain to her mother how to edit a facebook post (unsuccessfully, despite valiant efforts).
Outside of this niche community, basically nobody knows or cares about Zoom's various security gaffes. They just want something that works and gets out of the way. And I say all this as somebody who has watched others use Zoom a few times and read about it, but never used it myself nor felt the inclination to.
I'm sure you're right about specialists and strategies to try to spark mass adoption being things that happen, but the technology matters as well.
I have moved much of my digital life to Keybase. This news brings me much fear but I just pray that Zoom takes the best parts and then allows Keybase to continue to function as a goodwill venture at least until a suitable replacement appears. The software package Keybase offers is unbeatable.
Together with W3C's draft Decentralized Identifiers (DID: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/), it could provide a decentralized alternative.
Not sure what is the best way to verify Twitter/Github account though. This has to be managed by users themselves. E.g. one user posts a proof in the Twitter account, the other user verifies the proof by checking the proof against the public key posted in the database.
Very unfortunate. Besides its main purpose, Keybase has been my chat app of choice for quite a while, after I decided I could no longer put up with Signal's general crappiness.
Keybase has been one of the very few performant and usable "new-style" applications that I've used -and the only one of its kind.
Sadly I am forced to suffer electron-based vomit every day -between Skype, Teams, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Facebook messenger and whatever else I might be fortunate enough to be forgetting. It sucks that I might have to be on the lookout for a decent encrypted chat application that I don't actually hate, again.
Not sure why the use-case of chat communications has been afflicted by so much crappiness -as if it's a curse.
I know, that's why I was surprised it managed to somehow not suffer from the same performance and functionality problems that I observe on the rest I mentioned.
I didn't say that all electron apps have to suffer, at the same time it seems to me that there is a strong correlation.
This is sad. To me Keybase always seemed like it had a big mindshare among techies (more so before the cryptocurrency venture), but never had a good enough market share for its offerings (like chat, for example). As others here have said, Keybase could’ve launched some paid services.
With the shitshow that Zoom has turned out to be (there’s a long article on tidbits.com about the various issues), I don’t have any confidence that any part of Keybase as it exists now will survive. My belief is that it’ll shut down its services sometime this year or the next. I used it very rarely to verify certain identities, but am going to just delete my account and be done now.
Poor Zoom, first they were scapegoated due to the whole industry’s overuse, or faulty use, of the term ‘end-to-end encryption’ (especially if we believe Snowden’s claims in his latest book that portrays corporate cloud computing as a way for American corporations to create and sustain NSA backdoors). Now the team is probably pretty motivated to kick ass and show the world what they’re made of, considering they have Microsoft Teams, Skype Google Meet and other big co’s as competitors (or maybe it’s the opposite, and Zoom is the bigger NSA Trojan horse here).
If the main reason for this acquision is for the Keybase engineering talent, I hope Zoom/Keybase does the right thing and open-sources the server code for Keybase, rather than letting the product die.
Mergers and acquisitions make me so sad :/ I need to stop letting myself get excited about VC funded companies, because it always ends in disappointment. I really should know better by now!
Congrats to the team. Though in the inevitable acquisition, I wish GitHub/Microsoft had been the acquirer: there are a lot of natural fits between that ecosystem and Keybase's model, and a reasonable history of successful acquisition.
Hopefully Zoom avoids gutting Keybase. I found it really useful for bootstrapping credentials when onboarding remote team members and contractors. Way easier to manage than GPG: it was fairly painless even for non-technical people.
Fingers crossed. I wonder what the infrastructure overhead cost is?
I know we all like to pretend it's all passion projects, but the reality is that with very few exceptions, developing large-scale, end-user-ready software costs money, regardless of the license. If devs aren't getting paid, they're not going to work on it. Keybase is dead.
Despite being one of the earlier signups I have never fully grasped what it's actually good for.
Time and time again I forget about it and when I check the website it seems to be doing something different - but it all sounded very centralized, first the gpg keys, then the file-sharing and chat - it doesn't seem to be federated.
