29 ms·

GNU Ring 1.0 released

421 points by kilburn 9y ago

onli 9y ago
Does someone have that running and would share its current state? I tested ring at the beginning of this year and it was a disaster. Does it work now?
- ty_a 9y ago
  Came to ask the same. This would be interesting as an alternative to Google Hangouts if an html frontend could be used.
  - LukeB42 9y ago
    http://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony http://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony is a web version of Rings' concepts but focused on decentralised HTTP. You can add users on other instances and initiate WebRTC video calls in the chat view.
  - occultist_throw 9y ago
    Indeed. I had the same issues of "No workey" for my machines as well. It locked up on viewing video status page on all platforms previously. Im primarily curious if it supports terminating the same data to multiple endpoints. Facebook and other centralized chat servers do that. That functionality guarantees that regardless which machine is logged in, I can get my messages. I know that recent TOR chat server doesnt. There's a GH issue open to "try to deal with it", with no comments. I also know that Tox doesn't support the same key with multiple endpoints. That too defeats my purpose of having it on my phone and laptop: I then have to have a new "contact" per device, which easily balloons out of control. Edit: Am on freenode's irc #ring . They seem asleep. No comments, positive or negative.
    - occultist_throw 9y ago
      YES, you can have different devices on the same RING account. All you need to do, is to export the profile and import it, so all devices share the same profile. Just confirmed from one of the devs!
- javitury 9y ago
  First, make sure that you have enabled upnp and nat-pmp on your router and that your machine firewall allows both. The distributed design of ring makes finding peers slow, from 1 to 20 min. Regarding the issues, this is what I've encountered: 1) Text chat works unreliably. Sometimes messages are not delivered even if the other peer was found. 2) Even if upnp and nat-pmp are both working, sometimes you need to open all tcp and udp ports to get ring working. 3) Migration of accounts to ring beta 2 on linux was a total dissaster. It always failed so I had to create a new account. 4) On some computers during a videocall ring makes pulseaudio crash and freeze the system. Ring has a lot of potential but it's still not ready to replace skype. It works better than qtox though. EDIT: It was ring beta 2, not ring 2
  - onli 9y ago
    Hey, thanks for the response. Upnp is no problem, but my router has no settings for nat-pmp. It does not matter, unreliable chat messages are a dealbreaker, and the same goes for not getting messages sent while the client was offline, as described in a comment above. I also do not run pulseaudio, if that is a requirement (and it looked like it back then when I looked at it) the linux-client is useless to me.
    - javitury 9y ago
      > I also do not run pulseaudio Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer. > but my router has no settings for nat-pmp Maybe I exagerated a bit. Ring comes by default configured to use TURN and you can also setup STUN. The problem with this is that they are not distributed. If you want true P2P, you have to use upnp or nat-pmp, Ring can use any of the two. I don't know if it is because I get impatient, but it takes forever to connect. Just upnp should suffice but I get paranoid and think, maybe it's upnp that is not working. Then I enable nat-pmp in the router and open the nat-pmp port in the laptop. Sometimes I get so impatient that I also open (temporarily) every port in the laptop just in case.
      - onli 9y ago
        > Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer. That's great to know :) I'll keep an eye on Ring. Something like this in a working state would be great, But it should not take forever to connect and should be stable (more or less). According to this thread the project still has a lot to do, and it might be that the p2p approach is just not a good one for the problem at hand. Riot/Matrix looked more promising in that regard.
scrumper 9y ago
For those in the dark who don't want to do the digging I just did, Ring is "some sort of Skype or Hangout," to quote one of the project leaders.
- pferde 9y ago
  Digging? Just reading the linked announcement is enough to figure that out.
  - scrumper 9y ago
    Ah, thanks I know what happened: I was using an iPhone app to read HN and accessed the link through its built-in browser. I checked again on desktop and you are indeed right, there is info available at the top of the page that I didn't see at first. No digging required.
rvern 9y ago
Unlike so many communication platforms created in this day and age, Ring provides something more than reinventing the wheel and following the latest trends. It is peer-to-peer, which XMPP and Matrix aren't. This is a step forward. Edit: As some comments note, I previously wrote decentralized while meaning peer-to-peer.
- foepys 9y ago
  How is XMPP not decentralized? If you call XMPP centralized, then email is centralized as well.
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    Perhaps OP doesn't consider federation the same as fully peer-to-peer? Still a weird choice of words though. Is Ring the latter? The 'Discover' and 'FAQ' sections of the website don't seem to answer that question.
    - rvern 9y ago
      The name registration is done with a blockchain (ring-nameservice) and a DHT (OpenDHT). You can find the information on the wiki in their Tuleap instance.
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        Seems to be Ethereum... ouch. You'd've hoped people would've come up with a better way of solving Zooko's Triangle than forcing everybody to store an ever-increasing, unprunable amount of data on their devices - that also requires massive amounts of data to be downloaded, wherever you are, even over mobile networks. In practice, even DNS-based aliases are a better idea, given the tradeoffs.
        rvern 9y ago
        Ethereum might not have been the best choice, but there are ways they could migrate to another GNU Ring-specific blockchain (therefore a smaller blockchain; there are only so many people who are going to use Ring and they will only want to have so many separate identities) if the Ethereum blockchain really became unmanageably large.
out_of_protocol 9y ago
Could anybody point me to docs? Can't find any explanation how it works exactly, the only explanation i can find is <list of buzzwords>
- lesterpig 9y ago
  See https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Technical_Overview https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php...
- grive 9y ago
  I guess you could read those: https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Main_Page#Technical_Documents https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php...
  - out_of_protocol 9y ago
    Thanks. I have seen these docs, though not gained much - these docs provide very tiny bits of knowledge, only covering some specific areas
- mikekchar 9y ago
