With all of the Pandemic precautions that have been put into effect, many people are turning to "free" on-line conferencing services. As the saying goes, "If you are not paying for the service, you are the product". And, even if paid for (by yourself or by an employer), that does not mean freedom from having your information mined for advertising or other purposes.
I've not used any of the following, so please forgive me if I got the product names incorrect. Here are some of the big "free" services that I've seen mentioned: Zoom (whose security issues have been cited many times on SoylentNews), Apple (Group Facetime), Google (Hangouts), Facebook (Facebook Live) and Microsoft (Teams).
I suspect many Soylentils have now acquired some experience with on-line conferencing. I am hoping to draw upon your experience. Better still, I would love to see development and proliferation of alternatives to the "Big Names". Solutions that are self-hosted and as free as reasonably possible from the prying eyes of the big, data-warehousing corporations. Open source — free as in beer and libre — would be good, too
Aside: Way back in 2013 there was a great deal of media attention given to the revelation that the USA's NSA (National Security Agency) had been collecting metadata. Oft-touted was that it was only metadata. I immediately thought, "If it is only metadata, then why is there such resistance to terminating the program? They must be getting something of value out of it!"
Kieran Healy answered my question. He is a Professor of Sociology at Duke University and posted an illuminating article, Using Metadata to find Paul Revere. A humorous and lighthearted portrayal, written as if from the colonial era, Kieran uses relatively simple linear algebra on seemingly innocuous data to draw some startling conclusions. Fear not! No deep understanding of linear algebra is required! For the mathematically knowledgeable, sufficient details are provided. For the rest of us, summaries are provided which explain what each operation does and offers. If you've ever wondered why so many organizations want to know your contact list, this article makes things quite clear!
So, back to conferencing. To my knowledge, the preceding companies offer video chat, though I am more interested in strictly voice chat applications (but am willing to consider video as an alternative, too.) Skeptical of company's ulterior motives, I thought there must be some self-hosting solution. I'd like to be able to lease a low-cost, on-line server, like SoylentNews does from Linode. Then install the application on, say, Ubuntu and make chat available over the net using just a web browser.
Besides, I can't be the first person to be interested in this. It sounds like something tailor-made for an open-source solution. A cursory glance seemed filled with "marketing speak" and I could not tell the wheat from the chaff. Each offering trumpets their features and downplays (or even neglects to mention) their shortcomings. How to choose?
Yes, I realize that short of going nuts with onion routing and TOR or something of that ilk, there will necessarily be "footprints" left behind for ISPs, DNS providers, etc. to harvest. Still, the perfect is the enemy of the much-better-than-what-we-have-now, so I'm reaching out to our the community.
What user-platform-agnostic (smartphone, laptop, or desktop) browser-based conferencing software have you hosted or used? How did it work out? What worked well? What shortcomings did you find? What obvious question am I forgetting to ask?
Related Stories
Zoom Acquires Keybase to Bring End-to-End Encryption to Video Platform:
Popular communications platform provider Zoom Video announced on Thursday that it has acquired secure messaging and file-sharing service Keybase for an undisclosed sum. The move is the latest by the company as it attempts to bolster the security of its offerings and build in end-to-end encryption that can scale to the company's massive user base.
"There are en-to-end encrypted communications platforms. There are communications platforms with easily deployable security. There are enterprise-scale communications platforms. We believe that no current platform offers all of these. This is what Zoom plans to build, giving our users security, ease of use, and scale, all at once," Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, said in a statement.
Zoom said it would offer an end-to-end encrypted meeting mode to all paid accounts.
[...] "This acquisition marks a key step for Zoom as we attempt to accomplish the creation of a truly private video communications platform that can scale to hundreds of millions of participants, while also having the flexibility to support Zoom's wide variety of uses," Yuan wrote in a blog post. "Our goal is to provide the most privacy possible for every use case, while also balancing the needs of our users and our commitment to preventing harmful behavior on our platform. Keybase's experienced team will be a critical part of this mission."
Details on Zoom's encryption roadmap are available on the Zoom blog.
