741–750 of 751 posts
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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.”
Click the timestamp, you can favorite a comment from there. It will show up on your profile under favorites -> comments.
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Likewise. My friends and I have been using it throughout the pandemic to chat, I've been using it for years, but we're all deleting our accounts this morning. All around unsettling news as far as keybase software goes. Congratulations keybase team, though.
I'm curious where Keybase refugees are going to end up. Matrix? Telegram?
Discord is a nice solution if proprietary solutions aren't a problem. It's really sad.
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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?
I mean, from a certain point of view, why not? If you're thinking in terms of 1, they're wildly different. If you're thinking in terms of 1,000,000,000,000, they might as well both equal 0.
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> 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…
I agree with you that maximizing profit as the sole metric is a myth, which is perhaps why I didn't mention it. However, in practice if one has taken $10m from investors looking for a big payday, one can't just do any old thing. Doing something sufficiently contrary to the interests of minority shareholders could certainly result in a lawsuit. Could the shareholders win? Who knows! As you say, it's a murky area. But…
I suppose, but does it? Ever? Not to be antagonistic but your entire paragraph is a hypothetical which is substituting for anything from the real world, which leads me to believe that it's either not a risk at all, or such a small risk as to be invisible and still effectively not a risk. I mean, I'm sure we would have heard some cautionary tales by now!
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Keybase packed together many different technologies in one place. I don't think any of us who moved to Keybase had delusions that it would be around forever. But it's an amazingly comprehensive suite for its small scope and the open source product that replaces it will only exist because Keybase existed. If the writing is placed on the wall (the marker cap is open right now) then replacing each of Keybase's features…
Indeed. We always knew that Keybase would have to find a source of income someway, get bought, or shut down.
If Keybase completely shuts down, I have hopes the team will be able to convince Zoom to let them pack up and release parts of the server code not being shared with Zoom's products.
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I agree with you that maximizing profit as the sole metric is a myth, which is perhaps why I didn't mention it. However, in practice if one has taken $10m from investors looking for a big payday, one can't just do any old thing. Doing something sufficiently contrary to the interests of minority shareholders could certainly result in a lawsuit. Could the shareholders win? Who knows! As you say, it's a murky area. But…
> Doing something sufficiently contrary to the interests of minority shareholders could certainly result in a lawsuit. I suppose, but does it? Ever? Not to be antagonistic but your entire paragraph is a hypothetical which is substituting for anything from the real world, which leads me to believe that it's either not a risk at all, or such a small risk as to be invisible and still effectively not a risk. I mean, I'm…
If you're specifically asking about VC-vs-founder lawsuits, I think we don't see many of those because everybody has strong incentives not to let it get to that stage. Founders really want to keep on good terms with VCs. VCs want to be seen as pro-founder. Their incentives are generally aligned right up until things start going south.
And once we get to the on-the-brink-of-failure stage, the VCs hold all the cards. Any continued investment requires the VCs to at least approve. If a founder ever might want to do something venture-backed again, they need to stay in their VC's good graces. If the investors don't have majority control, they at least have board seats and the ability to disrupt any deals or other actions the CEO might make against their interests, both internally and by threatening deal partners. The CEO also probably can't afford a lawsuit either with the company's funds or on their own.
So I don't think we see the cautionary tales because few who have been selected by investors and spent years dancing to their tune turn out contrary enough to set those relationships on fire when it doesn't really get them anything.
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Losing their independence was from the beginning the most likely outcome of building something that's hard to monetize like Keybase on the VC funding model. FWIW, I doubt Keybase offering a paid plan would have raised revenue that's significant compared to their burn, so Chris was probably right to not spend resources figuring out a paid offering. For raising their next round, having $5K in revenue from a paid plan f…
How much power do the VCs typically have? Don't founders often have the ability to overrule and make their own decisions? Chris is already financially independent from the OKCupid sale, he could have open sourced the server code and/or reduced the overall burn to pivot to paid accounts. Though the weird Stellar wallet addition implied some vision/product issues anyway. Of course it's easy and probably unfair for me t…
Stellar integration was weird indeed, but it blended really nicely into the chat, and it would totally work for Keybase if there was an easier way to cash in / cash out. That said, any cryptocurrency would do the job, but if this particular one helps monetize the product, why not?
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It is funny that Zoom was one of the companies that I flagged in my head as the worst (or rather, most dangerous) up-and-coming tech company and I considered Keybase one of the most promising up-and-coming tech companies. Keybase solves a (to me) nontrivial problem: How to bring private keys into social media. Just a silly example: You don't use the same private-public key exchange in Whatsapp as you would use for yo…
Have a try of Maskbook.com , ran by our team. I believed this actually solve this problem in a more elegant way.
I don't quite get the purpose though, why would I post something in public only for a group of people to be able to read it? Why not post it in a private chat then (encrypted, naturally)?
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…
I don't know how many people here remember the excitement when Android was new and, OMG, it's Linux! Open source! Finally we have a Linux-based, free and open phone platform! I actually think that this played a non-trivial part in Android getting early traction - similar dynamic to Gmail where tech people got excited about it eventually "my friend who's good with computers recommends this" becomes a factor. Not the e…
Really sad because I personally recommended it too, and was hoping these things would work out somehow. Lesson learned: they don't. The next messenger I will promote with my friends would be one without the server at all.
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If people have bad passwords, that makes brute force recovery of the private key on a Keybase server plausible, right? At least a lot more so than the whole key from scratch. I'd assume that a machine generated key has more entropy than any password that a human can memorize. If sharing a password-protected private key is perfectly safe, why bother having them? Why don't PGP users just password protect everything? Ab…
I think people are confusing things a bit here. Sure, you can protect your pgp key with a password, but I don't think that adds a whole lot of security to your uploaded private keys. When you upload a pgp key to keybase, it encrypts the key again, using your keybase device key. So its double encrypted, basically. The keybase model revolves around devices. Device keys are private keys that are tied to a particular dev…
Except that long time ago, when device keys didn't even exist, there was a feature on Keybase website that allowed to upload a PGP private key encrypted only by your account password (which was never transmitted to Keybase in plaintext though – it was scrypted in browser when logging in, too – but this still means your private key was as secure as your password, which isn't a good practice in my opinion).