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Unsolicited messages on Keybase
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago> A solution like "you have to opt into being added to a team" is really ugly from a UX perspective and harms the service for honest people. We have thought tons of this. Clearly, this person has never been involuntarily added to a chatty group MMS conversation.
- reffaelwallen 7y agoHmm, I just had people contact me out of the blue. I wonder if someone is taking advantage.
- pythux 7y agoI used to love keybase and used it for a while, but somehow since the crypto coins donations I started getting followed by random people and getting some "spam". So nowadays I avoid it and stick to Signal. I really like the idea behind it though and I hope they manage to solve of these issues eventually!
- hs86 7y agoThe spam folder in my Fastmail account usually got only one or two spam mails in a month but recently it went up to ~10 per day. The only change that happened around the same time was that Keybase added some crypto-play money to my account which is associated to that Fastmail account. I know that correlation does not imply causation but this stellar addition after the fact left a sour taste in my mouth. :(
- rbritton 7y agoDo you use Fastmail’s aliases? Those are one way to pinpoint which service revealed your email address if you’re diligent about creating them.
- vips7L 7y agoNot related to the article, but that background is terrible and flickers everytime I scroll on Firefox.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lucb1e 7y agoNo such issues on the latest stable Firefox on Linux here. The background is one of those that looks like it might cause issues while scrolling with a lot of monitors though, are you sure it's the site / some software and not your hardware? Edit: similar to these patterns: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php#invpattern http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php#invpattern
- jakelazaroff 7y agoWomen have been complaining about this for ages. See for example: https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/1171615043387109376 https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/1171615043387109376 https://twitter.com/geekygirlsarah/status/1166360306806939649 https://twitter.com/geekygirlsarah/status/116636030680693964... https://twitter.com/aredridel/status/1171824207069614081 https://twitter.com/aredridel/status/1171824207069614081
- geofft 7y agoI appreciated this later thread from the third person you linked: https://twitter.com/aredridel/status/1201348525499523072 https://twitter.com/aredridel/status/1201348525499523072 Quoting in part: > The onslaught of sexual harassment on platforms like early Twitter (and later twitter for people of notability), @KeybaseIO, every naive social network is an attack on the right to exist in public. It is the inverse of a privacy problem. > But the conceiving of this as a privacy problem brings the wrong solutions. It means we are offered tools to remove ourselves from public view, to restrict our public personas, to retreat from public life. It means women are again confined to private sphere, denied civic life.
- asjw 7y agoWomen also close the doors of their homes for safety and privacy. It doesn't deny their civic life, it simply blocks uninvited guests from entering their homes. We don't need police, when a door is more than enough
- geofft 7y agoYes, but I hope you'd agree that if a woman says, say, "I'd enjoy going to the local tabletop game store more if people didn't always hit on me there," the response of "Why don't you stay at home and close your door so you can have safety and privacy" is a little bit missing the point.
- buzzkillington 7y ago> But the conceiving of this as a privacy problem brings the wrong solutions. It means we are offered tools to remove ourselves from public view, to restrict our public personas, to retreat from public life. It means women are again confined to private sphere, denied civic life. Yes, welcome to real life. Where I can't say I'm an atheist back home because I will get beheaded. Or say what I think of capital accumulation in SF because I will never work again. And if you take the cowards way out of "We should only protect people for what they are and not what they do", being a woman in this day and age is a choice on par with being blond or a socialist.
- souterrain 7y agoKeybase seems to be enjoying an identity crisis. On one hand, it’s a tool that makes a lot of sense for team collaboration, particularly with its low-effort encrypted git implementation. I even know a couple teams doing software development for the US government using Keybase for collaboration. On the other hand, the Stellar (cryptocurrency) wallet and the “feature” referenced in this article are something... else. Granted, Keybase is $0/month per user currently, so it’s no surprise it is the founders’ personal sandbox for experimentation. I thought Keybase were on the right track in the past with their feature conservatism. Now, not so much.
