Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#71

Post by carapace » Thu, May 07, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #17

atonse wrote: post #8

I am also curious here. I have used and advocated strongly for Keybase with a couple of local government clients to send sensitive files back and forth (not sensitive in the sense of national security, but more to preserve privacy and store encrypted at rest). But I want to get ahead of the concern that Keybase is now owned by a Chinese company, which instantly compromises it. PGP is dead on arrival, since it's an ov…

Zoom is not a Chinese company. The founder merely was born in China. He is US citizen. I am very put off by this anti-China rhetoric. Everything that even has a remote connection to China is now under suspicion. This is madness.

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#72

Post by novok » Thu, May 07, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #16

> I myself mostly use the following features from Keybase: Chat, KBFS, Git repositories and encrypting messages sent out-of-band via PGP in Keybase (and the various cryptographic tools [signing, validation etc]) While all these features are individually nice, I kinda started to worry about Keybase as a product when they started bolting on stuff like this. I think the key (pun intended) to stable & ongoing success in…

I feel like they were making a general secure E2E 'corporate team software' kit, with a focus on software dev. Storage, chat, git, etc. But then they forgot to charge money :(

For corps especially, they want to be able to pay money so they can get support and SLAs. But keybase files have always had somewhat bad performance and undefined storage limits, so you couldn't rely on it as a company. It was always the biggest confusion point about keybase for me. If keybase charged money, would they have been more successful?

The social network / device & key management stuff they started with I considered their original startup idea that they pivoted from.

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#73

Post by zowanet » Thu, May 07, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

spladug wrote: post #61

If you just want to share your public key safely, a .well-known directory on your domain works these days: https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD

Also GitHub supports .keys" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/.keys

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#74

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, May 07, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

msla wrote: post #36

FooBarWidget wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom is not a Chinese company. The founder merely was born in China. He is US citizen. I am very put off by this anti-China rhetoric. Everything that even has a remote connection to China is now under suspicion. This is madness.

> I am very put off by this anti-China rhetoric. It isn't anti-China, it's anti-PRC. The difference is obvious.

China is an authoritarian one-party state. There might be a difference, but it's pretty slim.

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#75

Post by carapace » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

sapir wrote: post #65

what do you think about it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Bt3jEhIwA

(Just to let you know I automatically downvote links to Youtube that have no description of what to expect. Nothing personal.)

That was weird, but not bad. But it doesn't have anything to do with this thread. (It's a funky dance video.) You seem to be spamming that link on HN. Please don't. You'll just get banned.

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#76

Post by covidcovidcovid » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

10 years ago I was able to get good result from ads, but now it is an absolute waste of money and it's not worth it anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#77

Post by xrd » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

wayneftw wrote: post #11

Honest question: What function does a server perform in end to end encryption? Because I see that the Keybase client is open source but not the server…

You have to exchange data (public keys and the actual encrypted content) and if you can't do that peer to peer, you need something that facilitates that. For example, webrtc clients can talk over an encrypted channel to each other p2p if they are inside the same network. If not they need a TURN server to relay that information and do NAT (firewall traversal). For obvious reasons no one wants to be the service provider of anonymous encrypted content, hence a business opportunity.

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#78

Post by fishywang » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:03 PM UTC

zowanet wrote: post #73

spladug wrote: post #61

If you just want to share your public key safely, a .well-known directory on your domain works these days: https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD

Also GitHub supports .keys" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ .keys

I think that's only ssh keys, not including gpg keys.

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#79

Post by niyikiza » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

What's a good business model for this kind of company?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23106043

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#80

Post by msla » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #74

msla wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am very put off by this anti-China rhetoric. It isn't anti-China, it's anti-PRC. The difference is obvious.

China is an authoritarian one-party state. There might be a difference, but it's pretty slim.

> China is an authoritarian one-party state. There might be a difference, but it's pretty slim.

China is a culture with a very long history, like all cultures, and a diasporic population, not to mention all of the Chinese people under the rule of the Republic of China on Taiwan.

Confusing the PRC with the entirety of Chinese people, Chinese culture, and China as a whole is rather similar to refusing to distinguish between Nazis and Germans, and only serves to either make criticism of the PRC impossible, since one can always accuse the critic of racism, or make defense of the Chinese people and culture impossible, since it will be taken as burnishing the PRC.