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Zoom Acquires Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#341

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

mikro2nd wrote: post #292
KAMSPioneer wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#342

Post by carapace »

fao_ wrote: post #244
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…

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…

I think you're reading too much into it.

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?)

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#343

Post by djrogers »

freepor wrote: post #206
ativzzz wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#344

Post by sb057 »

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.

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#345

Post by alwillis »

I woke up this morning and read this and literally thought it was a belated April fool’s joke or something.

Best case scenario: the Keybase app gets spun out and gets an appropriate home.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#346

Post by president »

ezoe wrote: post #300

"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…

You forgot:

- 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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#347

Post by conroy »

paramk wrote: post #330

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 t…

> Will this mean Keybase will be killed in the near future ?

Absolutely. This was clearly an acquihire.

I copied all of my data out of my keybase folder today and I'd suggest you do the same.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#348

Post by vlowther »

dcow wrote: post #165
vz8 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#349

Post by gonehome »

For years people have been begging Keybase to allow them to pay them for the service and Chris Coyne always refused.

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#350

Post by thanatropism »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #272
johnchristopher wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is wayland support even a femto blip on Zoom's radar ?

They do keep saying "multiplatform", but I guess that's Windows/macOS/iOS/Android, not Linux. They're not the only ones though, this is what most companies call "on any device".

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).
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