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Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

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Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#31
post #10
post #4

I've been using Google meet as a remote student for a while (Google made meet available for free for education accounts a while ago already) and it's been a great experience, even with large groups of people online. We tested up to ~80 without any problems.

a few days ago I was in a zoom meeting with 996 people. The mac client was sluggish on my 2017 core m3 macbook but the audio (and video when scrolling around gallery view) never lagged or went tin-y.

yale art talk?

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#32
post #13

No end-to-end encryption plus forced Google Mail registration preventing anonymity. Yawn, Google. Yaaawn!

Meet supports up to 100 participants. That would be pretty tough to do e2ee. Is there a service that can do that?

even just e2e for 1:1 meetings would be great

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#34
post #13

No end-to-end encryption plus forced Google Mail registration preventing anonymity. Yawn, Google. Yaaawn!

Meet supports up to 100 participants. That would be pretty tough to do e2ee. Is there a service that can do that?

How come this is hard to do with 100 participants? Not a crypto or video encoding expert, but I'd have thought each participant would have a decryption key for their stream, and this key they would transfer to others by encrypting it separately with each other participant's public key and then broadcast that bundle to everyone. Thus everyone else can decrypt only their entry in that bundle using their private key, and gain access to the shared decryption key for that individual stream. When a new person joins, they add their public key to the central list of public keys, and request that everyone update their bundle to include an entry encrypted with their public key. So basically, from the perspective of the new joiner, each stream would be encrypted until that streamer had updated their bundle to allow the newcomer access to their decryption key. But each streamer would still only need to encrypt their stream once, and then share access to the decryption key only to participants. Scaling wise, sending only incurs the cost of encrypting once - though as a receiver, you'd need to decrypt N streams using N different keys - but is that much harder to do than decoding N video streams in the first place?

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#35
post #18
post #12

> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. Reminder: it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number (and thus permitting access your traditional identity information with it: name, street address, et c) to Google, who can then tie it to any existing Google cookies and your IP. Demanding that your communications partner…

it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number I just now tried the Google account creation process on an unactivated mobile device, and entering a phone number can be skipped. Entering a birthdate was mandatory.

Try to use it for a while also. My experience has also been that, after a short time, you will be required to provide your phone number for security reasons.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#36

> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. If there is no guest accounts this will not be intresting for many.

Agreed. While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring an account to join a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users will use another platform. The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?". I…

This is specifically for business meetings and the quoted text says that the restriction is for _individual_ accounts.

So this announcement doesn’t target family hangouts, but the product doesn’t either.

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#37

> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. If there is no guest accounts this will not be intresting for many.

Agreed. While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring an account to join a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users will use another platform. The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?". I…

They definitely saw Zoom crushin' in an internal call. Hilarious.

https://9to5google.com/2020/04/25/google-meet-zoom-competiti...

Re: Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone

#38
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet supports up to 100 participants. That would be pretty tough to do e2ee. Is there a service that can do that?

even just e2e for 1:1 meetings would be great

Duo supports that.
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