I've been seeing Jitsi mentioned a fair amount - don't know anything about it, beyond what you'll see here: https://jitsi.org/ Kurt On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:32 PM Douglas Lucas <dal@riseup.net> wrote:
Hey cypherpunks,
So what video chat options are there that are less privacy violating and social graphing than Zoom, Skype, etc, while still being at least somewhat available to the everyday user? Imagine two use cases:
1. Audiovideo chat between Alice and Bob: they want to watch an online movie together whether by sharing a screen or some other method, and then have sexy times later by same audiovideo chat. Imagine further that Bob uses Linux laptop and knows more or less what he's doing, while Alice uses Windows or Apple or her standard-issue smartphone or w/e and doesn't want to spend her little weekend time off paidwork trying to configure stuff to meet some faraway incel's expectation of flawless fantasy security.
2. A video panel or Q&A being hosted by your local friendly anarchist bookstore. Maybe it needs 3-5 people on a panel talking, their famous faces visible on the screen along with their audio while they debate each on internecine leftist conflicts that distract from far more rational propaganda of the deed, while the 20 people in the audience, including people of all sorts of demographics who have a hard enough time paying their bills online, have their audio and video forcibly off so there's not random beeps and bloops and toddler singing during the panel, but the audience could still type in Q&A questions or whatever. It would also be cool if there was a film screening option -- imagine an anarchist bookstore that prior to covid19 had been doing weekly film screenings offline in their brick and mortar location, but now wants to do something similar online, while making it hopefully accessible for people without intense computer skills.
How are Signal and Wire for the above?
My big picture understanding has for a long time been that, 1. perfect security is snake oil, the top spy agencies can crack anything if they want given enough time and targetting interest, but that's not typically relevant to the above use cases unless you're a Supreme Court justice or an incel fantasizing about being James Bond, 2. encryption makes data packet size much bigger, and large data size is already a problem with video in cleartext, so there never has been a really good solution to this problem. However #2 was my understanding as of like 5 years ago, so I'm curious if some new solution has come out.
It looks like EFF is fairly useless and using Zoom themselves. I suppose if they're not gonna go after something meaningful, like how the corporate voting gear in the US is closed source, they have to spend that sweet Papa Omidyar cash and prestige somehow and produce little guides about how to toggle your Zoom settings. Afte
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/what-you-should-know-about-online-tool... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/cc-backgrounds-video-calls-eff https://ssd.eff.org/
Guides by Riseup Networks don't have much on video understandably https://riseup.net/en/security/resources https://riseup.net/en/security
Prism Break mentions something called Jami I've never heard of https://prism-break.org/en/all/
And yeah, Signal and Wire...? I know everything is fucked but using something less bad for the use cases outlined above seems better than diving headfirst into whatever the worst popular solutions are.
Thanks!
Doug