8 ms·

Free software tools for staying in touch

224 points by lelf 7y ago

deminature 7y ago
Jitsi is the primarily recommended alternative video conferencing tool here, which hasn't had anywhere near the security scrutiny that Zoom has had. I'd prefer to use the tool that we understand is moderately secure, though flawed, rather than the tool that is a security unknown. It seems a little much to recommend Jitsi as 'better', when nobody is really sure of that.
- thomzane 7y ago
  I would not call Zoom secure. Example: https://www.androidauthority.com/zoom-feature-freeze-1101693/ https://www.androidauthority.com/zoom-feature-freeze-1101693...
  - justicezyx 7y ago
    I would not call OP stated that "calls Zoom secure": "moderately secure, though flawed"
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - anoraca 7y ago
      This does not seem moderate to me https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto-a-quick-look-at-the-confidentiality-of-zoom-meetings/ https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...
- adev_ 7y ago
  > I'd prefer to use the tool that we understand is moderately secure, though flawed, rather than the tool that is a security unknown. That's really a weak argument: bad is not better than unknown. And in this case unknown is not unknown. Jisti is OSS, has been reviewed as such, and has been around since way before zoom was even invented.
- okprod 7y ago
  It's better from an ethical perspective; I don't think the FSF would use it internally if it weren't.
- thomzane 7y ago
  https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/zooms-encryption-is-not-suited-for-secrets-and-has-surprising-links-to-china-researchers-discover/ https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/zooms-encryption-is-not-...
- joecot 7y ago
  Jitsi Meet runs on your own server and lets you videoconference using just your browser and its built in support for WebRTC. That means it gets to leverage the readily available and easily understood security of: * Traditional Web Servers (Apache 2 or nginx) * https/ssl * modern web browsers Running a videoconference software that just works in your browser over https solves a large majority of security concerns. The video and voice is encrypted over SSL between the clients and the server. It's not end to end encrypted because that's not really possible, but the only place its unencrypted is in your browser and on the server you own and control. If you don't trust Jitsi's ability to password protect rooms, you could put normal http password authentication in front of your jitsi install -- which would break the mobile app but work just fine in your browser. Lots of the concerns of Zoom's security are resolved by using readily available standards and software instead of depending on proprietary black box solutions that turn out to send encryption keys through china. EDIT: As kardos notes below the video actually runs over udp on port 10000 so it is not encrypted over https. It looks like video is encrypted[1] but I'm unclear what method it's encrypted. 1. See Security section of Readme https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
  - kardos 7y ago
    The web app runs on TCP/443 and benefits from your Let's Encrypt cert. Jitsi also exposes UDP/10000 for receiving streams from clients, which doesn't go through apache/nginx. So what does it do for encryption there?
    - joecot 7y ago
      Fair enough. I just firewalled 10000 and tried talking to a friend and it does not work. The web app indeed runs over 443 but all the video conferencing is done over UDP. However WebRTC is always encrypted. So add on a 4th well tested piece of tech being utilized. https://webrtc-security.github.io/ https://webrtc-security.github.io/
      - kardos 7y ago
        Yeah, I'm not really suggesting that they failed entirely to encrypt the UDP traffic. But I am curious if what they have done has been scrutinized recently. Jitsi was formed in 2003 according to Wikipedia, there could be outdated choices in there somewhere. That they use widely deployed tech is not really enough, we've just seen that Zoom is using ECB mode when they should not, etc.
thomzane 7y ago
Wiki on this topic: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Remote_Communication https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Remote_Communication Mailing list on this topic: https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/remotecommunication https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/remotecommuni...
- 0x006A 7y ago
  getting a 404 on the list archive at https://lists.libreplanet.org/archive/html/remotecommunication https://lists.libreplanet.org/archive/html/remotecommunicati...
  - thomzane 7y ago
    Brand new list today. No messages. No archive.
    - pwinnski 7y ago
      That's the sort of amazing focus on user experience I expect from Free software, unfortunately.
      - okprod 7y ago
        You should contribute to free software packages instead of complaining and continuing to willingly sell out your agency by using proprietary software.
oDot 7y ago
Zoom is still the best performing software. Alternatives fail in various ways. I wrote Emergency Remote[0], and for some companies thrown into the situation it is best to use it anyway. They can't handle more trouble during this time. [0] https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf
- tw04 7y ago
  I fundamentally disagree. Webex has been around longer and despite the zoom founder trying to trash it, has been more reliable for me. They just apparently spent their money on building an enterprise-worthy app instead of marketing. https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-Free-in-These-Countries-COVID-19-Response https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-...
