A couple of months ago the encryption service provider Keybase announced that they had been bought out by video conferencing company Zoom. That made a lot of people uneasy about the future of Keybase as there is some distrust of Zoom out there for various reasons. There were fears that development could tail off as they would be busy maintaining Zoom. I can see some activity on their HitHub.
I have a couple of Keybase accounts and in the last week their respective email accounts have had messages from someone at Cyph. This seems to be a fairly new company founded by former SpaceX people that looks like it is providing some similar services such as encrypted messaging and cloud storage. They also have video calling, but I have yet to see this in action.
I have installed their desktop app on Ubuntu Studio Linux. I cannot do much with it as I do not have any contacts yet. Has anyone else got it and want to play?
I also have the Keybase app installed. I have around 100 contacts on there, but do not use it too much. There are quite a few Hivers and there are chat groups for them.
One of the initial features that sold me on Keybase was the ability to post signed messages to various social accounts and other places to prove you controlled them. Proof of identity is useful. I was hoping someone would add the ability to do this on Hive. End-to-end encrypted messaging is also vital these days, but it relies on your contacts using the same service.
I used the Keybase cloud storage in the early days of Steem when you needed to host your own images. They also have various team functions that include code repositories.
Keybase got a lot of publicity for a Stellar Lumens airdrop. I got a fair bit from that, but it was abandoned due to abuse.
Cyph have various paid plans, but you can use most features for free. They are obviously looking to poach some Keybase users by letting them bypass the waitlist and offering special deals.
The Cyph privacy policy is a little vague. They say:
We do not and will never view, log, or transfer plaintext versions of your encrypted data, nor the private keys and mutually shared secrets needed in order to decipher them.
whereas Keybase cannot view your messages. I expect others will be reviewing the terms more carefully to see what compromises are made.
I have played around with encryption for many years, but it seems most people are not that concerned about privacy and verification. I can do PGP/GPG encrypted email too, but rarely use it. I did receive an encrypted email recently, but it was sort of spam for a 'secure social platform' that I have heard nothing else about. Cyph could have encrypted their email to me. My email address is associated with my public key which is on public keyservers as well as Keybase.
I am happy to play around with encryption if anyone wants to try it out.
Stay secure and stay safe.