  I don't know about it, but I speak a little VOIP Buzzword, so I'll do my best to explain. Essentially it's a SIP phone. SIP is a protocol that is used to initiate sessions. So if I want to talk to you (usually using Voice Over Internet Protocol), I can use the Signal Initiation Protocol to send a message saying that I want to talk to you. You respond by saying that you would like to talk to. SIP then sends some configuration information about how we're going to talk than then hands everything over to another protocol (usually something called RTP). Now, one of the problems with SIP is that while it is peer to peer, you have no real way of discovering your peers. Enter Distributed Hash Tables (DHT). I don't really know how this works, apart from it's how bittorrent clients discover each other without a centralised tracker. But essentially, I think you ping out to the internet saying "I want to talk to X". Someone near to you sees it and says, "I'm not X, but I can get you one step closer to X. Talk to my friend Y". And so you repeat that process until your discover where X is. Another problem with SIP lies in the peer to peer nature. Normally we don't put out computers right on the internet. For one thing it's really hard to get IPV4 addresses any more. So nobody can actually talk directly to you. Instead we are behind routers that have an external address on the internet and map requests to an internal address on your local network. This is called Network Address Translation (NAT). So, when we are trying to discover where our friend is, not only do we need to use DHT to inch our way towards them, but we have to traverse NAT as well (what the person thinks their address is, is not the address we see because of NAT). Not only that, but we usually add firewalls on our routers because we don't want just anybody to send traffic on our local area networks. ICE, STUN, and TURN are ways for a client to discover their external address on the internet as well as the port you need to use to talk to them (the port is the most difficult part to figure out). Once they do that, when they send a request to you, they can tell you what address and port to reply to. In many cases this won't work (and I'm informed by very reputable people that this is because router manufacturers fail to follow the specs... I believe this). So instead of jumping through hoops to discover the port that you need to talk to, there are some standards in place that allow a client to talk to the router and say "I'm expecting my buddy to talk to me on this port. Would you please open a big gaping hole and let the traffic through. I promise I know what I'm doing." Now, sensible people do not allow their routers to do this kind of crazy thing because malware is really good at sending requests to routers and promising to be good. So basically, if you know what you are doing, and have control of your router, you can poke holes in it and make this work. If not, then there is a good chance that you won't be able to communicate to people. This is why all the VOIP services out there use a centralised server (because if you carry all the traffic with a centralised server, both ends can contact the server and it can act as a mediator... the downside is that the server has to physically move all the traffic to ensure that it works). Now what they are saying is that they have hacked the SIP protocol to discover the other peer using DHT. This is possible because SIP is the most under-defined protocol in the world, except for perhaps HTTP (on which is is based). So you can add whatever the heck extensions you like, and nobody cares. Then they use their NAT traversal techniques (which will work most of the time if you know what you are doing and have control of your equipment) to get to the other side. I am imagining that for messaging they are simply using one of the many SIP messaging extensions (or they have made their own ... which is cool, because SIP is a free-for-all, like I said). Not sure what else. It seems that they are probably using RTP for the VOIP protocol because they don't say. They are using pretty standard libraries for the codecs for audio and video. This stuff works exceptionally well these days. If you get connected and the ports are all aligned so that you have 2 way audio, chances are you will have extremely good audio/video. The codecs they are using are standard for SIP phones, but if you haven't experienced it before, I think you will be surprised by the quality. Anyway, even though I probably sound quite negative, I'm actually a pretty big SIP fan (I've written an implementation from scratch before). It's just that I'm not sure that the slowness of DHT combined with the witchcraft that is NAT traversal is going to meet the needs of the average person. One day if we all go IPV6, then we can get rid of NAT and open a single, well defined port so that we can forget all this nonsense. But before that happens, I don't think we'll see a p2p application that will challenge the big services.
kk_cz 9y ago
from the tutorial: > Please note that you shouldn't forget your password as long as you are using the current account. If your forget it, you won't be able to change it or get another one. I can already see it being mass-adopted by non-tech users. /s
- chriswarbo 9y ago
  Is "mass adoption by non-tech users" the goal? There are plenty of FOSS projects out there, like Apache, GCC, etc. which are presumably unusable for non-tech users (by definition: if you can use Apache and GCC, you probably count as technical). It doesn't hinder those projects at all, and there are also a bunch of "user friendly" projects which rely on those as key pieces of infrastructure (e.g. many Web sites, and many native executables like games). Also, as always, the nice thing about FOSS is that anyone is Free to contribute or fork/contribute their own improvements and services, either within the project or alongside, either to scratch an itch or to commercially exploit a niche.
  - Filligree 9y ago
    For a social network, anything less than mass adoption renders it mostly useless. So if that isn't already a goal, then someone isn't doing their job.
    - pferde 9y ago
      I don't see it as a social network at all. It is a tool allowing you to communicate and collaborate with people you already know.
      - darkstar999 9y ago
        If you communicate and collaborate with people you already know, you have formed a social network... It's hard enough to get people in your network to switch to a _polished_ platform (like Telegram), let alone a mess like this one.
chriswarbo 9y ago
From https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Technical_Overview https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php... I see the following under "Ring archive (export.gz)" > Contains private account data. > It's a JSON compressed and encrypted file. > The JSON byte-stream is compressed using gzip algorithm. > Then the gzip-stream is encrypted using AES-GCM-256 symmetric cipher with a 256-bits key. Does this compress-then-encrypt combination introduce a security weakness? It's certainly a problem on the Web, since attackers can learn what's in an encrypted response by getting the server to insert their own strings; e.g. trying the same request many times with different query strings, and seeing which ones result in smaller responses, indicating that the given query string matches somewhere in the document. It would require the attacker to be able to get their own strings in the payload, but since this JSON contains things like contact info that might be possible.
- yorwba 9y ago
  I'm not completely sure, since "Contact Request" is currently listed as TBD on the wiki, but since the JSON data is apparently limited to trusted user contacts, I assume that they have to be manually confirmed, which would limit the bandwidth of an attack. If the export also requires manual initiation (as the part about manually copying the PIN seems to suggest), this is likely not an issue.
  - mnarayan01 9y ago
    There might not be enough to get e.g. one of the private keys, but you could probably use it to check for someone else in the contact list. The CRL also seems like it might be possible to at least pivot off of, at least if the signing wasn't checked when writing the archive.
Rjevski 9y ago