- prophesi 7y agoFeature conservatism has never been Keybase; their identity crisis has been going on for quite some time. What first started as a simple messaging app became a file-sharing service, then a Slack competitor, and now a cryptocurrency wallet. Adding a simple toggle to block unsolicited messages doesn't sound like too much in that respect.
- api 7y agoAll messengers do this. They start out good and add features until they are bloated junk. It's a law of nature dating back to the 90s.
- flurdy 7y agoTo me, it first started out as a key sharing and identity verification service. That was quite useful to me. Then they pivoted to a chat app. I had no need for yet another chat app. Then lately this messy cryptocurrency integration which so far just seems shady. I am not sure Keybase provides to me any value anymore.
- alwillis 7y ago>Then lately this messy cryptocurrency integration which so far just seems shady. Stellar is actually pretty legit and is backed by a real organization going back to 2014: https://www.stellar.org/foundation https://www.stellar.org/foundation As far as Keybase is concerned, I can't complain when a company sends me free money every month—I'm up to about $60 USD now and there’s another airdrop next week. I think we're just at the beginning of the integration of messaging clients + digital currency—you know if Facebook’s Libra gets off the ground, people will be using Facebook Messenger to send it around.
- Already__Taken 7y agoDon't all platforms with added messaging make this mistake at a certain size? Well done to keybase I suppose. I'm sure I read about github having the same exploit years ago, anyone could add you to a repository and it would just show up on your profile. I think it was Zed; HN 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601342 working link: https://web.archive.org/web/20111202200335/http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1306816425.html https://web.archive.org/web/20111202200335/http://sheddingbi...
- jrockway 7y agoIt is somewhat unfortunate to watch what's happening to Keybase. I read /r/keybase over on Reddit and every single post is whining about how they didn't get enough free bullshitcoins or how some people are exploiting the system to get too many free bullshitcoins. It is the highest concentration of whining I've ever seen on the Internet... and I read my own posts ;) I think there are some fundamental conflicts that are going to be difficult to resolve. Back in the old days of the Internet, everyone could message everyone else. This was great, except for all the spam. Ultimately, by putting our email in a central place, capturing the text of every email message, and analyzing it, we got a world where you could use email and largely be free of spam. But it did come at a great privacy cost; the same access that allows ML to categorize your email allows anyone to read your email; server administrators, hackers, law enforcement. (This problem plagues every open network, not just email. You are not the only one that gets 6 phone calls a day about how Microsoft needs to be updated or the Internal Revenue Service will come get you, or something.) This all blows up with end-to-end encryption. There is no centralized place for messages to be classified, so no spam filtering can be done. It is the wild wild west. The mistake I think Keybase made was not realizing that having easy discovery AND private messaging was going to result in a lot of spam. You can have easy discovery and then analyze every message to make sure it's not abuse. Or you can have great privacy, and require everyone to exchange a 1024-bit secret key in person before they can talk to each other. Keybase has a kind of middle-of-the-road approach that is the spammer's dream platform. You can find all the information you need to message me right on my HN profile, and I can't do anything to stop you. They also made it worse by giving people free money. Now people are conditioned to think that a message announcing they just got some free money is legit. (The first I heard about the airdrop thing was when I had received my first drop.) You hate to see it, but I think that secure messaging and showing your investors exponential growth are basically mutually exclusive. As long as Keybase pays people to have their account open, they'll have users... but I wonder what their plan is after that.
- the_duke 7y agoI would love for Keybase to focus on building a product out of their messaging, file storage and git product. It is something I would happily pay for. But apparently that hole set of functionality was more of a bootstrapping phase for whatever crypto weirdness they are up to.