So unless some entity steps up as the de-facto api-compatible replacement, I don't see how having the code alone would help, unless you want a chat solution for a handful of users?
I've found kbfs a very convenient way to share files with collaborators. Anyone know of a self-hosted encrypted remote filesystem that might replace it?
This. In fact I've found it pretty useful just for just personal files.
There's Tahoe-lafs, which ahs been around for years but, although secure was originally pretty notorious for being hard to use. Maybe it's improves since...
This is so saddening. I use Keybase for a lot of my personal chat, as I find the signal multi-device workflow to be a bit crap. Keybase has been flawless. I love the kbfs and git integration, and I’ve desperately wanted to pay for ages. In fact the company I just started uses them for our git hosting and shared files. I’m gonna have to move now.
Please please please can someone fork and RE the backend code?
Why? Keybase's product is team chat. Zoom wants to kill Slack. Seems perfect.
(Keybase's crypto stuff is nifty, but we all know there is no money in that. They tried to make money by integrating cryptocurrency, and people did NOT seem to like that. So here we are.)
If anyone's looking for a fully open source, decentralized encrypted filesystem similar to keybase fs, then checkout Peergos[1][2]. It's built on top of IPFS.
I think this is fantastic news. I expect adoption of both Zoom and Keybase to increase as a result of this partnership. I love both these platforms and this feels to me like a really perfect match. I'm so glad that people aren't going to be forced to use Google and Microsoft for everything -- it is good for monopolies to be challenged with innovative tech.
Many are bemoaning what zoom will do with Keybase, but the code is bad licensed so nothing’s stopping anyone from forking the repos now and building a parallel distro.
Realistically this is probably the best outcome for the Keybase team as they presumably have jobs for the foreseeable future.
The server was never open source and that will be a pretty big obstacle to the product living on beyond the company. That and maybe the Amazon S3 bill.
Unregulated capital dominance is current at the historical peak in US. And funny thing is people can not do anything about it. Considering the time where AT&T (which is much more benevolent in today's term) can be broken up, today is just money game and money game.
This is actually a really interesting acquisition, keybase wasn't going anywhere yet was producing some really good stuff. On the other hand zoom is a bunch of security and cryptography amateur, I can't wait to see what's going to happen. Good luck!
Somewhat predictable move. Buying a security company (on the cheap with Keybase) is an easy way to advertise “See, security now!”. It’s a fast-track solution to slap some duct tape on the problem and at least say they fixed it.
They bought Keybase to bring on a strong security team as they try to build end-to-end encryption into 1,000 person meetings which is currently not possible with any solution.[1]
Well that's it for Keybase. I can't continue to recommend them. I was able to look past the cryptocoin distribution to be honest, but teaming up with Zoom seems like the kiss of death for any security focus.
Keybase was almost the perfect Slack-killer for security-minded teams, except it had a few wiggles, including their sluggish client. I believe there is an opportunity for someone to capture the users who are about to be abandoned by this transaction, if they implement a subset of the Keybase client functionality like team chat, shared files/git repos, but get rid of the crypto wallet nonsense. I, and others, would gladly pay $10/mo for this.
Matrix isn't the answer. That's like saying just use SMTP for email.
The slackification of Keybase did not lead to a viable business model, unfortunately. In fact, it's such a no brainer, I can't wait for someone to build Keybase 2.0. It might not be a VC enterprise, but could be a great lifestyle business for a small team.
So, reading this, it’s clearly an aquihire, and they don’t care about the Keybase product. Please open source the server. We want our communities to still be able to run, and self hosting would be fine.
Meh. They did it.
Surprise.
Think about what kind of intelligence is working in the inner of z00m.
You should be afraid of them, the same as you are of whatsapp, telegram and your knik-knok to come.
Now I don’t even know if I can trust Keybase, and am trying to figure out if I should delete my account. Does anyone have any persuasive arguments for/against?