  - throwaway55554 7y ago
    We use Webex at work and it's pretty reliable. Only issue I can think of off the top of my head is on Windows, Webex will sometimes freeze. Some colleagues have attributed that to certain bluetooth devices. I've personally not had that happen but have been in meetings where it did. Edit: Ok, that took all of 10 seconds to get the first downvote. Seriously?
    - tw04 7y ago
      I would guess your colleagues are onto something. We've got a wide mix of Windows and Mac users and can't say I've heard of anyone reporting problems with freezing.
      - burnJS 7y ago
        Ditto.
  - pkulak 7y ago
    They say they have a Linux app... but Zoom is available in official repos, Flatpak, the Arch AUR, SUSE community, etc. That's huge for me. I don't really have any interest in blazing a new trail to use a web conferencing app.
tw04 7y ago
Webex is free right now, they just haven't really marketed it: https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-Free-in-These-Countries-COVID-19-Response https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-... Hangouts Meet which I've had bad luck with but others have told me works well is free: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/helping-businesses-and-schools-stay-connected-in-response-to-coronavirus https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/helping-busin... And MS Teams has a free trial (had good luck with this as well but don't like the interface as much as webex): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/03/02/working-remotely-during-challenging-times/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/03/0...
- thomzane 7y ago
  The Free Software Foundation refers to free as in freedom and not free as in cost.
  - yingbo 7y ago
    , while some others refers to free as free in cost. We should respect each other.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      In this thread, I think we should use the more relevant definition.
  - tw04 7y ago
    I'm aware of what the FSF is. Downvoting me because I posted free-as-in-beer alternatives that aren't open source is childish. They're valid alternatives for people that don't want to use zoom and entirely relevant to the conversation.
    - tome 7y ago
      It's as though the title was "Try these green ways to generate energy" and you responded with a list of petrol engines which are painted green. It's not wrong, it's not unhelpful, per se, but does somewhat miss the point.
leke 7y ago
I recently tried Jami and think it was a great user experience. I love its decentralized nature, but just have nobody to use it with. I'm now using Discord and think its new screen sharing feature is very handy for lessons. The good thing about Discord is that its very popular.
- thomzane 7y ago
  Discord is nonfree. BigBlueButton is good for classes and screensharing.
chevman 7y ago
Another vote for Cisco Webex here. Work at a large Fortune 10 company and have tried all the major players (I think) - Google, Teams, Skype, Zoom, GotoMeeting, Webex, Join.me, etc. Webex seems to be the least worst and is fairly reliable and generally works everywhere under all kinds of load (we have meetings that range from a few folks to multiple hundreds with no issues). Definitely not the prettiest software but it gets the job done.
atonse 7y ago
Going to put my bias out in the open. My whole career has benefited from Open Source, yet when I see something from the FSF, I automatically assume it's going to be ugly and not user-friendly. Has anyone tried any of these FSF sanctioned tools? I'd love to have my bias be proven wrong.
- okprod 7y ago
  The FSF doesn't develop the tools listed in the article. Since it's free software, anyone, including you, can help make it prettier and more user-friendly. But again, the point of the article isn't about which software is free as in cost or easiest to use. It's about taking an ethical stance despite sacrificing things like a pretty UI.
  - lutorm 7y ago
    Not just about ethics though, also about making sure a commercial provider doesn't sell you out.
- dsr_ 7y ago
  Jitsi is very good. You can try it out at meet.jit.si or install your own server in about 30 minutes. (Yesterday's updated Debian packages improved things immensely.)
  - daffy 7y ago
    Installing one's own server seems horribly complicated on non-Debian-based distributions.
- consonaut 7y ago
  I'm the sole it guy for a small university in Germany (~40 FTE users and ~200 students) and here is my take on these tools. I used or tried to use most of them and have a, what I think is, good take on what I can burden my users with. I'm also bored this Friday evening because I can't go anywhere, so... Mumble: Mumble is amazing. I used it extensively playing EVE Online and what can be done with mumble with regards to external authentication and integration is really great. As an enterprise solution, if I have to weigh my time versus expenditure, it's not worth it though, I'll go with MS Teams or Slack. Asterisk/SIP: I actually ran an asterisk PBX with a self made IVR solution for a project at my previous employer and handled a lot of calls with it and saved a load of money compared to what the callcenter would have charged. Asterisk is great but we are back to the time/expenditure calculation again. I can buy a PBX solution and pay someone to maintain it for far less then me setting up Asterisk. I'd rather just buy a PBX and a support contract. For IVR the calculation gets more complicated. Jitsi: Jitsi meet is really great. It's right in that sweetspot where Skype begins to fail for decent conferences (>4 people) and where I'm invested that much that I want someone to blame and a service contract if my meetings get large enough. If you exceed that threshold (in my testing it