Video chat software / options
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
Sorry, already tried Signal, Wire, Discord, Matrix, Session, Telegram, WhatsApp, and probably one or two messengers more, but used all of them only for writing and spoken messages... :(( Good luck! Keep yourself safe and happy! <3 Ceci ---------- Loving. Caring. Sharing. Being Excellent To Each Other And To Our Hackerspace. <3 ---------- "Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live." - Mae Jemison
On Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 21:17 Cecilia Tanaka <cecilia.tanaka@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry, already tried Signal, Wire, Discord, Matrix, Session, Telegram, WhatsApp, and probably one or two messengers more, but used all of them only for writing and spoken messages... :((
Hmm, Slack too... Still trying to remember, wait, I am slower than usual... :D And Kurt is right. Everybody is talking about Jitsi, but never tested it. Ceci ---------- Loving. Caring. Sharing. Being Excellent To Each Other And To Our Hackerspace. <3 ---------- "Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live." - Mae Jemison
Hey, now I deserve a candie, yay! Even feeling slower than a dead sloth, found this cute and useful link, wohooo! ;D "Comparison of Web Conferencing Software" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing_software>
Thanks Cecilia, that Wikipedia page has been helpful. On 2020-04-19 00:55, Cecilia Tanaka wrote:
Hey, now I deserve a candie, yay! Even feeling slower than a dead sloth, found this cute and useful link, wohooo! ;D
"Comparison of Web Conferencing Software"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing_software>
Hi cypherpunks, For reference, some things I discovered researching this today for several hours, this is more for an enduser perspective than either a genuine expert perspective or the perspective of a Boomer incel fantasy about being James Bond / Tony Stark while doing backflips and fantasizing about going gay for Juliassar al-Assadnge or whatever. * Signal: won't work for video chat of more than two people, because according to various mainstream sources accessed 22 April 2020, Signal video chat is only 1 to 1 * Wire: won't work for video chat of more than 4 people, because according to official website accessed 22 April 2020, video conferencing is available for up to only 4 participants, and audio conferencing is available for up to only 10 participants. https://wire.com/en/blog/is-your-video-conference-solution-secure/ https://wire.com/en/pricing/#pro/ * Jitsi (i.e. Jitsi Meet): won't work for video chat for 10-20+ people, because according to an April 2020 Association for Computing Machinery report, "does not scale well and can be unreliable" and "in the default configuration, video is not mixed; instead every participant gets all the audio and video streams. This may not scale well." Further, see what Greg Newby said previously on this email list. https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LLLniPkf48CCZyG_BNy1ylF2wXNlztqNEOnzNuMQ... * TwoSeven: I have no experience with https://twoseven.xyz/ but it may be of some relevance. It's a website and Chrome extension that has a free version and pay versions/packages between $3 and $20 a month. It allows chat, video, and audio, and is geared toward helping people remote from one another watch simultaneously the following depending on version/package: youtube, netflix, amazon, HBO, vimeo, and video files users upload. * Kast: I have no experience with Kast, but it may be of some relevance. It's either https://kastapp.co or https://kast.gg (not sure which), formerly https://rabb.it, is a free or premium ($5/mo) application for browser, mobile, or desktop that allows audio-video chat and text chat during watch parties for youtube clips, users playing computer games, etc. * Kast and TwoSeven have a lot of competitors. See for example, 16 Sites Like Rabb.it - https://www.tech21century.com/sites-like-rabbit/ - but from this tech guide for sex workers - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sd6EoFCFOTmG1_IW_07s_DxNGWEA0m8T/view - it seems Kast and TwoSeven are the frontrunners in their respective areas. Kast reminds me a bit of https://tinychat.com/ which was the big solution for online video parties around Occupy/Anon/leak platform days and is still running. Haha, some people have nothing else, can't move on, and think it is still 2010, but thankfully for the rest of us life continues and is amazing! * For one-to-one encrypted video chat, choices are Signal, Wire, or Jitsi. Signal has an annoying social graphing problem that is particularly problematic for vulnerable or marginalized individuals, where installing Signal suddenly alerts your contacts that you have Signal, see https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Does-Signal-send-m... and https://community.signalusers.org/t/any-signal-user-that-has-your-phone-numb... and https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/wiki/faq#wiki_welcome_to_the_r.2Fsignal_faq..... Wire is based in Switzerland, Berlin, and EU. Jitsi comes from, as far as I could make out during a few hours' research today, a DIY hackerish background but was recently acquired by a Silicon Valley-based, publicly traded VoIP company, 8x8 Inc. So if for one to one video you pick between either Wire or Jitsi, that means picking between -- and this is an educated guess and half joking -- the fancy solution presumably used by money launderers corporations and pedo rings (Wire) or the slightly Millenium Falcon-y Jitsi that will probably be great for another 1-3 years until 8x8 Inc. decides to sell and/or ruin their new toy. * If more participants are required, and there are no other options, the Association for Computing Machinery - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LLLniPkf48CCZyG_BNy1ylF2wXNlztqNEOnzNuMQ... - is recommending as of April 2020 that conference organizers use Zoom with an awareness of the problems, such as crypto issues ( https://blog.rapid7.com/2020/04/02/dispelling-zoom-bugbears-what-you-need-to... ) and Zoombombing ( https://www.isc.upenn.edu/security/news/zoombombing ) and trying to mitigate those problems by following various guides, such as