- rgoulter 7y agoThe client is here, right? https://github.com/keybase/client https://github.com/keybase/client I'd prefer to see "discuss on a GitHub issue" or "open a pull request" to "send +1s to these email addresses". (The author does discuss how annoying it is to receive unsolicited messages, after all). I'd think "contacting is as frictionless as email or phonecalls" sounds reasonable for messaging. (EDIT:although email avoids 'unsolicited messages' with spam control, phones with "phone number is secret"; so perhaps not). Another suggestion: Maybe UI would help this; on FB messenger I can't see messages from strangers unless I go into the "messages from strangers" tab. That seems like it'd solve annoyances from unsolicited messages.
- ViViDboarder 7y agoI think the author got it right. Yes, those other platforms allow anyone to message you, but they don’t consider those features anymore. The way we are trying to mitigate is spam filters everywhere. Spam is a much harder problem. It’s far simpler to have a double opt in.
- geofft 7y agoFrictionless phone calls worked for decades until automation made telemarketing possible, at which point we had laws that stemmed the tide for a bit, and then further automation made anonymous telemarketing / scamming possible, and we're on the edge of a cultural shift to not picking up the phone when you don't recognize the caller. The latest version of iOS already has a checkbox to block all calls from people not in your address book (24/7, this is a separate feature from "Do not disturb"). Frictionless email had this problem since the very early days. A huge amount of algorithmic effort goes into identifying spam, and there are still large numbers of false negatives and false positives. These were architectural mistakes, and it's not a credit to a new messaging platform that it doesn't see this as a problem worth solving from day 1.
- jlgaddis 7y ago> The latest version of iOS already has a checkbox to block all calls from people not in your address book (24/7, this is a separate feature from "Do not disturb"). Thank you! I have been wanting exactly this for a long time now -- my phone is pretty much always on DnD for this reason. I guess I'll finally upgrade to 13 now.
- rocqua 7y agoI'm not sure this counts as a privacy problem. Freedom from harassment is important, but it does not fall under privacy. I'd even say that it is more important than privacy. Privacy is about what others can learn about you, not what they can do to you.
- rtkwe 7y agoYeah... spam sucks and Keybase should probably shunt unfollowed messages into a second screen or do something like Instagram where the first message comes with a "do you want this person to be able to message you?" prompt where you can easily block them, but there's no private information being leaked here.
- ahnick 7y agoCompletely agree.
- byproxy 7y agoI believe they're going to address this with an update? https://keybase.io/blog/dealing-with-spam https://keybase.io/blog/dealing-with-spam
- mundo 7y agoAgreed, the tone of this post is "I'm unveiling an exploit KB refuses to patch" but the content is "I asked KB to add a feature and they added it."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- davidham 7y agoYes. I am 100% in sympathy with the people who are concerned about unwanted messages and team adds, but the nuclear option at the bottom of the post seems to cover it: > `[ ] Only let someone message me or add me to a team if...` The only thing I can think of that would be better than this would be to enable this by default.
- KallDrexx 7y agoWhile the updates here are good, the bigger thing I'm surprised they aren't addressing is spam messages requiring attention. Just split the messages into folders of "people I have contacted and/or whitelisted" and "Strangers". Any incoming message of a non-whitelisted person or someone I haven't contacted previously should not trigger a notification and should be nothing more than a notification bubble in the folder with a number of unread messages. This means that I only forced to deal with messages by known people, and when I get bored I can peruse messages from strangers and decide if I want to deal with them or not.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoFacebook Messenger does this. e.g. google "facebook other inbox".
- geofft 7y ago
- asdkhadsj 7y agoGlad to see this. Recently I was debating using Keybase for chat at home over Telegram. For now I guess I'll need to use something else. edit: oh never mind, looks like they started to address it: https://keybase.io/blog/dealing-with-spam https://keybase.io/blog/dealing-with-spam
- iudqnolq 7y agoFYI, Telegram is insecure by default, run by unsavory characters, and possibly compromised. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15281788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15281788
- asdkhadsj 7y agoIndeed, that's why I wanted to migrate from it
- iudqnolq 7y agoHave you tried Signal? Not as majy features as Telegram, bit they have very good reasons for why the missing features are difficult to do and are working hard at solving the crypto problems necessary. A good discussion about this today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744274
- octocode 7y agoI'm a bit confused, this blog post is written as if it's an exploit, but it looks like it's the intended functionality? Am I missing something?