has been somewhere between 15 and 30 participants) you want to pay someone for this service or run your own server/videobridge (still curious why BigBlueButton isn't mentioned here anywhere in all these Zoom topics). As an educational institution with my amount of users, hosting a videobridge or bbb the hosting budget alone would have exceeded our Zoom licensing cost not to mention my time. At least in Germany there is also the issue with not having a contract with the provider and problems this creates with regard to the GDPR. Jami: I don't actually know this one. OBS: Nothing can touch OBS. It's an incredibly flexible tool and while it could use some usability improvements it just really is that great. With it's usability downfalls it's also not something you can suggest to a casual user, which is kinda sad. Someone please figure out whatever Zoom is doing with the virtual camera background. Setting a simple picture as background without a green screen frankly is one of their killer features. No one talks bout it but so many people are using this that it has got to be one of their killer features. XMPP: Is a weird mention for me, since it's not an application but a protocol. Jabber sucks, most XMPP clients suck for normal users. I'm not aware of any decent enterprise solutions. IRC: Well, IRC is fucking great. I spend so much time on IRC in my youth and I'm fairly certain my earliest linux contact was an IRC bouncer on a friends machine. In the end it's kind of a weird mention as well though, since it's a protocol and not an application. It is also a protocol that is kinda caught between the "I want link preview, VoIP, file sharing, whatever" crowd and the "why is that noobs client spamming my channel with un-interpretable messages" crowd. IRC with a spec upgrade, even if it would induce a permanent netsplit would be great. I'm not gonna talk about the rest. Nextcloud is great, and with Univentions app server (https://www.univention.de/ https://www.univention.de/) is a usable solution that just suffers at scale. Of course I could set up a univention server and nextcloud and imap email and ldap and lots of other things mentioned above but it would cost me a significant amount of money and time and I can have Office 365 basically for free. So, considering I'm spending tax payers money, and I'm in the EU and MS claims to be GDPR compliant... what is my incentive to do any of this? If I'd have one complaint about Zoom, I'd would be that we had one student unable to join from Iran (which is either because of his ISP blocking certain connections or Zoom actively blocking users from Iran). Zoom excludes users from Iran in their ToU but we assumed that would just be for paying users and have a currently open ticket to figure out what could be the issue. So, this is my take. Basically if you have the time and money and want to tinker most of these OSS solutions are great and worth it. If you are operating within budget or time constraints there a valid reasons to choose a commercial provider.
ruffrey 7y ago
asterisk is an amazing, underrated stack of technology
- dsr_ 7y ago
  I managed a set of Asterisk PBXen for about ten years. They're extremely capable. To get full use of it back then, using high-quality hardware SIP phones was a necessity. These days I think that in-browser phones will work very well for most people. Interconnection with telcos went from unsanctioned to orderable to being widely marketed during that time. If you know what you're doing you can save a lot of money. If you would prefer to have someone else do the work, the virtual PBX vendors are pretty good.
matthberg 7y ago
Pseudo-related, yet does anyone know of a good replacement for Google Voice? I've heard Asterisk is good software to look into, yet ideally I'm looking for a way to self-host or cheaply have a standard phone number which can send SMS and call normal phones, from multiple devices, ideally with a web interface.
- nsomaru 7y ago
  You'll probably need a SIP provider. I just spent 4 days setting up VICIDial and Asterix as a complete noob; can probably definitively say it's not a replacement for GVoice
- lutorm 7y ago
  Google Fi can do most of the things Voice could, certainly I can call or send SMS from any device.
- Coritenst 7y ago
  Twilio
  - Coritenst 7y ago
    Using Twilio to make a call forwarding and voice messaging system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761712
DevKoala 7y ago
There is a reason Zoom has been adopted the way it has; the overall user experience, do not confuse with UI, has the least amount of friction. Zoom might not be the best in any single category, but I am glad it exists.
- oska 7y ago
  > There is a reason Zoom has been adopted the way it has The reason is that people do not generally think philosophically or strategically about the software choices they make. The FSF does and, time and time again, their deep consideration has proven prescient. It will be the case with Zoom too.
  - DevKoala 7y ago
    Philosophically? Strategically? Company employees are rejecting the alternatives. For example, SpaceX had to ban Zoom because employees kept using their own subscriptions. I agree that privacy and security are not negotiable, but unless you ban the tool, you cannot force your employees to not use it, there are no better alternatives from their perspective. We have all lived through Skype, Hangouts, Webex, GotoMeeting, etc. They all failed at delivering the experience Zoom delivers.
primitivesuave 7y ago
Can anyone comment on the software layers and infrastructure one would have to build around WebRTC to achieve Zoom-level performance?
aklemm 7y ago
Matrix would be an excellent one to add for the Chat category. Lovely, federated, and has voice/video calling that works great one-on-one.
- ntw1103 7y ago
