Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Free software tools for staying in touch

fsf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#71

Post by daffy »

dsr_ wrote: post #49
atonse wrote: post #26

Going to put my bias out in the open. My whole career has benefited from Open Source, yet when I see something from the FSF, I automatically assume it's going to be ugly and not user-friendly. Has anyone tried any of these FSF sanctioned tools? I'd love to have my bias be proven wrong.

Jitsi is very good. You can try it out at meet.jit.si or install your own server in about 30 minutes. (Yesterday's updated Debian packages improved things immensely.)

Installing one's own server seems horribly complicated on non-Debian-based distributions.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#72

Post by ntw1103 »

aklemm wrote: post #35

Matrix would be an excellent one to add for the Chat category. Lovely, federated, and has voice/video calling that works great one-on-one.

I was sad to see that matrix wasn't on the list. Another great feature of Matrix, is that it is a lot easier to setup that xmpp.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#73

Post by jeremija »

I've been developing peercalls.com on and off on since 2015. It's an open source peer to peer WebRTC audio/video calling service, allows the users to chat, share their desktop and send files (sending files is a little buggy at the moment, works best in Firefox).

It has gotten a lot of interest in the past month and I noticed a spike in web traffic so I'm actively working on making it more scalable. I'm planning on implementing an SFU to support calls with more than 3-4 people. Right now the peers establish a mesh network and it quickly gets expensive to send video to more users.

I've also been paying attention to the criticisms of Zoom and other WebRTC conferencing services and am hoping to implement end to end encryption for intermediate servers using Insertable Streams once the functionality is supported in most browsers.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#74

Post by kardos »

joecot wrote: post #65
kardos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web app runs on TCP/443 and benefits from your Let's Encrypt cert. Jitsi also exposes UDP/10000 for receiving streams from clients, which doesn't go through apache/nginx. So what does it do for encryption there?

Fair enough. I just firewalled 10000 and tried talking to a friend and it does not work. The web app indeed runs over 443 but all the video conferencing is done over UDP. However WebRTC is always encrypted. So add on a 4th well tested piece of tech being utilized. https://webrtc-security.github.io/

Yeah, I'm not really suggesting that they failed entirely to encrypt the UDP traffic. But I am curious if what they have done has been scrutinized recently. Jitsi was formed in 2003 according to Wikipedia, there could be outdated choices in there somewhere. That they use widely deployed tech is not really enough, we've just seen that Zoom is using ECB mode when they should not, etc.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#75

Post by gentleman11 »

_snsh wrote: post #66
atonse wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the great summary. I should've been more clear. I've learned a lot about OBS in the past couple of weeks and it really seems to be the king (for streamers). I'm already familiar with XMPP but feel Matrix is a much better and more modern successor. I grew up on IRC but it probably needs a lot of modern security enhancements.

Well, at least in my opinion, it was a good question and the answer across the board is "Yes, these solutions need to be more accessible". A good part of that is corporations not giving back to OSS but I also think that a large part of OSS developers are missing the point (I keep remembering the story of that one these OSS guy trying to get his printer working but I can't remember his name to find the link).

RMS said one of the inspirations for free software was a particular printer he couldn’t get to work because of a driver issue. The company refused to give him the source code, and iirc said he was not allowed to write his own for it. He did not forgive or forget this slight, and we live in the world he helped create as a result

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#76

Post by oska »

DevKoala wrote: post #32

There is a reason Zoom has been adopted the way it has; the overall user experience, do not confuse with UI, has the least amount of friction. Zoom might not be the best in any single category, but I am glad it exists.

> There is a reason Zoom has been adopted the way it has

The reason is that people do not generally think philosophically or strategically about the software choices they make. The FSF does and, time and time again, their deep consideration has proven prescient. It will be the case with Zoom too.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#77

Post by DevKoala »

oska wrote: post #76
DevKoala wrote: post #32

There is a reason Zoom has been adopted the way it has; the overall user experience, do not confuse with UI, has the least amount of friction. Zoom might not be the best in any single category, but I am glad it exists.

> There is a reason Zoom has been adopted the way it has The reason is that people do not generally think philosophically or strategically about the software choices they make. The FSF does and, time and time again, their deep consideration has proven prescient. It will be the case with Zoom too.

Philosophically? Strategically? Company employees are rejecting the alternatives. For example, SpaceX had to ban Zoom because employees kept using their own subscriptions.

I agree that privacy and security are not negotiable, but unless you ban the tool, you cannot force your employees to not use it, there are no better alternatives from their perspective. We have all lived through Skype, Hangouts, Webex, GotoMeeting, etc. They all failed at delivering the experience Zoom delivers.

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#78

Post by app4soft »

> Audio chats: 1) Mummble ; 2) Asterisk/SIP

3) Walkie Talkie radio[0]-like apps?[1,2,3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie

[1] https://github.com/murtaza98/Walkie-Talkie

[2] https://github.com/js-labs/WalkieTalkie

[3] https://github.com/dhammikamare/android-walkie-talkie

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#79

Post by rakoo »

ntw1103 wrote: post #72
aklemm wrote: post #35

Matrix would be an excellent one to add for the Chat category. Lovely, federated, and has voice/video calling that works great one-on-one.

I was sad to see that matrix wasn't on the list. Another great feature of Matrix, is that it is a lot easier to setup that xmpp.

I just installed synapse with Riot, and I have to say it's the exact contrary. Some of the steps are not documented, I had to read the code to understand what to do.

XMPP with Prosody on the other hand is one of the easiest servers I've ever had to install

Re: Free software tools for staying in touch

#80

Post by _snsh »

gentleman11 wrote: post #75
_snsh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, at least in my opinion, it was a good question and the answer across the board is "Yes, these solutions need to be more accessible". A good part of that is corporations not giving back to OSS but I also think that a large part of OSS developers are missing the point (I keep remembering the story of that one these OSS guy trying to get his printer working but I can't remember his name to find the link).

RMS said one of the inspirations for free software was a particular printer he couldn’t get to work because of a driver issue. The company refused to give him the source code, and iirc said he was not allowed to write his own for it. He did not forgive or forget this slight, and we live in the world he helped create as a result

I did find it, it was Eric Raymond and "The Luxury of Ignorance" http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
Post reply on HN