Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Keybase launches encrypted Git

keybase.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 277 posts

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#261

Post by michaelt »

dasil003 wrote: post #162
r0ze-at-hn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Joel's article: > That means that our highest priority is removing any obstacles to adoption. Anything that people might use as a reason not to use Trello has to be found and eliminated. In this case I am weary of using something like this that is free because I have seen so many things in the past that were free only to shutdown rapidly after they grew in size, but with no way to pay for themselves and had to p…

I am intimately aware of this frustration, but what's the alternative? Stable companies also kill or abandon projects. The whole software and consumer product ecosystems are constantly churning. Personally I'm old enough that I don't have to try every new service, but if something is solving a real problem in the short-term, I will give it a try and hope for the best. Keybase is definitely in this bucket. Worst case…

  but what's the alternative? Stable companies also kill
  or abandon projects.
The alternative is products which, considered in isolation and with all costs taken into account, produce more revenue than they cost to maintain.

Nobody shuts down a project that costs $500,000 per annum and brings in $1,000,000 per annum.

Of course, 'all costs' there doesn't just mean employee salary - it has to include difficult-to-measure costs like the opportunity costs of the attention it demands from executives, paying a portion of the support costs of any legacy systems it needs, and suchlike.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#262

Post by veidr »

mikeash wrote: post #27
eropple wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so maybe we're using "local" for different things. Are you developing in your local copy of Dropbox , or are you cloning to a local directory using the Dropbox directory as a source (probably bare)? I assumed the former, which is what I meant by "local"; you can end up syncing multiple different instances of the repo and horking the contents of your .git directory (as well as cross-edited files, etc, that bleed c…

That explains the confusion, I'm talking about keeping a bare repository in Dropbox and cloning it to a non-Dropbox location on each computer where I work. It never occurred to me to keep the working copy itself on DB, that would be silly! I expect that this could break the bare repository on DB if I ever pushed from two places simultaneously (where "simultaneously" could potentially encompass a period of hours or da…

> ...keep the working copy itself on DB, that would be silly!

I don't think it's necessarily silly; it can be very useful in some scenarios.

I keep all my local working copies in a folder synced across several machines. I use Resilio Sync because it is better[1] than Dropbox for this purpose, but it's basically equivalent.

What this lets me do is stop working suddenly, at any moment (baby crying upstairs, or I lost track of time and have to bike to the office for a meeting) get up from my computer and move to another one (in another room in my house, or across town at my employer's office).

The code doesn't have to be in any finished state, needn't compile, I can literally be right in the middle of a line of code. As long as I've saved my work to disk, it will have synced before I reach the next computer, so I can sit down and resume work.

Before I had kids I didn't need this as much, so I just did git push/pull.

But then you have to do the work of pushing your half-finished junk to a different private repo, or rebasing to avoid polluting the git history with a bunch of crap commits just because you had to move, or not do that and just accept having a git history filled with crap.

Frankly I wish more of my work was capable of being distributed like this, but it's really only suitable for collections of plain files, which are amenable to being synced file-by-file. Luckily that includes almost all my programming work, however.

[1]: Resilio Sync is better than Dropbox for this because: it is much faster to sync than Dropbox, it supports symlinks so it doesn't corrupt your data when syncing folders containing them, and it syncs my data only among computers I control, not to any cloud service.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#263

Post by ptspts »

payomdousti wrote: post #123

is there some way to verify what was actually uploaded, and that it was indeed encrypted properly?

You can ask the same question about copying the .git directory with rsync over SSH, and the answer for that one applies to your original qustion as well:

* You can take a look at the packets (using e.g. tcpdump). * You can take a look at what the binaries (rsync, ssh vs. keybase and git-remote-keybase) read and write (using e.g. strace). * You can read the source code. * You can read the white papers and other analyses about the crypto used, and decide if you trust it.

The average user probably won't bother with these, because they need time, effort and experience.

If you can imagine a fundamentally better possible way for the average user to verify crypto, please let us know.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#264

Post by FullyFunctional »

mlindner wrote: post #248
FullyFunctional wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. I have many of my git repos in Dropbox but I'm not using Dropbox for sharing. Having those in Dropbox means I get automatic backup and that they are available when I switch to a different computer, which I do, but not frequently. As only I use my Dropbox account, I'm aware of the potential sync problem, but it's never been a problem. I do run fsck & gc more frequently than most, but I probably don't ne…

If you're doing this then there's no reason to use git. Just sync a raw directory.

