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Keybase launches encrypted Git

keybase.io

21–30 of 277 posts

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#21
post #10

Keybase team member here. Interesting fact: git doesn't check the validity of sha-1 hashes in your commit history. Meaning if someone compromises your hosted origin, they can quietly compromise your history. So even the fears about data leaks aside, this is a big win for safety. From an entrepreneurial perspective, this is my favorite thing we've done at Keybase. It pushes all the buttons: (1) it's relatively simple,…

So I love Keybase unconditionally and if you guys weren't rolling in physical offices (and not one in Boston) I'd have been beating down your door to come work there--I think what Keybase is doing is important and it's something I'd love to work on. But I have a serious question that maybe you can answer, and it's something everybody who I've showed this to has asked me: How is Keybase gonna make money? How am I assu…

> You guys should be taking my money, is what I'm saying.

Completely agreed. The reason I don't use Keybase more than I do is because I half expect them to be acquired/something else to happen. Would gladly give them my $10/mo. for a 1TB instead of Dropbox.

With that said, I completely understand why they aren't right now -- maybe they're not going after the consumer market, maybe they don't want to box themselves in with customer support obligations, etc. But I really would like to use them.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#23
post #21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I love Keybase unconditionally and if you guys weren't rolling in physical offices (and not one in Boston) I'd have been beating down your door to come work there--I think what Keybase is doing is important and it's something I'd love to work on. But I have a serious question that maybe you can answer, and it's something everybody who I've showed this to has asked me: How is Keybase gonna make money? How am I assu…

> You guys should be taking my money, is what I'm saying. Completely agreed. The reason I don't use Keybase more than I do is because I half expect them to be acquired/something else to happen. Would gladly give them my $10/mo. for a 1TB instead of Dropbox. With that said, I completely understand why they aren't right now -- maybe they're not going after the consumer market, maybe they don't want to box themselves in…

For sure. I would give them my ten bucks a month for the 100GB I get for free.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#24
post #10

Keybase team member here. Interesting fact: git doesn't check the validity of sha-1 hashes in your commit history. Meaning if someone compromises your hosted origin, they can quietly compromise your history. So even the fears about data leaks aside, this is a big win for safety. From an entrepreneurial perspective, this is my favorite thing we've done at Keybase. It pushes all the buttons: (1) it's relatively simple,…

So I love Keybase unconditionally and if you guys weren't rolling in physical offices (and not one in Boston) I'd have been beating down your door to come work there--I think what Keybase is doing is important and it's something I'd love to work on. But I have a serious question that maybe you can answer, and it's something everybody who I've showed this to has asked me: How is Keybase gonna make money? How am I assu…

We believe the right long-term answer for Keybase is finding a way to charge large corporations and offer pretty much everything else for free. Obviously there would have to be some paid tier if you really wanted 10TB of storage or something, but very few people want that right now. We're still just getting started.

Of course to achieve our goal, we'll also have to find a way to distinguish communities - which we'll want to use Keybase for free - and companies.

Many of us on the team have come from ad-supported businesses and we really, really never want to do that again. I personally guarantee I will never be a "publisher" again. Fortunately that just can't work with Keybase, so no fears there.

But charging for anything on Keybase right now would be a big mistake. We only have ~180,000 users, and we want to bring crypto to everyone. That basically means making products we believe are better.

Another way of looking at your concern: I think if we were charging right now, it wouldn't actually decrease the odds we disappeared in a few years. It might distract our attention from working on the best product and cause our bloody demise. So maybe we're not choosing the path that gives you the highest impression of safety, but I think we actually are.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#25
post #18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can hose your local, too. And it can happen easier than you think--I've seen it happen because a laptop that pushed to Dropbox went to sleep mid-sync and a desktop synced after. Fighting the Dropbox API to unwind it is a huge pain. git-remote-dropbox works as you would expect a Git remote to work; it's API-driven and actively discourages even syncing the remote repository down to your machine. I would so, so stron…

How would it hose my local? I thought git's design meant that it might possibly pull down new corrupted refs, but whatever I currently had would remain intact, so it's just a matter of reverting. Not so?

I believe it would be Dropbox doing the overwrite. Dropbox will just replace data - it doesn't do anything with respect to the reflog. I suppose it might be safer to work on a local copy and push to a second local copy in dropbox, so your working copy isn't touched by dropbox at all.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#26
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I love Keybase unconditionally and if you guys weren't rolling in physical offices (and not one in Boston) I'd have been beating down your door to come work there--I think what Keybase is doing is important and it's something I'd love to work on. But I have a serious question that maybe you can answer, and it's something everybody who I've showed this to has asked me: How is Keybase gonna make money? How am I assu…

We believe the right long-term answer for Keybase is finding a way to charge large corporations and offer pretty much everything else for free. Obviously there would have to be some paid tier if you really wanted 10TB of storage or something, but very few people want that right now. We're still just getting started. Of course to achieve our goal, we'll also have to find a way to distinguish communities - which we'll…

OK, awesome. I'm glad you wrote this, because this makes me feel a heck of a lot better about using Keybase. This was in a way my hunch, but I figured--this is something good and cool, I want to make sure it stays good and cool. =) Thanks for the reply.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#27
post #20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would it hose my local? I thought git's design meant that it might possibly pull down new corrupted refs, but whatever I currently had would remain intact, so it's just a matter of reverting. Not so?

OK, so maybe we're using "local" for different things. Are you developing in your local copy of Dropbox , or are you cloning to a local directory using the Dropbox directory as a source (probably bare)? I assumed the former, which is what I meant by "local"; you can end up syncing multiple different instances of the repo and horking the contents of your .git directory (as well as cross-edited files, etc, that bleed c…

That explains the confusion, I'm talking about keeping a bare repository in Dropbox and cloning it to a non-Dropbox location on each computer where I work. It never occurred to me to keep the working copy itself on DB, that would be silly!

I expect that this could break the bare repository on DB if I ever pushed from two places simultaneously (where "simultaneously" could potentially encompass a period of hours or days if I pushed from an offline computer) but I should be able to repair it by recreating the bare repository.

Using something like git-remote-dropbox seems like a good idea. But at this point, I can just start using Keybase, hooray!

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#28
post #25
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would it hose my local? I thought git's design meant that it might possibly pull down new corrupted refs, but whatever I currently had would remain intact, so it's just a matter of reverting. Not so?

I believe it would be Dropbox doing the overwrite. Dropbox will just replace data - it doesn't do anything with respect to the reflog. I suppose it might be safer to work on a local copy and push to a second local copy in dropbox, so your working copy isn't touched by dropbox at all.

Yeah, keeping a local copy outside DB and pushing to a bare repo in DB is what I do. It didn't occur to me that one might work directly in a repository in DB. The hazards there, at least, are quite clear!

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#30

Keybase team member here. Interesting fact: git doesn't check the validity of sha-1 hashes in your commit history. Meaning if someone compromises your hosted origin, they can quietly compromise your history. So even the fears about data leaks aside, this is a big win for safety. From an entrepreneurial perspective, this is my favorite thing we've done at Keybase. It pushes all the buttons: (1) it's relatively simple,…

I will pay a LOT of money if you can slap a half decent web interface on it.

Surprisingly, you guys look like a direct clone of the new Bitbucket interface. Its not my favorite (I like github so much better) - but Bitbucket with its inbuilt Pipelines integrations is so much better than Github.

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