fullsage

One of the best product post-mortems that I've seen is the RethinkDB post from Slava:

http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html

He does a great job describing how the "worse is better" essay plays out in the modern world, and how it played out for them in the OSS DB market.

This post is very oblique in a way that makes me suspicious.

1. Is Keybase still a for-profit corporation?

2. No actual technology is announced here. Is the purpose of this post to announce funding? If so, how much funding is it and what are the conditions under which it is provided?

3. How is Stellar compatible with privacy? Keybase mentions MobileCoin in this blog post, but they are only using Stellar's consensus protocol, not the full Stellar protocol. I think that is because Stellar isn't private. What is Keybase doing to solve that if they are using the Stellar network?

> Perhaps best of all, it's a nonprofit.

That doesn't appear to be true:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/11...

If they're a nonprofit, where is their 990 (or equivalent)?

> So I checked if this matches their privacy whitepaper [0] that claims to list what they store. It almost does, with one notable exception and one minor one.

Maybe it's good that they've documented this somewhere, but I don't think most Wire users read white papers. I'm a dev and I was surprised. Their outward facing marketing didn't lead me to think they track all my contacts and the state of every conversation I am having. It very clearly suggests the total opposite.

They need to do much better than this if they want people to think they take security/privacy seriously.

>> * Every group that you're in.

> This is the same as conversations... they clearly need to know this to route messages.

Why? That's not true for Signal from what I can tell.

No most of the source is still missing.

The title for this post should be changed to "a piece of the wire messenger server code open sourced." Most of the source is not open source, you can't run your own.

Also, holy shit they're storing a lot of information about their users:

* All of your contacts.

* Unencrypted profile information for everyone.

* Every active conversation you have.

* Every archived conversation you have.

* The frequency that you communicate with your contacts ('top contacts').

* Every group that you're in.

* The unencrypted titles and avatars of everyone's groups.

Wonder what will be in the rest of the database schema if they open source it.

Does this mean that ALB/ELB supports SNI now? Or they only allow you to do this with subdomains under a wildcard cert?

Safeway has changed a lot over the past five years. I used to be a kind of reluctant Whole Foods shopper, but have just recently been surprised by how comparable Safeway has become at a much more affordable price point.

I think there are probably a lot of people like you and me who were never part of the whole foods cult but still appreciated the product, and are realizing that now we can get the same stuff for less elsewhere.