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Zoom Acquires Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#161

Post by Arathorn »

ryukafalz wrote: post #158
Arathorn wrote: post #104

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. [disclaimer: project lead for…

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 i…

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).

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/messa... has the details.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#162

Post by nathcd »

emersion wrote: post #35

https://keybase.io/account/delete_me

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#163

Post by eropple »

crazygringo wrote: post #157

Everyone here saying Keybase is dead... why hasn't anyone mentioned that Keybase is open-source? New BSD (3 Clause) License. [1] So regardless of what happens to it with Zoom, the community can fork it and continue developing it, no? So if people don't want it to be dead... it's not dead. That seems like great news, right? (And great foresight?) [1] https://keybase.io/docs/the_app/source_code

The backend isn't open-source, AFAIK. It isn't a full reverse engineer job to implement that, but it's not trivial.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#164

Post by 627467 »

I can't help but feel shocked by this development. I guess it's my fault given that keybase was always potentially a target for acquisition.

PR-wise it does not seem to bode well for those who relied on it for both file, chat and social graph storage...

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#165

Post by dcow »

vz8 wrote: post #132
dcow wrote: post #78

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 hav…

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#168

Post by floatingatoll »

AgloeDreams wrote: post #135
momokoko wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Congrats Keybase!

> 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…

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#169

Post by 411111111111111 »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #106
coldpie wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 featu…

It's actually a pretty good example to be honest.

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

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#170

Post by coldpie »

crazygringo wrote: post #157

Everyone here saying Keybase is dead... why hasn't anyone mentioned that Keybase is open-source? New BSD (3 Clause) License. [1] So regardless of what happens to it with Zoom, the community can fork it and continue developing it, no? So if people don't want it to be dead... it's not dead. That seems like great news, right? (And great foresight?) [1] https://keybase.io/docs/the_app/source_code

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.
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