No, I use git to track my development history and I push to github. These are two difference issues.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#265

Post by ptspts »

jack12 wrote: post #98

This is exciting, but I'm new to Keybase and don't entirely understand it yet. How can I clone a Keybase-hosted repository on a remote server? Can gpg-agent proxy through ssh similarly to ssh-agent to allow access to GPG keys (and is that what keybase uses?), without having to store my keys on the remote server? Or would I need to create a new Keybase account just for the remote server, with that account's private ke…

Yes, probably you need a new Keybase account just for that remote server if you want the remote server be able to do git pull after the initial git clone.

If all you need is a single git clone, and you already have a Keybase account, just do a git clone locally, and use rsync to upload the result to the remote server.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#267

Post by kinoshitajona »

hasenj wrote: post #253
OJFord wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot, isn't your third quote a pretty good description? > Keybase is for anyone. Imagine a Slack for the whole world, except end-to-end encrypted across all your devices. Or a Team Dropbox where the server can't leak your files or be hacked. It's not much of a reach to assume familiarity with Slack and Dropbox; the message is clearly that Keybase is those (via Keybase Chat & FS) but encrypted. For what it's wor…

> isn't your third quote a pretty good description? It's not. I think the person who wrote it think it's good marketing, but even that, it is not. Here, try to see if this makes any sense as a product description: > FeedHamster is for anyone! Imagine a Yelp that's customized just for you! Or a YouTube feed that only shows you interesting videos that _you_ would like! > Install FeedHamster now! Now, can you guess what…

Tarsnap was a good example of a service selling to technically apt customer base. Guys who have years of IT training would love to read about deduplication and picodollars.

Keybase isn’t charging money to begin with, so “sales pitches” are not their primary concern.

Also, they are marketing to “the masses” with the idea that more people should have secure e2e encrypted communication and collaboration solutions where identity is cryptographically proven.

But if their welcome page started showing diagrams of encryption pathways and key derivation algorithm names with server client relationship diagrams, I guarantee no one besides people in tech will download it.

I still think they need to do better selling the idea to the masses, I in no way think their current front page is sufficient, but I understand that right now they aren’t concentrating on sales pitches.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#268

Post by RasputinsBro »

ptspts wrote: post #260
cs702 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this compare to git-gpg, mentioned below in this thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15403360

See my comparison of Keybase Git, git-remote-gcrypt and git-gpg here: http://ptspts.blogspot.com/2017/10/comparison-of-encrypted-g...

Thanks for that.

Is Keybase Git all hype then? Because the alternatives seem a lot better.

To be honest, I'm not even sure I understand what Keybase _is_.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#269

Post by RasputinsBro »

OJFord wrote: post #212
hasenj wrote: post #208

Wait, what exactly _is_ keybase? The home page says: > Keybase is a new and free security app for mobile phones and computers. ok, so, what does it do? > For the geeks among us: it's open source and powered by public-key cryptography. Still have no idea what it does .. > Keybase is for anyone. Imagine a Slack for the whole world, except end-to-end encrypted across all your devices. Or a Team Dropbox where the server…

It's a lot, isn't your third quote a pretty good description? > Keybase is for anyone. Imagine a Slack for the whole world, except end-to-end encrypted across all your devices. Or a Team Dropbox where the server can't leak your files or be hacked. It's not much of a reach to assume familiarity with Slack and Dropbox; the message is clearly that Keybase is those (via Keybase Chat & FS) but encrypted. For what it's wor…

No, it's not. It says exactly nothing.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#270

Post by RasputinsBro »

pfg wrote: post #159
ex3ndr wrote: post #149

Was expected one question but haven't found one: how it is actually encrypted? Any whitepaper or information how diffs could be handled over encrypted data? Or it is a just encrypted .git folder?

Looks like it's built on top of kbfs[1]. [1]: https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs/understanding_kbfs

So they've rolled out their own encryption?
Post reply on HN