  I was sad to see that matrix wasn't on the list. Another great feature of Matrix, is that it is a lot easier to setup that xmpp.
  - rakoo 7y ago
    I just installed synapse with Riot, and I have to say it's the exact contrary. Some of the steps are not documented, I had to read the code to understand what to do. XMPP with Prosody on the other hand is one of the easiest servers I've ever had to install
    - ntw1103 7y ago
      Out of curiosity, what guide did you follow? I followed the docs right on github for synapse, and it was pretty easy. That being said, It was awhile back, and it looks like they've updated the synapse guide.
      - rakoo 7y ago
        I installed Matrix behind Caddy, so I followed: - The archlinux guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Matrix https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Matrix - The official doc of running it behind a proxy: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/reverse_proxy.md https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/rever... I couldn't really test if it worked as-is, so I needed to install Riot web, still behind a proxy. It was also going to be my client of choice. That's where things got fun: - Installing the arch package doesn't do anything, it's just a bunch of static files, so you have to know how to serve them after that - Riot needs to go to your matrix's /.well-known/matrix/client, so you need to redirect it to your synapse server (and the previous redirect is not enough, because the previous redirect only cares about _matrix, not the root level) - It failed for me because a setting in the synapse config (server_name) wasn't set, so I had to read the code of synapse to understand how this well-known endpoint is served. All in all it was still doable, but took more manual steps than I expected.
okprod 7y ago
All these downvotes make me sad. I guess we're in a world where people turn off their Alexa for sensitive phone calls instead of choosing not to have an Alexa device in the first place.
dang 7y ago
Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22765899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22765899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22755596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22755596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22669968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22669968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477785 Recent and seemingly related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761816 Not so recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16155155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16155155 Not so recent and maybe not so related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311324
- cycloptic 7y ago
  Are those really the reason to bury this? There are several other programs mentioned in the article besides Jitsi and Jami, some I didn't know about.
  - dang 7y ago
    Ok, we'll unbury it. Thanks!
saagarjha 7y ago
Meanwhile Zoom uses a bunch of open-source software without the required attribution…
- okprod 7y ago
  Report to the license holder/s so they can start compliance.
driverdan 7y ago
If all you need is audio and text Mumble works very well. It used to be the primary audio chat app for gaming but unfortunately the field has become fragmented with game built in voice chat and platform voice chat (eg Steam).
kdrag0n 7y ago
I wish replacements like these would be practical, but the problem is that they all have flaws for many use cases, while Zoom just works. Jitsi Meet is the best I've found so far, but even that has some issues — I did a quick test with myself and the Android client wasn't able to send or receive audio. It also doesn't have any notion of a "host", which is normally good, but it doesn't work for a school setting where participants can't be trusted to not kick others.
jeremija 7y ago
I've been developing peercalls.com on and off on since 2015. It's an open source peer to peer WebRTC audio/video calling service, allows the users to chat, share their desktop and send files (sending files is a little buggy at the moment, works best in Firefox). It has gotten a lot of interest in the past month and I noticed a spike in web traffic so I'm actively working on making it more scalable. I'm planning on implementing an SFU to support calls with more than 3-4 people. Right now the peers establish a mesh network and it quickly gets expensive to send video to more users. I've also been paying attention to the criticisms of Zoom and other WebRTC conferencing services and am hoping to implement end to end encryption for intermediate servers using Insertable Streams once the functionality is supported in most browsers.
- timeuser 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing. It doesn't seem to work well in Safari on desktop or iOS. Seemed to connect but if you make the video larger than thumbnail or fullscreen it either doesn't show or only displays a small sliver.
  - jeremija 7y ago
    Thanks for reporting the bug! I thought I'd fixed this issue. Which version of MacOS/iOS/Safari are you using? Edit: I just realized that I just hadn't pushed the latest version which contained this fix. v3.0.17 is up and running now (was v3.0.15). Please let me know if you continue to experience this or any other issue!
app4soft 7y ago
> Audio chats: 1) Mummble ; 2) Asterisk/SIP 3) Walkie Talkie radio[0]-like apps?[1,2,3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie [1] https://github.com/murtaza98/Walkie-Talkie https://github.com/murtaza98/Walkie-Talkie [2] https://github.com/js-labs/WalkieTalkie https://github.com/js-labs/WalkieTalkie [3] https://github.com/dhammikamare/android-walkie-talkie https://github.com/dhammikamare/android-walkie-talkie