Previously:
(2020-04-21) This Open-Source Program Deepfakes You During Zoom Meetings, in Real Time
(2020-04-20) Every Security Issue Uncovered so far in the Zoom Video Chat App
(2020-04-17) Looking for Alternative, Self-Hosted Audio (or Video) Chat Services
(2020-04-15) Over 500,000 Zoom Accounts Sold on Hacker Forums, the Dark Web
(2020-04-13) Zoom Admits Data Got Routed Through China
Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @09:28PM (8 children)
Worked a few shifts in a mechanical test lab earlier this week (big place, $1000/hour testing) and one guy that wanted to watch the test was not local. They brought him in with Microsoft Teams, along with a couple of engineers that were working from home. (There was a skeleton crew onsite to run the tests and enough room that we could "distance" easily.)
I'm no MS fan, but I have to say that Teams worked very well. The test lab guys said they had tried others and had lots of disconnects, bad/lagged audio, etc. The company has Office licenses which include Teams, I joined with the guest/web option. MS seems to have figured out how to make Teams work well, even when internet traffic is much higher than normal.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MostCynical on Friday April 17 2020, @10:07PM (7 children)
Teams seems to be a better package, and does more than just facilitate meetings.
My work means I am on Skype and Zoom and Teams (dealing with employer, supplier, and third-party testing company).
Zoom and Teams handle low-bandwidth situations better than corporate Skype, and both allow you to log in to "online" versions quite gracefully, if the program/application can't connect.
"skype for business" is complicated to set up and configure if you're not running a full corporate email system.
Ordinary skype is okay for video chat.
One of the local non-government (private) schools has been using Teams for online teaching - and it works. Per class, they have up to 24 students at a time, with one or two teachers, plus assignment allocation and submission, all grouped by subject/class, running on ipads.
I detest MS as a company, but I am impressed with Teams.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @10:49PM (1 child)
Which means that it was probably a fairly mature product from some small company that they purchased. You know they don't grow anything from the ground up.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday April 17 2020, @11:07PM
Sort-of.. "Skype" (bought) plus "Classroom" (internal)
"It was created during an internal hackathon at the company." [wikipedia.org])
They already had "Microsoft Classroom", and they bought Skype (and partially wrecked it), so some internal MS devs managed to put the 'good' bits of original Skype together with Classroom, and the marketing people and PHBs somehow didn't break it before release..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 17 2020, @11:37PM (2 children)
Slightly off-topic, but does the screen sharing work yet?
Where I'm working we used to use Skype screen-sharing for (infrequent) remote support and collaboration, then with the forced update to Teams the screen-sharing became completely useless - terrible performance and we were lucky to get 5 minutes of remote control before the connection was lost. Finally resorted to jumping through the hoops required to use Remote Assistance when necessary since we couldn't find any other decent (and cheap) options - for some reason they didn't want to pay the ridiculous TeamViewer site license fee for a few hours a month of usage. Haven't been back to try Teams in a few months.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:50AM (1 child)
screen share with remote control is buggy.,. but I suspect they don't want to cannibalize TeamViewer licensing.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday April 18 2020, @04:22PM
Which would be far more tolerable if they hadn't forced us off a system that worked perfectly.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:15PM
My experiences with Teams are not as well. Even when connecting relatively locally, quality is often bad. Also the UI sucks. I had a very impressive experience with Zoom the other day. A conference that went virtual with > 200 participants and speakers calling in from anywhere between North America/Russia (maybe even China). Quality was astounding, really flawless. I checked bandwidth with nethogs and I saw bandwidths below 1kb/s with video and audio. No idea how they achieve it. Memory consumption was > 600Mb though, maybe they use very large buffer for backreferencing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @03:23PM
You must have a very low bar.
Skype user?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Recovery One on Friday April 17 2020, @09:31PM (1 child)
So used to use this a lot when playing video games. Hosted my own server and everyone that had the client could connect. Audio only I think. Oh and open source as well!
https://www.mumble.info/ [mumble.info]
Can adjust audio quality to pretty low and have decent results if your network is bandwidth limited.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 17 2020, @11:45PM
Yep, lots of options for voice-only - video adds a huge amount for feeling connected though - whether it's collaborating with colleagues or hanging with friends. Facial expressions, gestures... a huge fraction of face-to-face communication is nonverbal, and that's completely lost with voice chat. (to say nothing of the intimacy/connection built by eye contact, though that's always a bit off with webcams ).
