Video chat software / options

[Douglas Lucas]

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_BNy1ylF2wXNlztqNEOnzNuMQmJc/edit
> 
> 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-tools-during-covid-19-crisis
>> 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