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Zoom Acquires Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#421

Post by stereolambda »

coldpie wrote: post #240
zomglings wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't follow your reasoning about proprietary software depending on the broken window fallacy. I don't see how Google's proprietary search engine or Facebook's proprietary interface to our social network rely on the broken window fallacy. Would you mind elaborating?

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.…

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#422

Post by ccktlmazeltov »

zelly wrote: post #325
pornel wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keybase was dead as soon as they took VC money. 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.

https://pgp.mit.edu/

this doesn't even have authenticated encryption

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#423

Post by ccktlmazeltov »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #341
mikro2nd wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technic…

> The only way I've found to join a room is the `/join` command. There's a GUI search, but it doesn't work.

never used that /join command, the GUI works fine for me

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#424

Post by bloopernova »

herval wrote: post #356
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. :(

While it's a cool tool, what exactly was the (commercial) potential Keybase had? I could never tell.

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.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#426

Post by kemonocode »

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?

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#427

Post by ackbar03 »

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.

What was the main difference with this a drop box though? It's encrypted?

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#428

Post by wutwutwutwut »

gonehome wrote: post #394
bgee wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] Tech job postings in US: https://zoom.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Zoom/0/refreshF…

Thanks - I edited it to soften the language a bit.

Is it called "soften the language" to fix a 100% factual error?

Honestly I feel that if you're arguing in one direction or another and haven't checked the facts, maybe it's better not to argue about it?

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#429

Post by ccktlmazeltov »

seemslegit wrote: post #340
Legogris wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

your scenario really makes no sense to me, maybe you're not familiar with what Matrix is?

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#430

Post by fwip »

roblabla wrote: post #34

Keybase' post about the acquisition: 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…

Sounds like good timing that https://keys.pub has become usable recently. :)
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