224 points by lelf 7y ago

Jitsi is the primarily recommended alternative video conferencing tool here, which hasn't had anywhere near the security scrutiny that Zoom has had. I'd prefer to use the tool that we understand is moderately secure, though flawed, rather than the tool that is a security unknown. It seems a little much to recommend Jitsi as 'better', when nobody is really sure of that.

thomzane 7y ago
I would not call Zoom secure. Example: https://www.androidauthority.com/zoom-feature-freeze-1101693/ https://www.androidauthority.com/zoom-feature-freeze-1101693...
- justicezyx 7y ago
  I would not call OP stated that "calls Zoom secure": "moderately secure, though flawed"
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - anoraca 7y ago
    This does not seem moderate to me https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto-a-quick-look-at-the-confidentiality-of-zoom-meetings/ https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...
adev_ 7y ago
> I'd prefer to use the tool that we understand is moderately secure, though flawed, rather than the tool that is a security unknown. That's really a weak argument: bad is not better than unknown. And in this case unknown is not unknown. Jisti is OSS, has been reviewed as such, and has been around since way before zoom was even invented.
okprod 7y ago
It's better from an ethical perspective; I don't think the FSF would use it internally if it weren't.
thomzane 7y ago
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/zooms-encryption-is-not-suited-for-secrets-and-has-surprising-links-to-china-researchers-discover/ https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/zooms-encryption-is-not-...
joecot 7y ago
Jitsi Meet runs on your own server and lets you videoconference using just your browser and its built in support for WebRTC. That means it gets to leverage the readily available and easily understood security of: * Traditional Web Servers (Apache 2 or nginx) * https/ssl * modern web browsers Running a videoconference software that just works in your browser over https solves a large majority of security concerns. The video and voice is encrypted over SSL between the clients and the server. It's not end to end encrypted because that's not really possible, but the only place its unencrypted is in your browser and on the server you own and control. If you don't trust Jitsi's ability to password protect rooms, you could put normal http password authentication in front of your jitsi install -- which would break the mobile app but work just fine in your browser. Lots of the concerns of Zoom's security are resolved by using readily available standards and software instead of depending on proprietary black box solutions that turn out to send encryption keys through china. EDIT: As kardos notes below the video actually runs over udp on port 10000 so it is not encrypted over https. It looks like video is encrypted[1] but I'm unclear what method it's encrypted. 1. See Security section of Readme https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
- kardos 7y ago
  The web app runs on TCP/443 and benefits from your Let's Encrypt cert. Jitsi also exposes UDP/10000 for receiving streams from clients, which doesn't go through apache/nginx. So what does it do for encryption there?
  - joecot 7y ago
    Fair enough. I just firewalled 10000 and tried talking to a friend and it does not work. The web app indeed runs over 443 but all the video conferencing is done over UDP. However WebRTC is always encrypted. So add on a 4th well tested piece of tech being utilized. https://webrtc-security.github.io/ https://webrtc-security.github.io/
    - kardos 7y ago
      Yeah, I'm not really suggesting that they failed entirely to encrypt the UDP traffic. But I am curious if what they have done has been scrutinized recently. Jitsi was formed in 2003 according to Wikipedia, there could be outdated choices in there somewhere. That they use widely deployed tech is not really enough, we've just seen that Zoom is using ECB mode when they should not, etc.

thomzane 7y ago

Wiki on this topic: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Remote_Communication https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Remote_Communication Mailing list on this topic: https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/remotecommunication https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/remotecommuni...

