Hacker News Reader

Comment by underyx | Hacker News Reader

Keybase's side of the announcement: 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 of notice.

> So, our shortest-term directive is to significantly improve our security effectiveness, by working on a product that's that much bigger than Keybase. We can't be more specific than that, because we're just diving in.

They're not even making the usual "Zoom is committed to keeping Keybase alive" promise :(

View on HN

(We've since changed the URL from https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/05/07/zoom-acquires-keyb... to that one)

Hi dang, are there any plans to introduce a marker of some sort so that people know whether the current URL is the same as the one it was submitted with? I find that often I have no idea what the comments are talking about

It's not clear to me whether that would add more signal to the comments or more noise.

If you have specific links to cases where this has been a problem, you'd be welcome to send them to hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. Or keep that in mind for the next time this comes up.

I haven't been collecting links, but I'll keep my eyes open moving forward.

They are buying Keybase to shore up their security, why would they still give them time to keep it up unless, they want to also integrate their message service into Zoom chat.

is this an acquihire then?

If so, it would be in the unusual shape that it is a top-dollar one rather than cover-the-failure-with-a-pretty-ending one. But in this case, Zoom is probably actually interested in the security tech that Keybase has apart from the talent, they're just not interested in the product.

did i miss something? how do you know its top-dollar? no dollar amount was disclosed.

No, you didn't miss anything. As you probably expected, it's just my deductions from context. I may be completely wrong. I still do believe in them, but obviously no one else needs to.

keybase doesn't have any 'security tech', zoom just needs a plausible fig leaf for the analysts that somehow associates with security.

Do "acquihires" work in practice? It reminds me of this Dilbert comic: https://dilbert.com/strip/2014-07-31

"to make Zoom even more secure." I mean, this might take a while.

I can easily see the words "even more" being added only after rounds of reviews :P

When I first heard of this purchase I thought, this is PR for Zoom to recover from its recent sec fails.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com