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Zoom Acquires Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#661

Post by raindropm »

Gasp0de wrote: post #553
gonehome wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Zoom is based in California’s Silicon Valley, but it owns three companies in China that develop its software. The Citizen Lab said the structure allowed the company to lower its development costs, but added “this arrangement may make Zoom responsive to pressure from Chinese authorities.”" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/24/uk-governmen... The implication is that China is hostile and leverages their powe…

Isn't the US actually at least as bad if not worse? Thanks to Edward Snowden we know without speculation that the US "is hostile and leverages their power to censor/collect communication information from companies and their people without checks on this power" (ok, supposedly there is secret judges that secretly check on this power, but that doesn't really do any good does it?). The USA also "pressure companies to ha…

I think at least the public can voice their opinion to certain degree in the US. In China...yeah, good luck with that.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#662

Post by kirillzubovsky »

rhizome wrote: post #656
wpietri wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power depends on the board structure and the ownership. But even if a founder owns 51% of the company, and so in theory can do anything, they still have an obligation to do right by the minority shareholders. This is generally known as fiduciary duty, and is a complex area of law. Here's a short summary: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi... In a case like this, a founder can't just give…

> they still have an obligation to do right by the minority shareholders Fiduciary duty is extremely rare to be the subject of a suit against a, let's say, CEO. It's a complex area of law because it isn't actually a law, nor specified anywhere, and not a requirement for corporate existence. So, it's a set of court decisions that future cases are built upon, but in general a house of cards in that it could be invalida…

Can you clarify your statement about the PBCs? I can't figure out if you're saying they are a good thing, or just a theatrical performance.

I am curious because B-corps have been popularized in the recent years, but when I looked into what B-corps are, it seems to me those are just bogus certificates that aren't doing any good, except enriching the people who print certificates for these types of corporations.

I don't really know whether I am right or wrong here, but I weren't able to find anything that actually makes a B corp different than any other. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#663

Post by mulmen »

derex wrote: post #602
zamalek wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Zoom was one of the companies that I flagged in my head as the worst [...] Keybase one of the most promising Hear hear. It really is an absurd world we live in, and I had a good chuckle about that - just before I deleted my Keybase account.

Can you elaborate on what concerns you so much that it warrants deleting your account right upon hearing the news?

I wrote Zoom off last year after the local webserver nonsense. Any company that can convince itself that is a good idea doesn't deserve my business. There's no path to redemption. Game over.

In the post Covid world I was forced to compromise a bit and I will join a Zoom call in a browser (when it works) or install the app on my phone if I have to. I trust iOS to not get totally owned by a rogue app more than anything else I have available. Although recently that's not an entirely safe bet either.

Keybase was not critical to my daily life so it will not hurt to get rid of it. It's about risk management. There are no upsides to Zoom and almost no upsides to Keybase (for me). With the growing list of downsides it's an easy choice to make.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#664

Post by wutwutwutwut »

yellowapple wrote: post #472
wutwutwutwut wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the original claim was "100% of the dev team is in China", and the reality is "only 80% of the dev team is in China", then that'd be a 20% factual error, mathematically speaking.

Haha. Do you also calculate levenshtein distance from true to false and say false isn't entirely false but a bit of true? And is it almost factually correct to say that 10 equals 8?

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#665

Post by wutwutwutwut »

gonehome wrote: post #435
wutwutwutwut wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The vast majority of the Zoom software development team is based out of companies in China. They do have support people in the US and a handful of non-support engineering which is why I said thanks and immediately updated the comment to say "majority" instead of "entire" since it's more correct. That technicality is less relevant to the main point of the argument.

My point was that you should check your facts before making an argument. Not exactly a crazy idea, right?

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#666

Post by seemslegit »

jng wrote: post #180
swyx wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this an acquihire then?

If so, it would be in the unusual shape that it is a top-dollar one rather than cover-the-failure-with-a-pretty-ending one. But in this case, Zoom is probably actually interested in the security tech that Keybase has apart from the talent, they're just not interested in the product.

keybase doesn't have any 'security tech', zoom just needs a plausible fig leaf for the analysts that somehow associates with security.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#667

Post by _urga »

munificent wrote: post #590
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.

> why not look at the problem the other way around? Because no one ever buys or hires a conscience. If you thought a conscience was worth having one, that implies you would already have one and thus wouldn't need to outsource it in the first place. Ethics always rolls downhill. If Al Capone goes out and hires Mr. Rogers, the power imbalance between them means Mr. Rogers is going to get dirtier than Capone will get cl…

Thanks for this!

Besides upvotes, HN should have a hall of fame for comments this good.

It reminds me of 1 Corinthians 15:33 quoting the Greek poet Menander:

  Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.”

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#668

Post by rhizome »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #662
rhizome wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they still have an obligation to do right by the minority shareholders Fiduciary duty is extremely rare to be the subject of a suit against a, let's say, CEO. It's a complex area of law because it isn't actually a law, nor specified anywhere, and not a requirement for corporate existence. So, it's a set of court decisions that future cases are built upon, but in general a house of cards in that it could be invalida…

Can you clarify your statement about the PBCs? I can't figure out if you're saying they are a good thing, or just a theatrical performance. I am curious because B-corps have been popularized in the recent years, but when I looked into what B-corps are, it seems to me those are just bogus certificates that aren't doing any good, except enriching the people who print certificates for these types of corporations. I don'…

I think they're a good thing that disproves the conventional wisdom that corporations are "required" to act only in the profit interests of shareholders, that share price is the only measure of executive performance.

Going further, I believe this canard is promoted by greedy assholes as justification for their bullying of "nicer" people who might have a more holistic view of corporate behavior, something which bullies are psychologically incapable. These people would call PBCs theatrical, "hey bro, good for you!" on par with starting a nonprofit.

I don't know a lot about B-corps so I'm generally talking out of my ass, but it seems like a "hey we tried" get out of jail card if they decide to shed it, which they can always do. If they don't wind up shedding it, do they go for PBC? Overall, maybe it's good for setting expectations, but since there's no legal committment involved I don't see much more to think about it.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#669

Post by namibj »

mirimir wrote: post #610
gonehome wrote: post #349

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.

Sad. Very sad. It was such a great approach to associating GnuPG keys with social media. And their chat etc were also pretty cool. But Zoom is beyond the pale. So what now? Maybe someone could clone the GitHub repos. And/or are GnuPG keyservers safe enough again? For chat, Session looks most interesting. It's got the Signal messaging bits. Plus anonymity via the Loki onion network. And it's available for all platform…

So, yeah. Zoom did bad stuff. But Keybase is designed so that all those things would obviously be detectable (Keybase client code is open source), and the ways in which the Server could mess with data are much restricted. If that spreads to Zoom, there's a chance it'd be a good service in a year or two.

PGP keyservers have a fundamental issue that demands a solution like CT logs or Keybase-style merkle trees.

The only way to prevent getting Loki backdoor issues would seem to be a development so clearly in-the-open, that any secretive addition of significant code/suspicious PR behavior is obvious.

Tor does not use Tor by default. It works with Tor, but that's it.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#670

Post by namibj »

pmorici wrote: post #594
chupasaurus wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22997245 and requiring gnome-keyring on Linux are issues for me.

Those looks like differences and matters of preference not anything "wrong" about it.

Well, there are reasons why Keybase changed from key-centric to identity-centric back in 2015: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-new-key-model
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