0x006A 7y ago
getting a 404 on the list archive at https://lists.libreplanet.org/archive/html/remotecommunication https://lists.libreplanet.org/archive/html/remotecommunicati...
- thomzane 7y ago
  Brand new list today. No messages. No archive.
  - pwinnski 7y ago
    That's the sort of amazing focus on user experience I expect from Free software, unfortunately.
    - okprod 7y ago
      You should contribute to free software packages instead of complaining and continuing to willingly sell out your agency by using proprietary software.

oDot 7y ago

Zoom is still the best performing software. Alternatives fail in various ways. I wrote Emergency Remote[0], and for some companies thrown into the situation it is best to use it anyway. They can't handle more trouble during this time. [0] https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf

tw04 7y ago
I fundamentally disagree. Webex has been around longer and despite the zoom founder trying to trash it, has been more reliable for me. They just apparently spent their money on building an enterprise-worthy app instead of marketing. https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-Free-in-These-Countries-COVID-19-Response https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-...
- throwaway55554 7y ago
  We use Webex at work and it's pretty reliable. Only issue I can think of off the top of my head is on Windows, Webex will sometimes freeze. Some colleagues have attributed that to certain bluetooth devices. I've personally not had that happen but have been in meetings where it did. Edit: Ok, that took all of 10 seconds to get the first downvote. Seriously?
  - tw04 7y ago
    I would guess your colleagues are onto something. We've got a wide mix of Windows and Mac users and can't say I've heard of anyone reporting problems with freezing.
    - burnJS 7y ago
      Ditto.
- pkulak 7y ago
  They say they have a Linux app... but Zoom is available in official repos, Flatpak, the Arch AUR, SUSE community, etc. That's huge for me. I don't really have any interest in blazing a new trail to use a web conferencing app.

tw04 7y ago

Webex is free right now, they just haven't really marketed it: https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-Free-in-These-Countries-COVID-19-Response https://help.webex.com/en-us/n80v1rcb/Cisco-Webex-Available-... Hangouts Meet which I've had bad luck with but others have told me works well is free: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/helping-businesses-and-schools-stay-connected-in-response-to-coronavirus https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/helping-busin... And MS Teams has a free trial (had good luck with this as well but don't like the interface as much as webex): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/03/02/working-remotely-during-challenging-times/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/03/0...

thomzane 7y ago
The Free Software Foundation refers to free as in freedom and not free as in cost.
- yingbo 7y ago
  , while some others refers to free as free in cost. We should respect each other.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    In this thread, I think we should use the more relevant definition.
- tw04 7y ago
  I'm aware of what the FSF is. Downvoting me because I posted free-as-in-beer alternatives that aren't open source is childish. They're valid alternatives for people that don't want to use zoom and entirely relevant to the conversation.
  - tome 7y ago
    It's as though the title was "Try these green ways to generate energy" and you responded with a list of petrol engines which are painted green. It's not wrong, it's not unhelpful, per se, but does somewhat miss the point.

leke 7y ago

I recently tried Jami and think it was a great user experience. I love its decentralized nature, but just have nobody to use it with. I'm now using Discord and think its new screen sharing feature is very handy for lessons. The good thing about Discord is that its very popular.

thomzane 7y ago
Discord is nonfree. BigBlueButton is good for classes and screensharing.

chevman 7y ago

Another vote for Cisco Webex here. Work at a large Fortune 10 company and have tried all the major players (I think) - Google, Teams, Skype, Zoom, GotoMeeting, Webex, Join.me, etc. Webex seems to be the least worst and is fairly reliable and generally works everywhere under all kinds of load (we have meetings that range from a few folks to multiple hundreds with no issues). Definitely not the prettiest software but it gets the job done.