Every time I see "GNU" I fear that it'll be more about "freedom" than actual functionality. Is the product actually any good (or at least on par with Skype, Hangouts, etc) or is this just something for free software fans to brag about with no productive use-case?
- corobo 9y ago
  You've been downvoted but what you've said isn't wrong. For example > Each RingID has 40 characters picture an md5 string but with 40chrs to imagine what your userid looks like. Yes, you need to supply this userid to others for them to contact you. > We haven't had time to add contact managing features (adding, editing, etc.) to Ring yet as its not the priority in the alpha stage Dust off the old rolodex for those 40 character strings, there's no way to save your contacts. > The Ring OpenDHT network is new and it may take up to a few minutes to discover Ring nodes around and reach your partner's machine. It can take minutes to set up a call. Long distance phonecalls in the 80s were faster > Ring can usually reach computers behind a NAT provided that you have checked the Allow UPnP setting So no corporate use then.
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    The long user ID is a side effect of how (I assume) the protocol works - essentially the user ID is a public key. However they can easily fix this by offering an official "directory" which allows you to sign up by email/username and stores the username->user ID mapping. It'll allow people who want UX to use this while leaving the use of raw user IDs if people don't want to depend on a central directory server. For the other issues it's very surprising that Skype (which used to be a P2P protocol) managed to solve them like 10 years ago and yet the Ring people still can't (or don't want to) solve those issues. But hey, freedom is more important than UX so screw it.
    - bigato 9y ago
      Skype didn't have unbreakable privacy as a main concern, this comment is not very fair
kilburn 9y ago
I've been testing it out, and it does not seem like an 1.0 release by any stretch of imagination. - On a mac, the client crashes regularly. I've been able to register an account and make a video call, but there are several GUI issues (cut labels, missing text fields, etc.) and the name registration didn't seem to work. - On android, the client acted really weirdly in the beginning. After a while it seems to have stabilized a bit, and I've been able to make a video call (to a mac). The video quality was fine, but the client did not handle screen orientation changes well (my own video feed ended up distorted). - On linux I haven't been able to make a call, even though text chat worked. It may have been because I don't have a webcam... All in all, the experience was far from what you would expect from an 1.0 release nowadays. It had major warts on all platforms I tested. Also, if anyone is curious, you can login with the same account from several devices at the same time. Calls ring on all devices, but text messages are less reliable (they don't always reach all devices). Also, off line devices do not get the messages they missed when you fire the client later on. I would love and push hard to replace skype/xmpp with a solution of this kind, but I just cannot in the current state of affairs :(
- INTPenis 9y ago
  Funny but I last tried it in november of 2016 and I had the same issues as you describe in points 1 and 3. I only tested on Mac and Linux. Wasn't aware of an android version.
- lesterpig 9y ago
  Right, this is a very nice project, but obviously not ready for a 1.0 release. I am frustrated by the lack of technical documentation. For this kind of decentralized projects, full transparency is required. It took some time before I understood the foundation blocks of the Ring network, using [0] and [1], and yet I'm quite unhappy: * Many items are very lightly documented, or even "to be disclosed" ; * The main website does not provide any insight about Ring's internals ; * Especially, the name registration service is quite obscure and currently not decentralized according to the doc [0]. Thanks for the project though, and good luck! [0]: https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Ring_distributed_network https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php... [1]: https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Technical_Overview https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php...
amingilani 9y ago
If you're trying to check this out and don't have anyone to talk to, like me, here's my contact info: Contact me using 'gilani' on the Ring distributed communication platform: https://ring.cx https://ring.cx BTW, on Android, I had to setup my username after creating my account.
- jhasse 9y ago
  I've sent you a message, still shows as "Sending …". I guess offline messages aren't supported?
  - amingilani 9y ago
    Hmmm, I see no indication of an incoming message or contact request.
dna_polymerase 9y ago
Apparently there is no release for Debian 8 Jessie. Is everyone on 9 already?
Galanwe 9y ago
Disclaimer: ex Skype employee. Looks like a Skype clone from 10 years ago to me. I cannot see this working in the long run. Many people naively think that Skype switched from full p2p to partially p2p to server centric because of some evil plot designed by Microsoft. This is all wrong. Skype abandonned full peer to peer because it does not work if you want something fast, reliable, and feature rich. 1. Asking users to enable upnp is a joke. I would never do that, and anyone doing so should consider the security implications of doing so. Unfortunately, since they want to stay pure p2p they have no other possibility to solve the "both clients behind a NAT router" problem. This is why Skype relies on STUN like protocols => not possible in pure p2p. 2. Peer discovery in pure p2p is SLOW. Skype understood that and switched to hosted "supernodes" with their IPs hard-coded in the client. It's the only way to have reliable peers to introduce you to the network. 3. You WANT dedicated peers with good connection and 100% uptime. 4. You cannot efficiently have shared states in pure p2p without an identity server. That would require the clients to bring their keys with them on every device, not very practical. 5. In case the network collapses, there is no way for it to go up again without supernodes.
- eleitl 9y ago
  You can automatically promote real servers with good uplink and public IPs to be supernodes. This eliminates the whole NAT penetration brain damage (going IPv6 is a possible workaround).
  - marksomnian 9y ago
    In that case, how do you distribute the IPs of supernodes to new clients, other than hardcoding them into the download binary? Tor has the same problem; it solves it partially by hardcoding directory authorities, and partially with bridges that are distributed offline.
  - Galanwe 9y ago
    Skype did that, Windows (lol) nodes with good up times and bandwidth were autopromoted as supernodes. This makes the network unfair tho, and encourages these users to use alternatives clients to prevent being a supernode (wasted bandwidth and cpu: who wants this?)
fiatjaf 9y ago
There is a GNU cryptocurrency project that aims to give the State the power to tax the users of the currency. How can you trust anything with the GNU label after that?
- jrs95 9y ago
  Stallman has always wanted government funded open source software, so that's probably why
  - mattl 9y ago
    > Stallman has always wanted government funded open source software, so that's probably why Stallman wouldn't say open source. But here's his plan: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/government-free-software.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/government-free-software.en.h...
- Karunamon 9y ago
