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Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

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Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#131

Post by pixl97 »

torrent-of-ions wrote: post #121

I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always. But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, a…

>I always see these services talking about "crystal clear quality", but never latency, which is a shame. Maybe there is simply nothing they can do about it. I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it.

Well, the first problem at home is likely your wireless. Live in an apartment and you can pick up 30 other routers in your wifi search. Chances are you're going to have latency and re-transmit issues to your AP.

Second problem, your router. Most of them suck. If you're lucky and yours doesn't setup QoS/shaping rules. I use fd_codel on mine to attempt to minimize the amount of buffer bloat that occurs. In the race to make your internet 'fast' huge buffers act like buckets for data, which is really bad if you want your data instantly. And if you search buffer bloat you'll see a lot of people talk about it, very few ISPs want to do anything about it though.

Lastly, the one you can't do anything about is the path that your data takes to the remote user. If it is overloaded or has capacity induced latency there isn't much you can do, other than change ISPs maybe.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#132

Post by JshWright »

drakenot wrote: post #130
JshWright wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> variable bitrate encoding I hope not... VBR can easily leak all sorts of information (including the actual content of the conversation)

Whoa, I had never thought of monitoring VBR as an attack vector for recovering audio. Do you have a link discussing this?

Sure, here are a couple papers on the topic:

https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf

https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/voip-vbr.pdf

It's fundamentally very similar to the sorts of issues you end up with if you compress then encrypt. If the attacker can make some educated guesses about the plaintext prior to the compression, the compression ratio can be a very powerful tool in their arsenal.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#133

Post by driverdan »

torrent-of-ions wrote: post #121

I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always. But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, a…

> I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it.

You're remembering incorrectly then. Dialup latency was in the range of hundreds of ms. Early high speed internet access also had higher latency than modern connections.

If you have latency problems it's likely a problem with your hardware.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#134

Post by NoGravitas »

Canada wrote: post #115
dgellow wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of sync is a feature. That's what you get when you have a secure system.

Signal and WhatsApp both support multi-device encrypted chats. Signal is better than WhatsApp in this respect as your primary device doesn't need to be online for it to work.

Signal multi-device support is very limited. Doesn't support multiple mobile devices. Primary device must be a phone, all others must be desktop computers with Chrome.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#135

Post by briandear »

16 wrote: post #65
notspanishflu wrote: post #3

I'm using Telegram as my main messaging system but I hope they'll open source everything. That's the only way to fully audit the service. Telegram is not too bad but has too many grey areas at this moment.

Telegram has been around for three years now. I wouldn't hold my breath for open source servers/ability to run your own. That's not their business model.

What IS their business model?

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#136

Post by tyingq »

wackspurt wrote: post #7

"Each time you make a Voice Call on Telegram, a neural network learns from your and your device‘s feedback (naturally, it doesn’t have access to the contents of the conversation, it has only technical information such as network speed, ping times, packet loss percentage, etc.). The machine optimizes dozens of parameters based on this input, improving the quality of future calls on the given device and network." What…

I have the feeling that's there soley for the "AI-Powered" hype train benefit. Versus actually being used as a genuine feedback loop to improve the service.

Logs of speed, ping times, packet loss, would likely be more useful in good old, non-AI reports...to identify regional issues, peering opportunities, etc.

I don't think you need AI for voip calls that upgrade/degrade quality based on network health.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#137

Post by NoGravitas »

unicornporn wrote: post #31
throwaway399 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way riot is less buggy. Try macos to macos Sierra to Yosemite voice call. It segfaults right away. Wire is buggy but generally works. The main problem with it is that metadata is collected by default.

Never experienced anything like that on Riot. I mostly call from Android to other Android and iOS phones though. I'd say we had a 40% chance of actually connecting a call with Wire. Suddenly there was an update to the app and calling didn't work _at all_ until the next update came (this happened more than once). A close relative finally gave up and yelled something along the lines of "who the f * uses this POS app",…

e2e on Riot/Matrix is in beta. I've had some experiences with someone else in a group chat only being able to read messages on one of their devices, and this is apparently not uncommon.

I'm a firm believer that Matrix is the future. But right now I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that isn't an early adopter.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#138

Post by floatboth »

owlmirror wrote: post #122
r1ch wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been involved in a project that went from standard Win32 controls to Qt, and while I was very much against Qt at the time (such bloat!), I can't deny how easy it has made cross platform UI work. With many apps being written in HTML/JS, a C++ Qt framework is still magnitudes faster than a JS interpreter.

I have zero experience with Qt but have heard that it has problems with High DPI presentations. Now It seems that they did something in that regard in Qt 5.6, but do you have anything to say or an idea about the maturity of it?

Qt classic (C++) apps run flawlessly on my 4K desktop (150% scale in Windows).

QML/QtQuick apps only support integer scaling for whatever ridiculous reason ("fuck your monitor we need to be pixel perfect" or whatever) so they're either tiny or huge.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#139

Post by goda90 »

lucb1e wrote: post #97
dgellow wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of sync is a feature. That's what you get when you have a secure system.

Huh? How is exchanging encryption keys between your devices and syncing history insecure? Because that's how Wire solves it.

My guess would be concerns about spreading around the keys being too easy, so you might end up with a compromised end point.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#140

Post by torrent-of-ions »

driverdan wrote: post #133
torrent-of-ions wrote: post #121

I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always. But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, a…

> I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it. You're remembering incorrectly then. Dialup latency was in the range of hundreds of ms. Early high speed internet access also had higher latency than modern connections. If you have latency problems it's likely a problem with your hardware.

I don't remember dialup latency. I only remember it having low bandwidth. I'm talking about ADSL latency in the 90s.
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