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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?
(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?