  ? What does that have to do with anything? The idea behind Taler is that unlike bitcoin, it doesn't try to fly under the radar of the authorities. That makes it a lot more palatable for regular people and greatly curtails the amount of undesirable elements using it that are associated with Bitcoin. Most people don't go out of their way to be tax cheats.
  - al_chemist 9y ago
    Bitcoin doesn't try to fly under the radar of the authorities - it just doesn't give backdoors for authorities. Building currency taxable-first is like building messenger invigilation-first or building social-media censorship-first. Do you imagine Skype selling their software with main feature being that every conversation you have is being sent to authorities "for your protection" or "to fight terrorists"?
    - Karunamon 9y ago
      That's a massive false equivalence since taxation is an accepted law of the land and is a price you pay for government services. There's no good way to tax bitcoin given how it works.
nannal 9y ago
Is there somewhere we can dump bug reports, this feels so unready for 1.0.
yebyen 9y ago
The Mac version warns me that I won't be able to run Ring because of my security settings and directs me to the Mac App Store to look for a newer version. Quite literally rolling on the floor laughing! (No, not literally) In the Finder, locate the app you want to open. Press the Control key and click the app icon, then choose Open from the shortcut menu. Click Open. I have never seen any Mac app for which I have ever needed to do this. Apple thinks it should warn me that I might have downloaded malware. Does this mean that GNU did not pay the Apple tax?
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  > I have never seen any Mac app for which I have ever needed to do this. Really? Everyone I know with a Mac (even the non technical people who don't code/do any professional work on their Mac) know how to do this. I may do it more than weekly, even.
  - yebyen 9y ago
    What other apps? I have only been using a mac for about a year, but I have literally never seen this.
    - mattl 9y ago
      It's pretty common with lots of free software applications.
      - yebyen 9y ago
        Ok but why does nobody want to name any other specific one app that does this? I feel like I was justified in calling this out, because nobody will actually name an app that does this. It looks wholly unprofessional to release a 1.0 with this identity warning, unless you're GNU! Then it's fashionable and people will come to your defense, for sticking to free software and libre as in freedom only, like the great St. Ignucius intended. :-)
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
djezer 9y ago
This is the brainchild of one the the founders of Savoir-Faire Linux. I was an employee of theirs and had to use this software for internal communications. It rarely works, crashes a lot and employees would crack jokes everytime we were told to use it. The idea is good. The current state of the app is barely useable. They just fired around a third of their employees (after promising to double in size).
- greenshackle2 9y ago
  Was an employee too. Can confirm. I think the core idea is good, the implementation still needs some work.
- we39i 9y ago
  I was an employee there too. They have really low salary standard and say that "you get to do open source so it's fine". The best programmers get out of there quick and that's why you don't get high quality software from them. Their business model is based on using people with temporary work permit (coming from out of Canada, mostly France) who are stuck with them if they don't want to go through the process of obtaining another work permit and have to go back to their country in the meantime.
whoami_nr 9y ago
This seems extremely ideal in a scenario where everyone has switched to IPv6 and punching through the NAT's is no longer a problem.
kodfodrasz 9y ago
Its not there yet, but seeing that skype is repositioning itself as a shitty wanabe snapchat/instagram, instead of the conferencing and telephony app, I hope it will mature and become a thing. (Hey microsoft, what will the office365 customers do with skype minutes, when you finish the repositioning?) They could sell SIP minutes and make it simple to set up, and that could provide a revenue for them.
jonstokes 9y ago
A friend told me that if you use the Ring then 7 days later all your files will be deleted.
fulldecent 9y ago
Is it just me or does anyone else think this will be a lame project just because it of GNU stewardship?
- jrs95 9y ago
  Or does it have GNU stewardship because it's a lame project?
gboudrias 9y ago
> Savoir-faire Linux Love these guys! They're based in Montreal, definitely the biggest Linux-only player I know around here. > Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité That's a really bad name for a release. I speak French natively but... Nah. The criticisms about missing features seem pretty reasonable as well, BUT I'm not afraid of this project being more ideological than practical. For one thing, SFL is in the money business, they are not a charity. For another, sometimes it takes someone to take the extreme "free" approach for someone else to approach the middle ground of "maybe not that free but still distributed".
rufugee 9y ago
For something that's free and not foisted upon anyone, there seems to be a lot of negativity here. Okay, so it's not as good as you want it to be. Roll up your sleeves and make it happen.
- s73ver 9y ago
  This idea that open source is somehow immune from criticism is old and tired. If they want to pretend like they're targeting normal people, they need to act like it. This means putting work into things like UX.
  - bm5k 9y ago
    This site isn't called "normal people news".
- EpicEng 9y ago
  How's that stance been working for you? Still waiting to see a single instance of Linux on the desktop of a non-programmer. 99% of people, HN users included, just want something that works. Few people have time to go much around and fix some messaging app when they could simply download a better alternative.
random3 9y ago
It's a bit unexpected not to post the binaries signatures along with the downloads, given the motivation of the project..
anw 9y ago
I am unable to create a public account. I get a spinning wheel when I input a public name, and it doesn't do anything else. The create button is disabled until (seemingly) I get a response back telling me my chosen name is okay or not. Unfortunately, their Web site didn't seem to have any clear way to register an account. Another point is that searching for contacts only works if you type in their last name. If you try searching for a contact by first name, then they won't show up.
mempko 9y ago
Seeing this makes me really want to add video support to my Firestr (http://firestr.com http://firestr.com) project. Also a DHT so I can store public keys and have shorter payloads to share. Alas I am only one man.
cyborgx7 9y ago
I've been reading the site and can't figure out what differentiates it from tox.
kwhitefoot 9y ago
Does anyone know how to install this on Linux Mint 18.2? It seems to depend on packages that are not available. As there were no instructions for Mint I tried the instructions for Ubuntu 17.10 but it fails: Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: ring : Depends: libebook-1.2-19 (>= 3.17) but it is not installable Depends: libedataserver-1.2-22 (>= 3.17) but it is not installable Depends: libqt5core5a (>= 5.7.0) but 5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.2 is to be installed Depends: ring-daemon (= 20170724.1.2088f8e~dfsg1-1) but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
coo1k 9y ago
Is this similar to bitmessage? https://www.bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page https://www.bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page
ivcha 9y ago
Will this be available in Pidgin?

