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Zoom Acquires Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#311

Post by Aeolun »

frogpelt wrote: post #102
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.

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.

> 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.

I've seen this turn out for the best literally one time, and that was Microsoft.

All the other times the bad company just continues its horrible slide into madness. It doesn't die either, just silently keeps churning out billions of dollars of shareholder value.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#312

Post by Endlessly »

ddevault wrote: post #53

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…

This is not a trend, it’s a long standing market strategy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#313

Post by Legogris »

seemslegit wrote: post #302
Arathorn wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix isn’t a company, it’s a non-profit foundation, expressly set up to protect its users: see https://matrix.org/foundation for details. Riot is a Matrix client made by New Vector ( https://vector.im ), the company started by the team who originally created Matrix. The endgame there is to sell Matrix hosting ( https://modular.im ), support and other value-added services for Matrix. We are categorically not going t…

I can imagine keybase delivering a similar statement back in the day, good luck.

I think a key difference here is fully open and collaborative specs, with Apache-licensed reference implementations for server and client that they dogfood themselves. It's also getting federated. So protocol, tech and network can live on regardless of who's running the servers people are using or driving the development of implementations.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#314

Post by soulofmischief »

I have moved much of my digital life to Keybase. This news brings me much fear but I just pray that Zoom takes the best parts and then allows Keybase to continue to function as a goodwill venture at least until a suitable replacement appears. The software package Keybase offers is unbeatable.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#315

Post by vlowther »

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.…

Open source software is (I would argue) even more driven to fragmentation by political, ideological, and personality conflict driven squabbles than proprietary software, as there is no profit motive to also satisfy.

Also, the broken window thing asserts that small amounts of criminal activity lead to larger amounts of criminal activity via signaling that being bad or neglectful is OK, which is both not proven and irrelevant to software writers being prone to reinvent the wheel for whatever reasons they have.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#316

Post by jlgaddis »

neltnerb wrote: post #251
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 signed up so long ago that I'm not quite sure what you mean. I remember posting a bunch of public keys (like on my profile here). I think the keybase app generated them along with a private key but it has been like three years. I don't remember at all uploading one or where to find it if I did, can you explain the issue you have in mind a little more?

The issue is a third-party having control of your private key.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#317

Post by anticensor »

JshWright wrote: post #190
mdtusz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I think yes: they lack the technical infrastructure to decrypt the meeting in real time (which totally makes sense), rather than they have no plans to buid any infrastructure to decrpyt it afterwards (which cannot be guaranteed against a hostile actor).

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#318

Post by purple-dragon »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #306
lmm wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The fact that they hired Alex Stamos and probably just spent a bunch of money on buying Keybase seem like a sign that things are changing. They prioritized ease of use above all to get adoption before. This is appalling to me, but I believe they are seeing enough pressure to change course. It’s believable to me that they would intend to as they have already captured much of the consumer (non-B2B) market mind share an…

> The fact that they hired Alex Stamos and ...

Call my cynical, but "hiring" a bunch of infosec celebrities and critics as part-time consultants or contractors should be considered nothing but a (brilliant and silencing) PR move until the day that product updates and analyses reveal otherwise.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#319

Post by pornel »

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…

Keybase was dead as soon as they took VC money.

Their original purpose — tying identities to keys — could have been a nice small non-profit. But there aren't fortunes to be made from managing GPG keys, so they had to pivot into shark jumping.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#320

Post by soulofmischief »

ddevault wrote: post #53

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…

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 with existing technologies won't be difficult -- just time consuming, which is why they have market fit.

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