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Friday April 17 2020, @09:45PM
P2P end-2-end federated video/audio with plenty of open source clients all over for every platform.
https://matrix.org/clients/ [matrix.org]
compiling...
(Score: 5, Informative) by zeigerpuppy on Friday April 17 2020, @09:47PM (5 children)
My company has been doing a lot of work with open-source video conferencing alternatives over the last few weeks.
Here's what we've found:
There's really only one alternative if you want a robust multi-user (more than 4 people) video conference to work.
That is Jitsi-meet with Jitsi-videobridge. It's cross platform compatible and really nice to use.
However, it does require fairly significant resources (best to have a 1GBps connection up/down, at least 4vcpus). It's easy to install on Debian but you need to pay attention to making sure ports are open (TCP 80,443,4443 and UDP 10000).
It's possible to also integrate with Matrix and have your multiuser chat launch Jitsi sessions (via the riot-web client).
There's also some alpha-level work integrating jitsi with nextcloud.
Now, the alternatives. Matrix video chat (native) didn't work very well for us (open no video/audio), we gave up and switched to jitsi (this could be just our fault and generally Matrix/Synapse has been really great for chat with multiplatform push support).
Forget about Nextcloud Talk, it falls all over itself with any more than a few users. We deploy a lot of nextcloud servers but it looks like Talk is only scalable with the proprietary Nextcloud signalling server (very expensive).
There's one other promising alternative, BigBlueButton. It integrates with Mattermost which seems nice. However, I think its use case is a little different and it's more of a one-to-many presentation tool.
So I think Jitsi is the way to go, but be prepared for a pretty expensive set up bandwidth-wise.
We're going to launch our service as a privacy respecting PAAS over the next few weeks, but it's not ready for primetime yet...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @10:45PM (3 children)
Why do businesses think they need to videoconference anyway? All you need is presentation and file sharing. Why does anyone think you need to see people staring in the general direction of a camera (come on, you know that nobody properly looks into the camera). It sounds like all of the bandwidth and complication is going to the least useful part of the whole experience.
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:24AM (1 child)
i tend to agree with you that voice is the most important thing. However, video definitely has its uses. For instance: telemedicine, explaining how to use an object etc.
It's also helpful to have software that integrates sharing of desktop windows. Video also helps people feel connected and is more engaging for children.
I think you can make an argument that in most cases it's distracting, unnecessary and bandwidth consuming; but for the cases where it's really needed, it's indispensible (although I would like to see a low bandwidth animated avatar system which would be nearly as good!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @07:28AM
Sharing desktop open source is called VNC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @04:05PM
Because it allows the PHB to continue lording over his minions much like in the office when the PHB drags 25 people into the conference room (when only 3-4 of them are really needed for the meeting). The other 21-22 people are present so the PHB can watch over them.
Video allows the PHB to continue to lord over the minions because it requires the minion to appear to be alert and paying attention to whatever the PHB thinks is important.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:42AM
Thanks so much. Matrix.org is also interesting but jitsi-through-matrix looks better. Truly appreciate that you shared your conclusions.
When you do, can you slashvertise this? I'll want to have a look...
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @09:48PM (2 children)
/s
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @10:26PM (1 child)
We all know this one [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @05:19PM
More likely than not, that's a US-ian honeytrap.
(Score: 1) by drgibbon on Friday April 17 2020, @09:51PM (1 child)
It's videoconferencing, but Jitsi [jitsi.org] sounds like it fits the bill? I seem to remember that you could host your own server (not sure if that's still the case). But if you just want to test it, there's Jitsi Meet [meet.jit.si] for the browser, and the Jitsi Meet app on Android/iOS.
Certified Soylent Fresh!
(Score: 1) by krokodilerian on Saturday April 18 2020, @10:39AM
We've been running jitsi for a while, but seems like bigbluebutton has more polish and can handle more users (with cameras), jitsi meet kills the browsers at ~7-8 participants. Both are somewhat invasive to install, bigbluebutton more so, so they need dedicated hw most of the time.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday April 17 2020, @10:03PM
Openfire is, ostensibly, an XMPP (jabber) chat/IM server.
However, it also has support through plugins for both voice and video.
It's generally easy to set up and easy to use.