421 points by kilburn 9y ago

onli 9y ago

Does someone have that running and would share its current state? I tested ring at the beginning of this year and it was a disaster. Does it work now?

ty_a 9y ago
Came to ask the same. This would be interesting as an alternative to Google Hangouts if an html frontend could be used.
- LukeB42 9y ago
  http://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony http://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony is a web version of Rings' concepts but focused on decentralised HTTP. You can add users on other instances and initiate WebRTC video calls in the chat view.
- occultist_throw 9y ago
  Indeed. I had the same issues of "No workey" for my machines as well. It locked up on viewing video status page on all platforms previously. Im primarily curious if it supports terminating the same data to multiple endpoints. Facebook and other centralized chat servers do that. That functionality guarantees that regardless which machine is logged in, I can get my messages. I know that recent TOR chat server doesnt. There's a GH issue open to "try to deal with it", with no comments. I also know that Tox doesn't support the same key with multiple endpoints. That too defeats my purpose of having it on my phone and laptop: I then have to have a new "contact" per device, which easily balloons out of control. Edit: Am on freenode's irc #ring . They seem asleep. No comments, positive or negative.
  - occultist_throw 9y ago
    YES, you can have different devices on the same RING account. All you need to do, is to export the profile and import it, so all devices share the same profile. Just confirmed from one of the devs!
javitury 9y ago
First, make sure that you have enabled upnp and nat-pmp on your router and that your machine firewall allows both. The distributed design of ring makes finding peers slow, from 1 to 20 min. Regarding the issues, this is what I've encountered: 1) Text chat works unreliably. Sometimes messages are not delivered even if the other peer was found. 2) Even if upnp and nat-pmp are both working, sometimes you need to open all tcp and udp ports to get ring working. 3) Migration of accounts to ring beta 2 on linux was a total dissaster. It always failed so I had to create a new account. 4) On some computers during a videocall ring makes pulseaudio crash and freeze the system. Ring has a lot of potential but it's still not ready to replace skype. It works better than qtox though. EDIT: It was ring beta 2, not ring 2
- onli 9y ago
  Hey, thanks for the response. Upnp is no problem, but my router has no settings for nat-pmp. It does not matter, unreliable chat messages are a dealbreaker, and the same goes for not getting messages sent while the client was offline, as described in a comment above. I also do not run pulseaudio, if that is a requirement (and it looked like it back then when I looked at it) the linux-client is useless to me.
  - javitury 9y ago
    > I also do not run pulseaudio Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer. > but my router has no settings for nat-pmp Maybe I exagerated a bit. Ring comes by default configured to use TURN and you can also setup STUN. The problem with this is that they are not distributed. If you want true P2P, you have to use upnp or nat-pmp, Ring can use any of the two. I don't know if it is because I get impatient, but it takes forever to connect. Just upnp should suffice but I get paranoid and think, maybe it's upnp that is not working. Then I enable nat-pmp in the router and open the nat-pmp port in the laptop. Sometimes I get so impatient that I also open (temporarily) every port in the laptop just in case.
    - onli 9y ago
      > Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer. That's great to know :) I'll keep an eye on Ring. Something like this in a working state would be great, But it should not take forever to connect and should be stable (more or less). According to this thread the project still has a lot to do, and it might be that the p2p approach is just not a good one for the problem at hand. Riot/Matrix looked more promising in that regard.

scrumper 9y ago

For those in the dark who don't want to do the digging I just did, Ring is "some sort of Skype or Hangout," to quote one of the project leaders.

pferde 9y ago
Digging? Just reading the linked announcement is enough to figure that out.
- scrumper 9y ago
  Ah, thanks I know what happened: I was using an iPhone app to read HN and accessed the link through its built-in browser. I checked again on desktop and you are indeed right, there is info available at the top of the page that I didn't see at first. No digging required.

rvern 9y ago

Unlike so many communication platforms created in this day and age, Ring provides something more than reinventing the wheel and following the latest trends. It is peer-to-peer, which XMPP and Matrix aren't. This is a step forward. Edit: As some comments note, I previously wrote decentralized while meaning peer-to-peer.

foepys 9y ago
How is XMPP not decentralized? If you call XMPP centralized, then email is centralized as well.
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  Perhaps OP doesn't consider federation the same as fully peer-to-peer? Still a weird choice of words though. Is Ring the latter? The 'Discover' and 'FAQ' sections of the website don't seem to answer that question.
  - rvern 9y ago
    The name registration is done with a blockchain (ring-nameservice) and a DHT (OpenDHT). You can find the information on the wiki in their Tuleap instance.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      Seems to be Ethereum... ouch. You'd've hoped people would've come up with a better way of solving Zooko's Triangle than forcing everybody to store an ever-increasing, unprunable amount of data on their devices - that also requires massive amounts of data to be downloaded, wherever you are, even over mobile networks. In practice, even DNS-based aliases are a better idea, given the tradeoffs.
      - rvern 9y ago
        Ethereum might not have been the best choice, but there are ways they could migrate to another GNU Ring-specific blockchain (therefore a smaller blockchain; there are only so many people who are going to use Ring and they will only want to have so many separate identities) if the Ethereum blockchain really became unmanageably large.

