Thanks for your erudite observations, Bill.. I agree with almost all of them. That is indeed a bit troubling that Keybase unnecessarily grabs your private key.. I should've paid better attention & noticed that myself. Looks like I'll continue to not really use it (never connected any mobile devices like most people do btw.. that thought creeped me out straight away.) It's an interesting idea though, & lots of cool nerds there, like you say (albeit not the most astute about being wary vis-a-vis privacy, I'd reckon.) And to update my ramblings: I think their "invite" phase is overwith, and anyone can just freely grab an account/handle at this point (demand must've been underwhelming I suppose.)
I'll definitely take your enthusiasm for Signal into consideration along with all the various opinions. Where I think you're a bit mistaken is wrt Google Hangouts-- I recall reading a post by a developer on a Goog forum decrying the fact that Google Voice traffic goes over unencrypted (even though the gmail connection spawning it is https) .. and sure enough, when I run Firefox from the command line & fire up the Voice Plug-in, it's blurting out stuff all over the place, including my gmail address as far as I can tell. Haven't had the desire to do video (and actually find the push to use Hangouts instead of the old Voice to be quite annoying) so I have no observations about that. But I've never trusted that megacorporation much, for a variety of reasons, and I must admit I find questionable your further assertion that "Google does NOT know who you are talking to, or what you are saying .." I mean, if the rest of Hangouts is anything like Voice, they absolutely try to know. Voice automatically tries to convert all your speech-recognize all your voicemails, presenting a usually-iffy text of them (and there's no way to turn that off that I could find.) This is consistent with their "free" business model-- free doesnt mean Free As In Freedom, to quote stallman.org.. our eyeballs (& vocal chords & probably camera-gleaned biometrics) are absolutely The Product-- Goog is an advert monster, after all. If I had the patience to read legalese, I'm sure I could provide passages from their ToS that'd leave no question about this. While I'm ragging on them, it might be worth noting that I heard some definite discontent on one or more of the Linux podcasts I consume about Android tending more & more toward pushing a proprietary silo sort of environment on hardwaremakers & consumers. They basically bemoan the increasing disappearance of AOSP options ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Open-source_community ).. But I don't want my points of disagreement to detract from my appreciation for your response-- it's a very much welcomed one. Mark -- https://twitter.com/linuxusergroup
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