There is very little server-to-server communication, which simplifies the design and software upgrades.
If they vibe coded the app, sure, be skeptical. But there's no indication they did, just that they wanted images for their website, and they're a software engineer and not a graphics designer.
I put about as much weight in the origin of those graphics as which website editor they use. If they were advertising themselves as a web designer, sure, maybe that's relevant. That's not what they're doing here though.
If this site were their product, maybe that'd matter. But why does that matter in this context?
No more than wearing off-the-rack clothes shows a lack of respect for and understanding of the work tailors actually do.
No more than wearing factory-woven cloth shows a lack of respect for and understanding of the work weavers actually do.
No more than heating a can of soup shows a lack of respect for and understanding of the work chefs de cuisine actually do.
In my cases as well as yours, one certainly can choose to spend extra for the luxury of the best to meet the want, but it is also fine to spend less and meet the need. In my cases as well as yours, judging someone for the value he assigns to a luxury is gauche.
In this case, probably not! The text on the website and the author’s comments here and his background all suggest that he writes high-quality cryptosystems. But the AI art by itself is still evidence pointing to lower quality.
Many people find using LLM images tacky and garish. It screams low-effort slop, to a significant number of people. When it's so easy to find great usable images on wikipedia, for example, it's hard to know why a sophisticated technical person would take the risk involved in this choice.
I'd a quick look there at the images on the wp page for chains, and the one for knots - some really excellent images. One doesn't need a PhD in web design to pull it off, either.
I'm excited to try this out personally! Thanks for building this maxtaco
You 100% didn’t vibe code this, but the AI images give that sort of impression.
1) compare to a team-shared Linux machine with SSH daemon. Each team member has a user account, and they can manage their SSH authorized keys, including keys stored on Yubikey. The team can share files and git repositories on the Linux machine's own storage. Some differences I see with this approach are the federated aspect and "append-only data structures that allow clients to catch dishonest server behavior".
2) compare to Radicle, a decentralized git service. Identities are keypairs.
With FOKS, how coupled is storage of git and secrets to the FOKS server?
The KV-Store and Git server are implemented as "applications" on top of the FOKS infrastructure, so they aren't coupled. They see a sequence of Per-Team-Keys (PTKs); they use the older ones for decryption and the newest for encryption. I'd really love to see all sorts of other applications built on top of FOKS but we might need to do some work as to nailing the right plugin architecture.
> all the admins and owners — those who have the ability to change the team — must be on the same home server
Maybe with easy multi-accounting it could be made less annoying, but this seems like a big limitation for a federated system.
This is a great point and I thought a lot about this. This is the sort of thing that can be changed later if it's really a good idea, but I got to thinking that having non-local admins would mean more server-to-server communication and more server-to-server trust, and I was trying to avoid that.
Imagine alice@foo is an admin of bluejays@bar. One thing alice@foo will need to do is to make signed changes to bluejays@bar, when adding or removing members, let's say. Right now, the server at bar will check the validity of these signatures, that they were made with the alice@foo's latest key. So in other words, there would have to be some way for bar to authenticate to foo to allow bar to read alice's sigchain and to determine her latest key.
I was thinking that keeping foo and bar separated was a good idea both in terms of privilege separation and keeping the network simpler (which would in turn be good for uptime and would simplify software upgrades).
maxtaco•2d ago
eterps•2d ago
What features from a user perspective does it currently have in common with Keybase?
F.e. I remember Keybase mostly for secure messaging using public identities (HN, Reddit etc.), and sharing data/files.
maxtaco•2d ago
eterps•1d ago
maxtaco•1d ago
The add vs invite distinction referred to above is because servers can choose different visibility policies. You can set up a server at foks.yourdomain.cc, and set it to "open-viewership", which means that any user can see any other user by default. If you and Bob are both on that host, you can add him to your team without his permission. But other hosts, like foks.app, do not work this way, and Bob has to authorize you to view him.
dannyobrien•8h ago
maxtaco•2h ago
pmw•8h ago
oooyay•2h ago
I'm actually working on a crytpography based project inspired by Keybase's use of Merkle Trees and identity proofing but with an added dash of privacy through pseudonyms and chain hashing. Thanks for putting time into this.
maxtaco•2h ago
packetlost•1h ago
IMO Vault is really nice, but something as simple as possible is better for managing secrets, especially when the storage layer has permission and sane encryption handled for you.
jazzyjackson•2h ago
https://keri.one/