out_of_protocol 9y ago

Could anybody point me to docs? Can't find any explanation how it works exactly, the only explanation i can find is <list of buzzwords>

lesterpig 9y ago
See https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Technical_Overview https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php...
grive 9y ago
I guess you could read those: https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Main_Page#Technical_Documents https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php...
- out_of_protocol 9y ago
  Thanks. I have seen these docs, though not gained much - these docs provide very tiny bits of knowledge, only covering some specific areas
mikekchar 9y ago
I don't know about it, but I speak a little VOIP Buzzword, so I'll do my best to explain. Essentially it's a SIP phone. SIP is a protocol that is used to initiate sessions. So if I want to talk to you (usually using Voice Over Internet Protocol), I can use the Signal Initiation Protocol to send a message saying that I want to talk to you. You respond by saying that you would like to talk to. SIP then sends some configuration information about how we're going to talk than then hands everything over to another protocol (usually something called RTP). Now, one of the problems with SIP is that while it is peer to peer, you have no real way of discovering your peers. Enter Distributed Hash Tables (DHT). I don't really know how this works, apart from it's how bittorrent clients discover each other without a centralised tracker. But essentially, I think you ping out to the internet saying "I want to talk to X". Someone near to you sees it and says, "I'm not X, but I can get you one step closer to X. Talk to my friend Y". And so you repeat that process until your discover where X is. Another problem with SIP lies in the peer to peer nature. Normally we don't put out computers right on the internet. For one thing it's really hard to get IPV4 addresses any more. So nobody can actually talk directly to you. Instead we are behind routers that have an external address on the internet and map requests to an internal address on your local network. This is called Network Address Translation (NAT). So, when we are trying to discover where our friend is, not only do we need to use DHT to inch our way towards them, but we have to traverse NAT as well (what the person thinks their address is, is not the address we see because of NAT). Not only that, but we usually add firewalls on our routers because we don't want just anybody to send traffic on our local area networks. ICE, STUN, and TURN are ways for a client to discover their external address on the internet as well as the port you need to use to talk to them (the port is the most difficult part to figure out). Once they do that, when they send a request to you, they can tell you what address and port to reply to. In many cases this won't work (and I'm informed by very reputable people that this is because router manufacturers fail to follow the specs... I believe this). So instead of jumping through hoops to discover the port that you need to talk to, there are some standards in place that allow a client to talk to the router and say "I'm expecting my buddy to talk to me on this port. Would you please open a big gaping hole and let the traffic through. I promise I know what I'm doing." Now, sensible people do not allow their routers to do this kind of crazy thing because malware is really good at sending requests to routers and promising to be good. So basically, if you know what you are doing, and have control of your router, you can poke holes in it and make this work. If not, then there is a good chance that you won't be able to communicate to people. This is why all the VOIP services out there use a centralised server (because if you carry all the traffic with a centralised server, both ends can contact the server and it can act as a mediator... the downside is that the server has to physically move all the traffic to ensure that it works). Now what they are saying is that they have hacked the SIP protocol to discover the other peer using DHT. This is possible because SIP is the most under-defined protocol in the world, except for perhaps HTTP (on which is is based). So you can add whatever the heck extensions you like, and nobody cares. Then they use their NAT traversal techniques (which will work most of the time if you know what you are doing and have control of your equipment) to get to the other side. I am imagining that for messaging they are simply using one of the many SIP messaging extensions (or they have made their own ... which is cool, because SIP is a free-for-all, like I said). Not sure what else. It seems that they are probably using RTP for the VOIP protocol because they don't say. They are using pretty standard libraries for the codecs for audio and video. This stuff works exceptionally well these days. If you get connected and the ports are all aligned so that you have 2 way audio, chances are you will have extremely good audio/video. The codecs they are using are standard for SIP phones, but if you haven't experienced it before, I think you will be surprised by the quality. Anyway, even though I probably sound quite negative, I'm actually a pretty big SIP fan (I've written an implementation from scratch before). It's just that I'm not sure that the slowness of DHT combined with the witchcraft that is NAT traversal is going to meet the needs of the average person. One day if we all go IPV6, then we can get rid of NAT and open a single, well defined port so that we can forget all this nonsense. But before that happens, I don't think we'll see a p2p application that will challenge the big services.

kk_cz 9y ago

from the tutorial: > Please note that you shouldn't forget your password as long as you are using the current account. If your forget it, you won't be able to change it or get another one. I can already see it being mass-adopted by non-tech users. /s

chriswarbo 9y ago
Is "mass adoption by non-tech users" the goal? There are plenty of FOSS projects out there, like Apache, GCC, etc. which are presumably unusable for non-tech users (by definition: if you can use Apache and GCC, you probably count as technical). It doesn't hinder those projects at all, and there are also a bunch of "user friendly" projects which rely on those as key pieces of infrastructure (e.g. many Web sites, and many native executables like games). Also, as always, the nice thing about FOSS is that anyone is Free to contribute or fork/contribute their own improvements and services, either within the project or alongside, either to scratch an itch or to commercially exploit a niche.
- Filligree 9y ago
  For a social network, anything less than mass adoption renders it mostly useless. So if that isn't already a goal, then someone isn't doing their job.
  - pferde 9y ago
    I don't see it as a social network at all. It is a tool allowing you to communicate and collaborate with people you already know.
    - darkstar999 9y ago
      If you communicate and collaborate with people you already know, you have formed a social network... It's hard enough to get people in your network to switch to a _polished_ platform (like Telegram), let alone a mess like this one.

chriswarbo 9y ago

From https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Technical_Overview https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php... I see the following under "Ring archive (export.gz)" > Contains private account data. > It's a JSON compressed and encrypted file. > The JSON byte-stream is compressed using gzip algorithm. > Then the gzip-stream is encrypted using AES-GCM-256 symmetric cipher with a 256-bits key. Does this compress-then-encrypt combination introduce a security weakness? It's certainly a problem on the Web, since attackers can learn what's in an encrypted response by getting the server to insert their own strings; e.g. trying the same request many times with different query strings, and seeing which ones result in smaller responses, indicating that the given query string matches somewhere in the document. It would require the attacker to be able to get their own strings in the payload, but since this JSON contains things like contact info that might be possible.

yorwba 9y ago
I'm not completely sure, since "Contact Request" is currently listed as TBD on the wiki, but since the JSON data is apparently limited to trusted user contacts, I assume that they have to be manually confirmed, which would limit the bandwidth of an attack. If the export also requires manual initiation (as the part about manually copying the PIN seems to suggest), this is likely not an issue.
- mnarayan01 9y ago
  There might not be enough to get e.g. one of the private keys, but you could probably use it to check for someone else in the contact list. The CRL also seems like it might be possible to at least pivot off of, at least if the signing wasn't checked when writing the archive.

