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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: 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).