Openfire: https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/ [igniterealtime.org]
Openfire Plugins: https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/plugins.jsp [igniterealtime.org]
Plugins of interest:
Candy (https://discourse.igniterealtime.org/t/candy-plugin-for-openfire/68696)
Openfire Meetings (http://wikisuite.org/Openfire-Meetings)
Jingle Nodes (https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/plugin-archive.jsp?plugin=jingleNodes) (more info about Jingle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingle_(protocol) [wikipedia.org] )
What's more, Openfire supports (via another plugin) a Presence service (https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/plugins/1.7.0/presence/readme.html ) as well.
Not sure if this will meet your needs, but the underlying server is open source, very functional and under active development.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @10:24PM (1 child)
Get a HAM license, talk with anyone anywhere on earth*!
(When the weather's right in the ionosphere..)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @02:07AM
Encryption is not allowed, though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 17 2020, @11:33PM (4 children)
I see that Linphone still exists, and can now do video.
I have dabbled in VoIP over the years. Wasn't too worried about video, just wanted voice. 15 years ago, I tried Linphone, and it worked. But, it wasn't user friendly. Seemed the big thing was the use of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and you didn't use phone numbers to connect, you used IP addresses. An extra little bit of fun was dealing with your contacts having dynamic IP addresses. Used to use DYNDNS, when they were free.
Another difficulty was configuring the NAT, router and firewall in the typical home networking environment. Had to manually forward the correct ports to the machine that ran the software. Didn't have UPnP at that time. I could deal with that, but I realized it was too much for the average user. I used it to talk to my parents. I had carefully set myself up with access to their home network, and I needed that to get it to work. Used Xwindows remotely to view the packets that Ethereal sniffed, which helped greatly in figuring out where packet drops, blocks, and misroutings were occurring. First it was text chat only. I soon had voice working in one direction, from them to me, while I replied with text chats. Then I got the voice working in both directions, or so I thought, but it proved to be only one way the other way. I could see nothing wrong. Finally I remembered that their microphone was battery powered. (It was the only one the local Radio Shack had in stock.) Yep, the batteries had gone dead. Didn't even last half an hour. Dumped that microphone.
Things have changed a lot over those 15 years. Now we have a great audio codec, Opus. That alone used to be a big problem. Either you used a fast speech codec that was proprietary, and/or poor quality, or you tried a good quality one and suffered dropouts because they were too resource intensive for the low end computers and not-very-broad broadband of those times. The latter was the more frequent problem. AT&T's crappy DSL service was, at best, only 3 times as fast as a 56K modem. Pathetic. The best codecs just couldn't compress the audio data enough and maintain decent audio quality. In some cases, the most extreme compression setting took too much processing power, and then you'd get dropouts for that reason instead of network bandwidth. The compromise was to settle for poor audio quality that was nevertheless good enough for a conversation. Video was right out.
Another really irritating problem was severe lag. It could take up to 3 seconds for audio to traverse the network. Until we got used to it, we were talking over each other, thinking that the other side had not replied or was waiting to hear more.
Video codecs are still a problem today. Until AV1 achieves sufficient market penetration, will have to settle for MPEG4, as that is the one most commonly implemented in hardware. But why is everyone so hot to have video?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 17 2020, @11:55PM (3 children)
Nice! I hadn't heard of Opus before, haven't used voice chat in ages - last time I did Speex was the OSS codec king of the hill, and it looks like Opus trounces it everywhere except extreme low bandwidth, which is rarely an issue these days..
