Now that we're all video conference, all the time, @yaelwrites's writeup on the privacy concerns of using the commercial chat tools is very timely. https://onezero.medium.com/slack-zoom-google-hangouts-are-your-remote-work-apps-spying-on-you-cf1e33809cf7
@s_ol
I've been using Jitsi and Signal whenever possible. Let me know if you learn of any others. Videochat is expensive to run for free at scale so there probably aren't many non-corporate ones.
I wish there were more security tips in the article.
@th @yaelwrites
@kavbojka @s_ol @yaelwrites jitsi does seem to be the most developed open source group video tool, although without e2e. signal is excellent for 1:1 video and group chats, although I much prefer a real keyboard for messaging and signal desktop has issues, as described by Harlo in her hack.lu talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vax5vLSUUw
The EFF has a similar piece on privacy risks of remote collaboration tools with links into their surveillance self-defense site for more security tips: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/what-you-should-know-about-online-tools-during-covid-19-crisis
@th
Please, what is e2e?
I’ll need to check out Signal, no experience of it yet. How would you compare Signal and jitsi, use-case-wise? UX-wise?
@kavbojka @s_ol @yaelwrites
@s_ol @th @yaelwrites There are a whole bunch and in theory it should all work nicely P2P. The tricky part seems to be getting through firewalls, which in many pragmatic cases means proxy-ing data through the server. I used this nice minimalist thing, coded by friends, for a while but some routers were making it unreliable:
Yeah, I worked in webRTC corporate conferencing and this definitely is a tricky point. Most residential firewalls should be traversable with help from just a STUN server, which just helps the clients find their public IPs etc., but in extreme cases (like corporate firewalls) you may need a TURN server (which is essentially a proxy). Depending on the conferencing setup in general there may or may not be a central MCU that does transcoding or forwarding.
@th @yaelwrites
Haven't done extensive research, but are there any recommendable open-source protocols/implementations (likely based on webRTC)?
Quick search yields https://jitsi.org/ (and a ton of middleware)