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Zoom Acquires Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#591

Post by munificent »

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.

For businesses, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#593

Post by [deleted] »

Gasp0de wrote: post #553
gonehome wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Zoom is based in California’s Silicon Valley, but it owns three companies in China that develop its software. The Citizen Lab said the structure allowed the company to lower its development costs, but added “this arrangement may make Zoom responsive to pressure from Chinese authorities.”" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/24/uk-governmen... The implication is that China is hostile and leverages their powe…

Isn't the US actually at least as bad if not worse? Thanks to Edward Snowden we know without speculation that the US "is hostile and leverages their power to censor/collect communication information from companies and their people without checks on this power" (ok, supposedly there is secret judges that secretly check on this power, but that doesn't really do any good does it?). The USA also "pressure companies to ha…

[deleted]

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#594

Post by pmorici »

chupasaurus wrote: post #512
MrGilbert wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate? Just curious...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22997245 and requiring gnome-keyring on Linux are issues for me.

Those looks like differences and matters of preference not anything "wrong" about it.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#595

Post by nske »

Very unfortunate. Besides its main purpose, Keybase has been my chat app of choice for quite a while, after I decided I could no longer put up with Signal's general crappiness.

Keybase has been one of the very few performant and usable "new-style" applications that I've used -and the only one of its kind.

Sadly I am forced to suffer electron-based vomit every day -between Skype, Teams, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Facebook messenger and whatever else I might be fortunate enough to be forgetting. It sucks that I might have to be on the lookout for a decent encrypted chat application that I don't actually hate, again.

Not sure why the use-case of chat communications has been afflicted by so much crappiness -as if it's a curse.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#596

Post by wutbrodo »

purple-dragon wrote: post #406
wutbrodo wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it's not "on its own", it's in the context of the investment in security mentioned by the parent comment.

At this point, I'm confused, and I'm not sure what point you or the other commenter are looking for me to concede. Zoom is paying some security consultants, pushed out some product updates, and bought Keybase, so it's a story book ending?

Just as your comment was aiming to narrowly point out a logical fallacy in the parent comment, I'm pointing out a flaw in your own: I disagree with your claim that investing in security practices is just theater, and that more concrete efforts in the same direction are irrelevant. The concrete efforts are Bayesian evidence that the newer investments are more than theater.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#597

Post by avanti »

Baeocystin wrote: post #568
Gasp0de wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the US actually at least as bad if not worse? Thanks to Edward Snowden we know without speculation that the US "is hostile and leverages their power to censor/collect communication information from companies and their people without checks on this power" (ok, supposedly there is secret judges that secretly check on this power, but that doesn't really do any good does it?). The USA also "pressure companies to ha…

Short answer? No. Not even close. Source: have lived in both countries

Have lived in both, I can say they are equal. Just different culture norms you have to learn to navigate around.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#598

Post by wpietri »

gonehome wrote: post #550
tabbott wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The power depends on the board structure and the ownership. But even if a founder owns 51% of the company, and so in theory can do anything, they still have an obligation to do right by the minority shareholders. This is generally known as fiduciary duty, and is a complex area of law. Here's a short summary: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi...

In a case like this, a founder can't just give away the source code. They'd have to believe that doing so was in the best interests of the company. And unless they wanted to risk a lawsuit, they'd have to persuade the shareholders of that too.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#599

Post by LeoPanthera »

nske wrote: post #595

Very unfortunate. Besides its main purpose, Keybase has been my chat app of choice for quite a while, after I decided I could no longer put up with Signal's general crappiness. Keybase has been one of the very few performant and usable "new-style" applications that I've used -and the only one of its kind. Sadly I am forced to suffer electron-based vomit every day -between Skype, Teams, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Facebook me…

The Keybase app is also written in Electron.

Re: Zoom Acquires Keybase

#600

Post by notatoad »

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…

on the other hand, it was actually usable by somebody who isn't a privacy advocate.

the trend exists because "pretty UIs" and usability are actually valuable features to users, and the existing open ecosystems tend to fail at that aspect.

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