Good thing I already finished my coffee before seeing this headline. With no disrespect to Zoom, who might even have the best intentions, seeing Keybase just get acquired spooks me, and makes me glad I wasn't seriously invested in it. I had been under the impression (as a very casual user) that it was using a foundation finance model to ensure its independence.
Zoom Acquires Keybase
181–190 of 751 posts
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#182This is hilarious to me, because I finally decided to make a keybase account and start making use of their service two days ago, and today it appears to be a dead product.
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#183I'm seeing a certain pattern here, aren't we all just fooling ourselves? Isn't this just all inevitable? Aren't all these startups just lining up all in the hopes just to get acquired? I guess when we see VC Funded™ on any startup what it _really means_ is that: "We are prioritising a return for our investors even if it means violating our mission statement".
My two cents: that's part of the game in today's marketplace. It's pretty difficult to 'disrupt' firmly cemented market footholds and play with the big boys with seemingly endless streams of capital (though it certainly is possible, tech is more notorious for this than most industries, though highly improbable).
You really want to lock down some strategic IP that stands in the path of a behemoth and hope they'll want to aquire it under their growth goals or attempts to stomp out potential competitors (by throwing money at them and not through litigation or other paths). The big boys win because they buy out proven effective solutions/IP and models while failed startups eat the market high-risk exploratory costs.
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren’t. They are making a lot of money which is what the business was made for. The post is actually refreshingly honest that keybase is now abandoned and will probably die at some point. The idea that companies were stupid enough to place their internal identity on some random 3rd party is so incredibly stupid that it’s hard to feel too bad for anyone. Congrats Keybase!
> They are making a lot of money which is what the business was made for. I miss the days when businesses existed not just to serve investors but also their employees and the common good. It's like a 1%-er meta profit model where the actual business is in buying and selling the business and the core business is really just a temporary front that is designed to never make a profit, just create fancy looking charts and…
I think you have a rose-tinted view of what old-timey businesses looked like. We moved past mom-and-pop subsistence industry like 400 years ago. No one ever said “I’m going to create a sheet metal production company for the common good.”
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
It bothers me that they even tried, honestly. Keybase seems like something that should be small, isolated, FOSS, supported by a foundation, etc. They could have built a business _around_ Keybase I'd imagine, but all they managed to do with this is invalidate Keybase and make people like myself, who feared their business motivations, feel vindicated for being paranoid. I'll never blame anyone for wanting to make money…
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 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?
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#186Earlier 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…
It is kind of surreal for me, that you complain that Zoom does not on Wayland. Even though i use Linux myself.
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#187Keybase 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…
it's more about the VC funding than anything else. it is almost always the reason for the death of cool software
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because keybase obviously needs money and zoom has a lot of it right now..
That, and this is probably in large part a marketing/PR move. Public perception of zoom/security is "beyond horrible", thus visibly spending lots of money on an acquisition of a very well respected name in security helps them polish that image at least a little. And who knows, maybe they'll even work on actually improving security. Always the hopeless romantic/optimist, me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Public perception
I'd say you overestimate that. Perhaps 0.01% of the public knows that Keybase exists and has a bad opinion of Zoom security. Expert's opinion is important, but does not automatically become general perception.
(Anecdatum, I'm far from a security expert. I know that Keybase exists, even have an unused account; I use Zoom for work and don't blame them for not locking up tighter. Their blog post on the topic sounded reasonable to me.)
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#189It's kinda ironic that Keybase disappears into Zoom the day after Matrix/Riot enabled end-to-end encryption by default, with cross-signed device verification similar to Keybase's concept of connected keys - see https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... . In other words, a fully open source (and open standardised) alternative continues to exist in the form of Matrix. [disclaimer: project lead for…
I was about to complain about your desktop Electron app but it seems that spectral[0] is already usable without any hassle (build from source, ...) at least on Fedora, time to reactivate my Matrix account, keep up with the great work 0: https://gitlab.com/spectral-im/spectral
There's also Fractal[0] which uses GTK+ instead of Qt, and is maintained by the Gnome foundation and planned to be used by the Librem 5 AFAIK.
Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
only that it is not. warrant canaries must be written in the past tense. This is future tense. So they can monitor millions of calls, and give your information away at every second. This text only tells you about the next second (a promise they will break too, but then the text will be about the next second)
> Zoom has not and will not build a mechanism to decrypt live meetings for lawful intercept purposes. That seems to include past tense.
I wonder how important the word "live" is there. Does this statement only apply to real-time decryption of ongoing meetings?