This is hilarious to me, because I finally decided to make a keybase account and start making use of their service two days ago, and today it appears to be a dead product.
Lookinmg forward to see what happens to those boys standing up to make life easier for encryption and idintity.
From that point of view, the project is canceled immediately.
Zoom?! What a twist! Congrats to the Keybase team! Although it's time to drop the account and move further, I'll keep it for a while in case of another twist.
How will the need for private matters to stay private be dealt with as mainland China requires use of a version that provides surveillance of all calls?
I was starting to look at the space of public trustworthy identities, are there any viable alternatives out there that are vouched for in the community?
very unfortunate news given that I have zero trust in zoom. To be honest, i've never found a unique use for keybase in the past years that my account was active and was always disappointed with the quality of their desktop and iphone applications.
later today or tomorrow when I have free time, I will be deleting my keybase account.
This is kind of comical - I guess when leadership-types want to recover from the recent bad press, they decided they could buy a security-oriented company and that'll "help make Zoom more secure." I guess what more can you do when you can't implement this stuff lmao
I was one of the early Keybase adopters/users, this is kind of a sad and happy day all at once. I am happy for the founders and team as this is a great exit, but am sad because I think Keybase, one of my favorite products, is going to go to the wayside :(
"Our existing codebase sucks. So let's buy some cool companies in the wild and let them help fixing our codebase"
Yup, it sounds like the perfect plan to me.
What likely happens is this. The current codebase is too ugly to improve. But since they have a lot of users, it has value. So, the engineers from Keybase started from scratch, try to implement all of the functions in the existing codebase, plus secure. The plan is, after it has been developed, replace the existing codebase. But unfortunately, they miss the planed deadline by years and when it's finally working, they couldn't implement all of the existing codebase because nobody knows how to implement it. No documents and original implementers were left the company long ago. But they spent so much effort on the new project and all the new features are implemented just on the new one. Resulting the chimera of old and new code base both running at the same time. Oh and by that time, the user is rapidly decreasing for they failed to improve the service for years while the competitors offer the better service now.
- Acquihired employees end up having zero passion or motivation to work on tech from their new masters and end up doing a crappy job and implementation before their retention period ends and they bail out.
- Mish-mash of additional crap code increases tech debt to a point that alienates top engineers causing them to leave for greener pastures. The second-tier engineers end up taking up the reigns hack band-aid further destroying the codebase. Cycle of crap code and good engineers leaving continues until the company is left with lowest-tier engineers who couldn't get a job elsewhere or desperate H1-B visa holders who hold up the fort until a competitor comes to eat their lunch with a better, more performant product.
I do not know the paperwork around this, but my guess is the same as with: WhatsApp-founders or some compareable.
They begin hating what they did. Quit as fast as the contract allows.
And stupidly try to restart the same shit in the same niche.
Zoom is a US Based, publicly traded company listed on the NASDAQ [1]. So to that first part, no, that's not correct.
However they have a Chinese subsidiary that does some of their development work along with supporting their in-China services. Any tech company that operates inside of China is legally obligated to private the CCP access to anything and everything they want. This is why most companies has separate, special, dedicated servers for/in China (up to and including AWS [2]).
The reason for the purchase of Keybase is to up Zoom's crypto game. They (Zoom) made a pledge to do significantly better around encryption and user controls, right after they became super popular and started getting targeted for news/abuse/etc.
Sadly it probably doesn't matter what you think of Keybase as this looks like this was probably an Acquihire for the team and their knowledge. Maybe Keybase the product will be totally open sourced, but beyond that it's likely dead.
Isn't the point of Keybase that they let you control the private keys? I don't use it so I don't know, but my impression was that they were trying to make encryption and key management easy.
Now they've lost their independence and they're owned by a communication company that has [edit: the majority of] its dev team in China.
I use Keybase to talk to my friend in China since it's one of the few services they don't block.
This is a pretty disappointing outcome.