atonse 7y ago

Going to put my bias out in the open. My whole career has benefited from Open Source, yet when I see something from the FSF, I automatically assume it's going to be ugly and not user-friendly. Has anyone tried any of these FSF sanctioned tools? I'd love to have my bias be proven wrong.

okprod 7y ago
The FSF doesn't develop the tools listed in the article. Since it's free software, anyone, including you, can help make it prettier and more user-friendly. But again, the point of the article isn't about which software is free as in cost or easiest to use. It's about taking an ethical stance despite sacrificing things like a pretty UI.
- lutorm 7y ago
  Not just about ethics though, also about making sure a commercial provider doesn't sell you out.
dsr_ 7y ago
Jitsi is very good. You can try it out at meet.jit.si or install your own server in about 30 minutes. (Yesterday's updated Debian packages improved things immensely.)
- daffy 7y ago
  Installing one's own server seems horribly complicated on non-Debian-based distributions.
consonaut 7y ago
I'm the sole it guy for a small university in Germany (~40 FTE users and ~200 students) and here is my take on these tools. I used or tried to use most of them and have a, what I think is, good take on what I can burden my users with. I'm also bored this Friday evening because I can't go anywhere, so... Mumble: Mumble is amazing. I used it extensively playing EVE Online and what can be done with mumble with regards to external authentication and integration is really great. As an enterprise solution, if I have to weigh my time versus expenditure, it's not worth it though, I'll go with MS Teams or Slack. Asterisk/SIP: I actually ran an asterisk PBX with a self made IVR solution for a project at my previous employer and handled a lot of calls with it and saved a load of money compared to what the callcenter would have charged. Asterisk is great but we are back to the time/expenditure calculation again. I can buy a PBX solution and pay someone to maintain it for far less then me setting up Asterisk. I'd rather just buy a PBX and a support contract. For IVR the calculation gets more complicated. Jitsi: Jitsi meet is really great. It's right in that sweetspot where Skype begins to fail for decent conferences (>4 people) and where I'm invested that much that I want someone to blame and a service contract if my meetings get large enough. If you exceed that threshold (in my testing it has been somewhere between 15 and 30 participants) you want to pay someone for this service or run your own server/videobridge (still curious why BigBlueButton isn't mentioned here anywhere in all these Zoom topics). As an educational institution with my amount of users, hosting a videobridge or bbb the hosting budget alone would have exceeded our Zoom licensing cost not to mention my time. At least in Germany there is also the issue with not having a contract with the provider and problems this creates with regard to the GDPR. Jami: I don't actually know this one. OBS: Nothing can touch OBS. It's an incredibly flexible tool and while it could use some usability improvements it just really is that great. With it's usability downfalls it's also not something you can suggest to a casual user, which is kinda sad. Someone please figure out whatever Zoom is doing with the virtual camera background. Setting a simple picture as background without a green screen frankly is one of their killer features. No one talks bout it but so many people are using this that it has got to be one of their killer features. XMPP: Is a weird mention for me, since it's not an application but a protocol. Jabber sucks, most XMPP clients suck for normal users. I'm not aware of any decent enterprise solutions. IRC: Well, IRC is fucking great. I spend so much time on IRC in my youth and I'm fairly certain my earliest linux contact was an IRC bouncer on a friends machine. In the end it's kind of a weird mention as well though, since it's a protocol and not an application. It is also a protocol that is kinda caught between the "I want link preview, VoIP, file sharing, whatever" crowd and the "why is that noobs client spamming my channel with un-interpretable messages" crowd. IRC with a spec upgrade, even if it would induce a permanent netsplit would be great. I'm not gonna talk about the rest. Nextcloud is great, and with Univentions app server (https://www.univention.de/ https://www.univention.de/) is a usable solution that just suffers at scale. Of course I could set up a univention server and nextcloud and imap email and ldap and lots of other things mentioned above but it would cost me a significant amount of money and time and I can have Office 365 basically for free. So, considering I'm spending tax payers money, and I'm in the EU and MS claims to be GDPR compliant... what is my incentive to do any of this? If I'd have one complaint about Zoom, I'd would be that we had one student unable to join from Iran (which is either because of his ISP blocking certain connections or Zoom actively blocking users from Iran). Zoom excludes users from Iran in their ToU but we assumed that would just be for paying users and have a currently open ticket to figure out what could be the issue. So, this is my take. Basically if you have the time and money and want to tinker most of these OSS solutions are great and worth it. If you are operating within budget or time constraints there a valid reasons to choose a commercial provider.