Rjevski 9y ago

Every time I see "GNU" I fear that it'll be more about "freedom" than actual functionality. Is the product actually any good (or at least on par with Skype, Hangouts, etc) or is this just something for free software fans to brag about with no productive use-case?

corobo 9y ago
You've been downvoted but what you've said isn't wrong. For example > Each RingID has 40 characters picture an md5 string but with 40chrs to imagine what your userid looks like. Yes, you need to supply this userid to others for them to contact you. > We haven't had time to add contact managing features (adding, editing, etc.) to Ring yet as its not the priority in the alpha stage Dust off the old rolodex for those 40 character strings, there's no way to save your contacts. > The Ring OpenDHT network is new and it may take up to a few minutes to discover Ring nodes around and reach your partner's machine. It can take minutes to set up a call. Long distance phonecalls in the 80s were faster > Ring can usually reach computers behind a NAT provided that you have checked the Allow UPnP setting So no corporate use then.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  The long user ID is a side effect of how (I assume) the protocol works - essentially the user ID is a public key. However they can easily fix this by offering an official "directory" which allows you to sign up by email/username and stores the username->user ID mapping. It'll allow people who want UX to use this while leaving the use of raw user IDs if people don't want to depend on a central directory server. For the other issues it's very surprising that Skype (which used to be a P2P protocol) managed to solve them like 10 years ago and yet the Ring people still can't (or don't want to) solve those issues. But hey, freedom is more important than UX so screw it.
  - bigato 9y ago
    Skype didn't have unbreakable privacy as a main concern, this comment is not very fair

kilburn 9y ago

I've been testing it out, and it does not seem like an 1.0 release by any stretch of imagination. - On a mac, the client crashes regularly. I've been able to register an account and make a video call, but there are several GUI issues (cut labels, missing text fields, etc.) and the name registration didn't seem to work. - On android, the client acted really weirdly in the beginning. After a while it seems to have stabilized a bit, and I've been able to make a video call (to a mac). The video quality was fine, but the client did not handle screen orientation changes well (my own video feed ended up distorted). - On linux I haven't been able to make a call, even though text chat worked. It may have been because I don't have a webcam... All in all, the experience was far from what you would expect from an 1.0 release nowadays. It had major warts on all platforms I tested. Also, if anyone is curious, you can login with the same account from several devices at the same time. Calls ring on all devices, but text messages are less reliable (they don't always reach all devices). Also, off line devices do not get the messages they missed when you fire the client later on. I would love and push hard to replace skype/xmpp with a solution of this kind, but I just cannot in the current state of affairs :(

INTPenis 9y ago
Funny but I last tried it in november of 2016 and I had the same issues as you describe in points 1 and 3. I only tested on Mac and Linux. Wasn't aware of an android version.
lesterpig 9y ago
Right, this is a very nice project, but obviously not ready for a 1.0 release. I am frustrated by the lack of technical documentation. For this kind of decentralized projects, full transparency is required. It took some time before I understood the foundation blocks of the Ring network, using [0] and [1], and yet I'm quite unhappy: * Many items are very lightly documented, or even "to be disclosed" ; * The main website does not provide any insight about Ring's internals ; * Especially, the name registration service is quite obscure and currently not decentralized according to the doc [0]. Thanks for the project though, and good luck! [0]: https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Ring_distributed_network https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php... [1]: https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php/Technical_Overview https://tuleap.ring.cx/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/ring/index.php...

amingilani 9y ago

If you're trying to check this out and don't have anyone to talk to, like me, here's my contact info: Contact me using 'gilani' on the Ring distributed communication platform: https://ring.cx https://ring.cx BTW, on Android, I had to setup my username after creating my account.

jhasse 9y ago
I've sent you a message, still shows as "Sending …". I guess offline messages aren't supported?
- amingilani 9y ago
  Hmmm, I see no indication of an incoming message or contact request.

dna_polymerase 9y ago

Apparently there is no release for Debian 8 Jessie. Is everyone on 9 already?

Galanwe 9y ago

Disclaimer: ex Skype employee. Looks like a Skype clone from 10 years ago to me. I cannot see this working in the long run. Many people naively think that Skype switched from full p2p to partially p2p to server centric because of some evil plot designed by Microsoft. This is all wrong. Skype abandonned full peer to peer because it does not work if you want something fast, reliable, and feature rich. 1. Asking users to enable upnp is a joke. I would never do that, and anyone doing so should consider the security implications of doing so. Unfortunately, since they want to stay pure p2p they have no other possibility to solve the "both clients behind a NAT router" problem. This is why Skype relies on STUN like protocols => not possible in pure p2p. 2. Peer discovery in pure p2p is SLOW. Skype understood that and switched to hosted "supernodes" with their IPs hard-coded in the client. It's the only way to have reliable peers to introduce you to the network. 3. You WANT dedicated peers with good connection and 100% uptime. 4. You cannot efficiently have shared states in pure p2p without an identity server. That would require the clients to bring their keys with them on every device, not very practical. 5. In case the network collapses, there is no way for it to go up again without supernodes.

eleitl 9y ago
You can automatically promote real servers with good uplink and public IPs to be supernodes. This eliminates the whole NAT penetration brain damage (going IPv6 is a possible workaround).
- marksomnian 9y ago
  In that case, how do you distribute the IPs of supernodes to new clients, other than hardcoding them into the download binary? Tor has the same problem; it solves it partially by hardcoding directory authorities, and partially with bridges that are distributed offline.
- Galanwe 9y ago
  Skype did that, Windows (lol) nodes with good up times and bandwidth were autopromoted as supernodes. This makes the network unfair tho, and encourages these users to use alternatives clients to prevent being a supernode (wasted bandwidth and cpu: who wants this?)

fiatjaf 9y ago

There is a GNU cryptocurrency project that aims to give the State the power to tax the users of the currency. How can you trust anything with the GNU label after that?

