Zoom Acquires Keybase • Hacker News Board

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#291

Post by fmpwizard » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

oever wrote: post #89

ddevault wrote: post #53

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 existin…

Sounds like protonmail.

I don't know their revenue numbers, but protonmail offers paid services, unlike Keybase. I hope protonmail doesn't go the same path.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#292

Post by mikro2nd » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

KAMSPioneer wrote: post #226

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…

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. Thanks to you and the team for all the hard work!

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#293

Post by m3kw9 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

frogpelt wrote: post #102

ithkuil wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not look at the problem the other way around? 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.

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. Nope. Once a pariah, always a pariah.

Really? Why is everyone using FB, google?

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#294

Post by dgellow » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

neltnerb wrote: post #245

bloopernova wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, yup, keybase is dead. Well, shit. Keybase had an amazing potential. I use it every day to ad-hoc securely share/store stuff. It will be sad to see it wither even more than it has. :(

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.

Is the server open source? I know that the client is, but I haven’t found sources for the backend.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#295

Post by m3kw9 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

underyx wrote: post #44

Keybase's side of the announcement: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom > What the Keybase team will be doing > 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 o…

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#296

Post by usrusr » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #66

dcow wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#297

Post by ViViDboarder » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #214

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 backdo…

From your second link a commenter actually steps through the flow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21116981

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#298

Post by an_ko » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #294

neltnerb wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the server open source? I know that the client is, but I haven’t found sources for the backend.

It's not: https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/6374

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#299

Post by bad_user » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

I like Keybase's encrypted Git repos.

I hope it doesn't die.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#300

Post by ezoe » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

"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.

The same story repeated countless times.