Meredith Reitman's ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rvp6NfRNNs6e4bx2l07XWlB4vvevMnn9m-cu97jR... ) and Konrad Kording's anti-Zoombombing script ( https://medium.com/@kording/neuromatch-anti-zoombombing-script-842eabf160dc ) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's guide ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/harden-your-zoom-settings-protect-your... ) and enabling/steering people toward/requiring the web version ( https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383 ) and this guide for virtual conferences best practices which has a lot of helpful thoughts about accessibility and fairness ( https://people.clarkson.edu/~jmatthew/acm/VirtualConferences_GuideToBestPrac... ). * Here are some various resources on the subject if you want more. Riseup Networks security guide re video options is out of date (due to them requiring more support/donations for more labor, presumably). This video conferencing comparison guide website by various journohacker types: https://videoconferencing.guide/ February 2020 guide for sex workers including tech tips for camming: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sd6EoFCFOTmG1_IW_07s_DxNGWEA0m8T/view Wikipedia page comparing various video conferencing software/platforms thanks to Cecilia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing_software Association for Computing Machinery landing page, report, and highly recommended drill down comparing video conferencing options: https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences https://people.clarkson.edu/~jmatthew/acm/VirtualConferences_GuideToBestPrac... and https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LLLniPkf48CCZyG_BNy1ylF2wXNlztqNEOnzNuMQ... Dec 2019 hour-long talk at Chaos Computer Club by a sysadmin for Extinction Rebellion, via Greg Newby, regarding sixth mass extinction event and tech infrastructure for that movement. Especially from 28 minutes to 44 minutes, and the Q&A after. https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11008-server_infrastructure_for_global_rebellion Doug
On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 01:47:17 +0000 Douglas Lucas <dal@riseup.net> wrote:
Thanks Cecilia, that Wikipedia page has been helpful.
On 2020-04-19 00:55, Cecilia Tanaka wrote:
Hey, now I deserve a candie, yay! Even feeling slower than a dead sloth, found this cute and useful link, wohooo! ;D
"Comparison of Web Conferencing Software"
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing_software>
lawl, that list doesn't include tox which is the only half decent option, being permisionless / p2p
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
Hi, Doug. Just last week, the ACM came out with a thorough and interesting guide on how to run a virtual conference: https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences They link to an open Google Doc that lists lots of different resources and their characteristics: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LLLniPkf48CCZyG_BNy1ylF2wXNlztqNEOnzNuMQ... There are also a number of other useful links and appendices. There is no easy answer to the choice, since all the tools have limitations. They don't dig much into security and privacy aspects, but do have focus on how to restrict access only to registered persons. Another resource is something I posted to cpunks about earlier. I'm attaching the email I sent. It was a CCC talk that described the different software they used. Mastadon & Jitsi were highlighted, among others. Jitsi has a key limitation in how the video streams are sent, which makes larger meetings a problem due to bandwidth management - I experienced this myself, where a meeting with 10-12 people fell apart because attendees were getting dropped, or couldn't receive all the participant streams. Another personal experience I have is with Slack. Slack is actually pretty good for live audio/video meetings of 10 or so people. The nice thing is that if you're already having an ongoing Slack chat, you can launch a "call" any time in the same channel. It's nice to hear from you. Enjoy! Greg On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 06:24:23PM +0000, Douglas Lucas 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
Hi Greg, Thanks, your two emails were extremely helpful! I especially liked the ACM resources, your experience with Jitsi meeting of 10-12+ people (which fits what ACM says), and the CCC talk. All of those I forwarded along to a few other people. Thanks again for the awesome information. Doug On 2020-04-19 12:35, Greg Newby wrote:
Hi, Doug. Just last week, the ACM came out with a thorough and interesting guide on how to run a virtual conference: https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences
They link to an open Google Doc that lists lots of different resources and their characteristics: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LLLniPkf48CCZyG_BNy1ylF2wXNlztqNEOnzNuMQ...
There are also a number of other useful links and appendices. There is no easy answer to the choice, since all the tools have limitations. They don't dig much into security and privacy aspects, but do have focus on how to restrict access only to registered persons.
Another resource is something I posted to cpunks about earlier. I'm attaching the email I sent. It was a CCC talk that described the different software they used. Mastadon & Jitsi were highlighted, among others.
Jitsi has a key limitation in how the video streams are sent, which makes larger meetings a problem due to bandwidth management - I experienced this myself, where a meeting with 10-12 people fell apart because attendees were getting dropped, or couldn't receive all the participant streams.
Another personal experience I have is with Slack. Slack is actually pretty good for live audio/video meetings of 10 or so people. The nice thing is that if you're already having an ongoing Slack chat, you can launch a "call" any time in the same channel.
It's nice to hear from you. Enjoy! Greg
On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 06:24:23PM +0000, Douglas Lucas 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
participants (5)
-
Cecilia Tanaka -
Douglas Lucas -
Greg Newby -
Kurt Buff - GSEC, GCIH -
Punk-Stasi 2.0