jrs95 9y ago
Stallman has always wanted government funded open source software, so that's probably why
- mattl 9y ago
  > Stallman has always wanted government funded open source software, so that's probably why Stallman wouldn't say open source. But here's his plan: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/government-free-software.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/government-free-software.en.h...
Karunamon 9y ago
? What does that have to do with anything? The idea behind Taler is that unlike bitcoin, it doesn't try to fly under the radar of the authorities. That makes it a lot more palatable for regular people and greatly curtails the amount of undesirable elements using it that are associated with Bitcoin. Most people don't go out of their way to be tax cheats.
- al_chemist 9y ago
  Bitcoin doesn't try to fly under the radar of the authorities - it just doesn't give backdoors for authorities. Building currency taxable-first is like building messenger invigilation-first or building social-media censorship-first. Do you imagine Skype selling their software with main feature being that every conversation you have is being sent to authorities "for your protection" or "to fight terrorists"?
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    That's a massive false equivalence since taxation is an accepted law of the land and is a price you pay for government services. There's no good way to tax bitcoin given how it works.

nannal 9y ago

Is there somewhere we can dump bug reports, this feels so unready for 1.0.

yebyen 9y ago

The Mac version warns me that I won't be able to run Ring because of my security settings and directs me to the Mac App Store to look for a newer version. Quite literally rolling on the floor laughing! (No, not literally) In the Finder, locate the app you want to open. Press the Control key and click the app icon, then choose Open from the shortcut menu. Click Open. I have never seen any Mac app for which I have ever needed to do this. Apple thinks it should warn me that I might have downloaded malware. Does this mean that GNU did not pay the Apple tax?

ReverseCold 9y ago
> I have never seen any Mac app for which I have ever needed to do this. Really? Everyone I know with a Mac (even the non technical people who don't code/do any professional work on their Mac) know how to do this. I may do it more than weekly, even.
- yebyen 9y ago
  What other apps? I have only been using a mac for about a year, but I have literally never seen this.
  - mattl 9y ago
    It's pretty common with lots of free software applications.
    - yebyen 9y ago
      Ok but why does nobody want to name any other specific one app that does this? I feel like I was justified in calling this out, because nobody will actually name an app that does this. It looks wholly unprofessional to release a 1.0 with this identity warning, unless you're GNU! Then it's fashionable and people will come to your defense, for sticking to free software and libre as in freedom only, like the great St. Ignucius intended. :-)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

djezer 9y ago

This is the brainchild of one the the founders of Savoir-Faire Linux. I was an employee of theirs and had to use this software for internal communications. It rarely works, crashes a lot and employees would crack jokes everytime we were told to use it. The idea is good. The current state of the app is barely useable. They just fired around a third of their employees (after promising to double in size).

greenshackle2 9y ago
Was an employee too. Can confirm. I think the core idea is good, the implementation still needs some work.
we39i 9y ago
I was an employee there too. They have really low salary standard and say that "you get to do open source so it's fine". The best programmers get out of there quick and that's why you don't get high quality software from them. Their business model is based on using people with temporary work permit (coming from out of Canada, mostly France) who are stuck with them if they don't want to go through the process of obtaining another work permit and have to go back to their country in the meantime.

whoami_nr 9y ago

This seems extremely ideal in a scenario where everyone has switched to IPv6 and punching through the NAT's is no longer a problem.

kodfodrasz 9y ago

Its not there yet, but seeing that skype is repositioning itself as a shitty wanabe snapchat/instagram, instead of the conferencing and telephony app, I hope it will mature and become a thing. (Hey microsoft, what will the office365 customers do with skype minutes, when you finish the repositioning?) They could sell SIP minutes and make it simple to set up, and that could provide a revenue for them.

jonstokes 9y ago

A friend told me that if you use the Ring then 7 days later all your files will be deleted.

fulldecent 9y ago

Is it just me or does anyone else think this will be a lame project just because it of GNU stewardship?

jrs95 9y ago
Or does it have GNU stewardship because it's a lame project?

gboudrias 9y ago

> Savoir-faire Linux Love these guys! They're based in Montreal, definitely the biggest Linux-only player I know around here. > Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité That's a really bad name for a release. I speak French natively but... Nah. The criticisms about missing features seem pretty reasonable as well, BUT I'm not afraid of this project being more ideological than practical. For one thing, SFL is in the money business, they are not a charity. For another, sometimes it takes someone to take the extreme "free" approach for someone else to approach the middle ground of "maybe not that free but still distributed".

rufugee 9y ago

For something that's free and not foisted upon anyone, there seems to be a lot of negativity here. Okay, so it's not as good as you want it to be. Roll up your sleeves and make it happen.

s73ver 9y ago
This idea that open source is somehow immune from criticism is old and tired. If they want to pretend like they're targeting normal people, they need to act like it. This means putting work into things like UX.
- bm5k 9y ago
  This site isn't called "normal people news".
EpicEng 9y ago
How's that stance been working for you? Still waiting to see a single instance of Linux on the desktop of a non-programmer. 99% of people, HN users included, just want something that works. Few people have time to go much around and fix some messaging app when they could simply download a better alternative.

random3 9y ago

It's a bit unexpected not to post the binaries signatures along with the downloads, given the motivation of the project..

anw 9y ago

I am unable to create a public account. I get a spinning wheel when I input a public name, and it doesn't do anything else. The create button is disabled until (seemingly) I get a response back telling me my chosen name is okay or not. Unfortunately, their Web site didn't seem to have any clear way to register an account. Another point is that searching for contacts only works if you type in their last name. If you try searching for a contact by first name, then they won't show up.

mempko 9y ago

Seeing this makes me really want to add video support to my Firestr (http://firestr.com http://firestr.com) project. Also a DHT so I can store public keys and have shorter payloads to share. Alas I am only one man.

cyborgx7 9y ago

I've been reading the site and can't figure out what differentiates it from tox.

kwhitefoot 9y ago

Does anyone know how to install this on Linux Mint 18.2? It seems to depend on packages that are not available. As there were no instructions for Mint I tried the instructions for Ubuntu 17.10 but it fails: Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: ring : Depends: libebook-1.2-19 (>= 3.17) but it is not installable Depends: libedataserver-1.2-22 (>= 3.17) but it is not installable Depends: libqt5core5a (>= 5.7.0) but 5.5.1+dfsg-16ubuntu7.2 is to be installed Depends: ring-daemon (= 20170724.1.2088f8e~dfsg1-1) but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

coo1k 9y ago

Is this similar to bitmessage? https://www.bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page https://www.bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page

ivcha 9y ago

Will this be available in Pidgin?