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:15AM (2 children)
Are you referring to this comparison?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Opus_quality_comparison_colorblind_compatible.svg [wikipedia.org]
You probably don't want to go below 8 kbps for your audio. There's samples of 8 kbps and greater Opus here:
http://opus-codec.org/examples/ [opus-codec.org]
If you want to torture yourself, you can check out a shining example of 7.5 kbps Opus audio:
https://soylentnews.org/~takyon/journal/4876 [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:40AM (1 child)
Hey, when you're playing team FPSes with your mates over 56k modems, every kb/s counts. Speex would get tin-canny at extreme low bitrates, but you could make it use very little bandwidth and still understand each other.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday April 18 2020, @04:59AM
For speech at ultra-low bitrates (700 to 3200 bits/s), try Codec 2 [wikipedia.org] by David Rowe (VK5DGR).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 17 2020, @11:55PM (6 children)
NVIDIA RTX Voice: Noise cancellation with a bit of AI [guru3d.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Immerman on Friday April 17 2020, @11:59PM (4 children)
Heck yeah! Time to go buy a $500 video card so that my voice can be mangled by AI instead of deterministic codecs!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:07AM
RTX 2060 is a mere $300 or so.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 18 2020, @03:59AM (1 child)
Go out? This month?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday April 18 2020, @04:25PM
Why not? My gf and I are both in essential services anyway. You're welcome.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 23 2020, @04:07AM
You can get Nvidia’s “RTX Voice” noise filtering without a pricey RTX card [arstechnica.com]
Apparently, the RT cores are not needed at all.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @06:47PM
fuck nvidia
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:38AM (3 children)
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet:Conference/2020/Streaming [libreplanet.org]
there are the tech notes for what they used, might be of interest to see what they did since 2016 with jitsi.
I also advise you to check what kind of stream your gopro clone webcam sends when wifi enabled. I was able to send my gitup git1 video (did not find audio) low res but hi bitrate and quality h264 to youtube live without needing to reencode, using ffmpeg, using a decent connection though. The webcam sets up his wifi network (with easy to guess pw beware you condo dwellers), so the pc has a wifi network routed there and a cable to the dsl router. See I had to encode the audio myself from the pc mic. Of course the extreme wide angle might not really be what you're looking for. Here
ffmpeg -thread_queue_size 2048 -re -i rtsp://192.168.1.254/stream.mp4 -itsoffset 1.4 -thread_queue_size 512 -ac 1 -f alsa -i default -c:a aac -b:a 128k -ar 44100 -c:v copy -threads 0 -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -f flv rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/rtmp/...
where "..." is the streaming key
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:40AM (1 child)
btw iirc all you needed to set up the double network was to raise the wlan0 interface earlier than eth0. Checking routes does not hurt though.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:45AM
And btw your personal portable telescreen, if recent enough, should have realtime h264 encoding, so webrtc or ipwebcam or other webcam software found in the big brother software library for android or ios might help.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @01:47AM
Wow, thanks!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @02:11AM
I know it's really not really designed for this purpose, but if person A wanted to talk, transfer the file to person B, then B transfers back to A, it could work, whether the files be voiced or text.
https:/www.onionshare.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @07:25AM (2 children)
I am forced to use Zoom and Google Hangouts by the people that sign the checks.
I have been well aware of the lack of security with these "services".
When we have meetings (audio only is best and shared screen works pretty well)
between USA and Manilla and India, things in general work pretty well -- the 0.3 sec delay
is not too bad. Sometimes the children in the background get mention...
It will likely be difficult to get organizations to switch to self-hosting Jitsi
I find it amusing that companies will "trust" these third parties with proprietary
information. No patent ideas of mine in those meetings ....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @06:05PM (1 child)
> I am forced
No, no one is ever forced to do anything. There is always a choice. ALWAYS.
If you feel forced to do something, maybe you should reexamine your options.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18 2020, @06:56PM
my thoughts exactly. people always say this sort of thing as if they are assigned jobs by bayonet point. get some integrity, ffs! are you a free person or a willing slave?
(Score: 1) by btsfh on Saturday April 18 2020, @12:27PM
https://www.pexip.com/self-hosted. [pexip.com] They also have a cloud based version for orgs that prefer that.
(Score: 1) by spiraldancing on Monday April 20 2020, @10:22AM
I've been hosting my own instance for 4-5 years. Self-hosting is not too hard for the tech-savvy, but perhaps overwhelming for general public. They also offer hosted instances you can join (though I've never tried that).
At it's core, it's primarily a personal Cloud storage/sharing/syncing tool, similar to GDrive, Dropbox, etc. But as a self-hosted FOSS webservice, it also supports many plug-in apps for additional functionality ... calendars, collaborative Office suite, task lists, email, contact lists, yada.
Nextcloud Talk is one of the primary plug-in apps available, that provides text, audio, video and group chatting and such-like. Getting the audio and video functionality working across the public Internet is a bit more complicated than just 'install and use'. My personal experience with it has been spotty. But broadly speaking, it is well reviewed.
Lets go exploring.