- lucb1e 7y agoIndeed, it's intended functionality that you can talk to anyone and spammers are apparently just discovering the platform, and Keybase is reacting to it (see the recent blog post mentioned in other comments). The article is written a bit confusingly.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- brunoqc 7y agoIs there a way to convert that useless crypto money they gave us into real money?
- ceejayoz 7y agoI got mine out via Coinbase. (I had to use the pro offering, at https://pro.coinbase.com/ https://pro.coinbase.com/, as apparently Stellar isn't available in the main app for US users yet, but it worked fine.)
- mfer 7y agoFrom the keybase update: > As a bonus, their profile pic will get covered in Poo. This is in reference to accounts that have been blocked. If more people see this than the person who blocked it’ll be ripe for abuse. This seems entirely unprofessional and a bit childish. Says something about the culture at keybase.
- byproxy 7y agoIf you've read any of their blog posts you'll see that that's their general vibe: irreverence
- geofft 7y agoIs that supposed to make it better? "It's okay they don't take things seriously, they make a practice of not treating things seriously, so you should use their service?" (And, like, I get it, I have a good knack for being a troll and annoying all my friends, but at least I'm aware that this isn't a good thing and if I were running a business, I'd find someone else who could keep my instincts in check!)
- jedieaston 7y agoSuddenly I'm less confident in Stellar. wonder if this is really helping the foundation if Keybase is being this unprofessional in public communication.
- nemild 7y agoMore in this post too: https://vicki.substack.com/p/keybase-and-the-chaos-of-crypto https://vicki.substack.com/p/keybase-and-the-chaos-of-crypto > All of a sudden, I started receiving lots of random messages from people without profile pictures. > These were people I didn’t know contacting me on a pretty frequent basis, and I had no way to opt-in to their messages. Pretty ironic for a platform built on privacy. > I wasn’t the only one. After asking around, it seems that everyone I knew on Keybase was getting these. But of course, women with female names and profile pictures got a lot more than most men I knew. Other women online were experiencing it, too.
- hughpeters 7y agoOne of the companies I do contract work for uses Keybase to share credentials between engineers. Like database credentials, AWS access keys, ect. Including production credentials. I felt like it was a security risk when they started sharing creds with me over Keybase but didn't know enough about Keybase at the time to feel comfortable saying something so just followed their process. Does anyone here use Keybase for this use case? Is it secure?
- creativipy 7y agoI've used 1Password for this in the past. Maybe you should ask they switch to that?
- jedberg 7y agoI've used it for this use case. When I onboard new employees, I add them on Keybase and have them add me, and then I send them their AWS keys via Keybase chat. I've also used it to exchange AWS keys and other credentials when consulting. I chose keybase because it was the easiest chat to set up with end-to-end encryption that works on the desktop, where I generally needed to be to copy/paste the keys. It's certainly not the most secure way to share keys, but it's fairly secure and a decent trade off since I consider the credentials I'm sharing on there to be medium value at most.
- meddlepal 7y agoI've used it for this purpose before at a tiny startup. It's nice because you can script around directories in the Keybase Filesystem. That said our threat model and security concerns were minimal... we didn't store any PII for example. The team really appreciated it because of the tools low barrier to entry and ease-of-use.
- ahnick 7y agoYes, and yes it is secure. That is to say the data is encrypted and only you and the person(s) you are sending to have access to it. I have used it for credential sharing and use kbfs (Keybase's encrypted file sharing) for a simple secret storage mechanism for shell scripts. I map my encpass (https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh) directory to kbfs.
