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Zoom Acquires Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#261

Post by rstupek »

coldpie wrote: post #240
zomglings wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure! The idea is that each proprietary project is wasting effort implementing their own clones of everyone else's software. To use your example, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Yandex etc etc are all developing their own search engines. Instead they could all be contributing to one search engine to push the state of search engine software forward, instead of all spinning their wheels re-doing what everyone else is doing.…

That's not what the broken window fallacy is though. It references the idea that breaking a window generates economic activity which is good for everyone.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#262

Post by whateveracct »

This is kind of comical - I guess when leadership-types want to recover from the recent bad press, they decided they could buy a security-oriented company and that'll "help make Zoom more secure." I guess what more can you do when you can't implement this stuff lmao

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#263

Post by StavrosK »

floatingatoll wrote: post #159
StavrosK wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

keys.pub doesn't have the single most useful feature Keybase has: The ability to verifiably establish a secure channel with anyone given their Twitter/Github/whatever username.

Their homepage advertises 'keys pull username@github' as an example. Is the missing piece you describe here simply the command 'keys chat username@github'?

No, it's the cryptographic attestation so you know you are getting the right key.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#264

Post by redbeard0x0a »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #239
tobylane wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@Keybase users: Check if you uploaded your private key. I hope it is rare but now is the time to make that non existent.

I essentially didn't have a private key prior to Keybase, and I think it's still the only place I use it, so I'll end up rolling a new one if Keybase becomes fundamentally untrustworthy.

They are fundamentally untrustworthy. They haven't taken security issues in the past very seriously, they also have ties to China.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#266

Post by jariel »

lmm wrote: post #142
frogpelt wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that we live in an era where if you made bad decisions in the past, you can never be trusted to make good decisions ever again. Even if you own your bad decisions and show lots of improvement. Nope. Once a pariah, always a pariah.

Zoom's decisions did not feel like mistakes so much as an expression of their values. The company repeatedly prioritised ease of use while doing the absolute minimum on the security front. Are there any grounds to believe that that calculus has changed?

This is a good point.

But I do think that company values do change.

Zoom is getting the shining light of attention globally. Even human beings, in these situations, start to act more conscientiously, and then believe their own morality after the fact!

I believe the keybase acquisition demonstrates this a bit - because they will get zero public goodwill from this - nobody on Main St. knows are cares what Keybase is, this won't be on CNN so they are probably very much trying to make things better.

Owners of the company want money - now they are popular, they have to behave well to get that money. Wanting money usually transcends everything else including loyalty to state. A Chinese CEO with a popular Western product is going to realize that if his customers are way for CCP grabbing their data, it's a problem to his business. He doesn't want CCP snooping and one of the better ways to do that is to have better encryption as well.

Doing slightly suspicious things doesn't matter if nobody is watching and therefore nobody cares, now that people care ... it matters. Just as a matter of pragmatism.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#267

Post by seemslegit »

Arathorn wrote: post #104

It'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…

What endgame do you think your company has other than eventually selling out its userbase in one way or another ?

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#268

Post by _asummers »

souterrain wrote: post #64
frisco wrote: post #14

I had such high hopes for Keybase; kbfs had completely replaced Dropbox for me. This is terrible news.

This is precisely why Zoom is acquiring Keybase. Zoom seeks to become the single "remote work tool", challenging Dropbox, et al. directly. I'm particularly disenchanted with the growth of these multipurpose tools, but I am not their target audience. (Nor, I suspect, are many HN participants, but this is a baseless guess.) I suppose I'm more of an adherent to so-called "UNIX philosophy"--the best, single-purpose tool…

> Zoom seeks to become the single "remote work tool", challenging Dropbox, et al. directly.

Maybe they should work on the fact I can run Zoom in screen share and just about nothing else. Just entering a call for me takes ~75% of my CPU and I beach ball regularly when screen sharing lightweight text editors doing barely more than scrolling and typing.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#269

Post by jpxw »

MiroF wrote: post #131
sdlkfgj wrote: post #113

Earlier 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)

Perhaps it's my inexperience with the english language showing, but I thought "has" in this context was past tense.

Nope you’re right. They could use this as a warrant canary by removing the “has not” part

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#270

Post by core-questions »

dcow wrote: post #60
roblabla wrote: post #34

Keybase' post about the acquisition: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom > What the Keybase team will be doing > Initially, our single top priority is helping to make Zoom even more secure. There are no specific plans for the Keybase app yet. Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty…

I don’t necessarily read it that way. Keybase is 100% functional and has worked well for a long time. Zoom needs people who know how to make modern client software and chat if they want to compete with the Slacks and Teams, etc. You can’t even screen share on wayland... it’s that bad. If keybase ultimately gets secure video, and zoom a security architecture overhaul, how is that a bad thing?

Who gives a fuck about Wayland, honestly? It seems like it was designed by people who didn't like the few good things about X and wanted something to further fracture the Linux desktop. Well, they got it.

> Zoom needs people who know how to make modern client software

It's the best video client available on Windows / Mac and works acceptably on Linux, what exactly needs to be more "modern" about it? Slack's video call thing is way less featureful, and Teams is still the abortion that is Lync / Skype for Business under the hood which is and always will be shit-tier.

> chat

I don't want my video app to be my chat app. There's any number of reasons why separation there is a good thing. I can start a Zoom call from Slack in 1 second, what more do I really need on that front?

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