Hacker News Reader

I've never heard about Keybase before this post. Can someone explain what the "you can write securely to any twitter, reddit, facebook, github, and hacker news user" is about? If you write to them do they need the app to view it or does it go into their inbox (does github even have an inbox?). And if they open it on a browser it would no longer be encrypted, right?

View on HN

It's like WhatsApp; but with PGP and you're in complete control of your keys.

They basically provide the public key exchange and verification services with an appealing UI akin to your modern chat application.

Let's say you hook up your reddit account or HN account to your Keybase account, and we want to chat. One of us simply has to look for the other on Keybase, start up a chat like Twitter DMs -- but it's PGP encrypted and seemingly as flawless as exchanging PGP emails without the hassle of exchanging our public keys through a key-server. This is arguably the hardest thing for non-tech savvy's to grasp.

afaik, it's pgp/gpg under the covers with a nicer UX and registry for public keys... so, technically they wouldn't need the software to send/receive messages from you, but it makes it easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com