- floatingatoll 7y agoThe issue described in this post is the same issue that drove me to stop using IRC and XMPP. I’m all for open protocols and interop, but I’ve had an online stalker since dialup (Winsock). Building a system where anyone can message anyone is the same problem in each system. Anti-spam is not the solution. Harassment (and spear phishing) issues will not be solved by anti-spam.
- ahnick 7y agoAs a Keybase user for a number of years I'm very happy with the platform. I'm probably part of the silent majority who use Keybase and have been genuinely happy with it and don't speak up when others have complaints. I use it for personal messaging and for my business and it has been great. I think Keybase's position on this is on point. This is spam and needs to be dealt with as such. It's no more an issue than with email. Anyone can send you a virus or harassing message in your email, but where is the angry mob of people beating down the doors of every email provider? There is certainly a problem that needs to be addressed, but lets not blow this up into something it is not. Keybase's spam controls will continue to mature as it grows.
- lucb1e 7y agoIs there any reason you chose Keybase over other solutions? From my perspective, it's like Wire but without the video calling or end to end encryption, or like WhatsApp but without the network effect, or like Slack but without a number of features. I don't really understand Keybase's selling point.
- Gaelan 7y ago> like Wire but without the video calling or end to end encryption I'm not quite sure what you mean here, but Keybase does have end to end encryption—I think they're trying to position themselves as "Slack with end-to-end encryption."
- lucb1e 7y agoThe app is only end to end encrypted if you trust the server to give you the right keys from the beginning (it's E2EE meets TOFU): since there is no way to verify what information (the "sigchains") the server sent to your device (no safety number like in signal, encryption key like in Telegram, fingerprint like in Wire, or whatever you call it), you have to trust the server. The app does verify that nothing changes, so the server has to consistently lie to the device, and to app clients only because a command line client could verify the keys. Then again, since very, very few people do or can do this verification, and since the verification tutorial in the documentation is relatively complex and broken (an api call doesn't return a signatures field the tutorial relies on) and nobody seems to have noticed, it's probably a safe bet for an attacker that compromised the server to just MITM all devices of some users without being noticed. Note that the blockchain magic does nothing because the app doesn't verify it, and if it did, it would have to be a normal bitcoin client, which would take lots of traffic, storage (even with SPV, you need all the block headers), and shifts the trust to a lot of third parties instead of one (so that's quite trustworthy and great for my grandma that doesn't verify keys, but personally I'd prefer to just check a key in favor of running a bitcoin client on my phone). But that's not implemented yet so this point is moot anyway. And if I'm not mistaken, one needs to compute the merkle tree completely, that is, hash all sigchain of all Keybase users (imagine they become popular and you have to download a literal billion sigchains and hash them all together on a phone) to match it against the final value you get from the blockchain. Finally, someone brought up verifying keys with another device. I'm not sure if that works. It might, depending on how the key exchange works and if it forces you to verify something in the app. If you don't, I mean, in the situation that the server spoofs your sigchain (MITM) to your friends, it can do that between your devices as well and report whatever value it used for the merkle tree to your command line client so everything checks out. So it's not completely broken, but trusting the server on first use is m a lesser guarantee than all other E2EE software, and the fix is really simple so I don't get why they don't implement it (note that I don't mean to hint that they're indeed MITMing and that's why they don't let people verify it; I genuinely don't understand why not allow people to do this, I see no reason). My best guess is that they either didn't think of the scenario themselves (and NCC also missed it, which makes sense since they verified the crypto and code and not how a normal user would actually verify this in the UI) or they don't want to admit now that it depended on closed source servers being trusted all along. Relevant question: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/222055/how-can-i-verify-keybases-end-to-end-encryption-between-me-and-a-friend https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/222055/how-can-...
- xref 7y agoDiscord has a similar problem where crypto scammers come on any public servers and mass message all the users. There are no controls except to block them after the fact one by one.