ruffrey 7y ago

asterisk is an amazing, underrated stack of technology

dsr_ 7y ago
I managed a set of Asterisk PBXen for about ten years. They're extremely capable. To get full use of it back then, using high-quality hardware SIP phones was a necessity. These days I think that in-browser phones will work very well for most people. Interconnection with telcos went from unsanctioned to orderable to being widely marketed during that time. If you know what you're doing you can save a lot of money. If you would prefer to have someone else do the work, the virtual PBX vendors are pretty good.

matthberg 7y ago

Pseudo-related, yet does anyone know of a good replacement for Google Voice? I've heard Asterisk is good software to look into, yet ideally I'm looking for a way to self-host or cheaply have a standard phone number which can send SMS and call normal phones, from multiple devices, ideally with a web interface.

nsomaru 7y ago
You'll probably need a SIP provider. I just spent 4 days setting up VICIDial and Asterix as a complete noob; can probably definitively say it's not a replacement for GVoice
lutorm 7y ago
Google Fi can do most of the things Voice could, certainly I can call or send SMS from any device.
Coritenst 7y ago
Twilio
- Coritenst 7y ago
  Using Twilio to make a call forwarding and voice messaging system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761712

DevKoala 7y ago

There is a reason Zoom has been adopted the way it has; the overall user experience, do not confuse with UI, has the least amount of friction. Zoom might not be the best in any single category, but I am glad it exists.

oska 7y ago
> There is a reason Zoom has been adopted the way it has The reason is that people do not generally think philosophically or strategically about the software choices they make. The FSF does and, time and time again, their deep consideration has proven prescient. It will be the case with Zoom too.
- DevKoala 7y ago
  Philosophically? Strategically? Company employees are rejecting the alternatives. For example, SpaceX had to ban Zoom because employees kept using their own subscriptions. I agree that privacy and security are not negotiable, but unless you ban the tool, you cannot force your employees to not use it, there are no better alternatives from their perspective. We have all lived through Skype, Hangouts, Webex, GotoMeeting, etc. They all failed at delivering the experience Zoom delivers.

primitivesuave 7y ago

Can anyone comment on the software layers and infrastructure one would have to build around WebRTC to achieve Zoom-level performance?

aklemm 7y ago

Matrix would be an excellent one to add for the Chat category. Lovely, federated, and has voice/video calling that works great one-on-one.

ntw1103 7y ago
I was sad to see that matrix wasn't on the list. Another great feature of Matrix, is that it is a lot easier to setup that xmpp.
- rakoo 7y ago
  I just installed synapse with Riot, and I have to say it's the exact contrary. Some of the steps are not documented, I had to read the code to understand what to do. XMPP with Prosody on the other hand is one of the easiest servers I've ever had to install
  - ntw1103 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, what guide did you follow? I followed the docs right on github for synapse, and it was pretty easy. That being said, It was awhile back, and it looks like they've updated the synapse guide.
    - rakoo 7y ago
      I installed Matrix behind Caddy, so I followed: - The archlinux guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Matrix https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Matrix - The official doc of running it behind a proxy: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/reverse_proxy.md https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/rever... I couldn't really test if it worked as-is, so I needed to install Riot web, still behind a proxy. It was also going to be my client of choice. That's where things got fun: - Installing the arch package doesn't do anything, it's just a bunch of static files, so you have to know how to serve them after that - Riot needs to go to your matrix's /.well-known/matrix/client, so you need to redirect it to your synapse server (and the previous redirect is not enough, because the previous redirect only cares about _matrix, not the root level) - It failed for me because a setting in the synapse config (server_name) wasn't set, so I had to read the code of synapse to understand how this well-known endpoint is served. All in all it was still doable, but took more manual steps than I expected.

okprod 7y ago

All these downvotes make me sad. I guess we're in a world where people turn off their Alexa for sensitive phone calls instead of choosing not to have an Alexa device in the first place.

dang 7y ago

Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22765899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22765899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22758131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22755596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22755596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22669968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22669968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477785 Recent and seemingly related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761816 Not so recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16155155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16155155 Not so recent and maybe not so related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311324

cycloptic 7y ago
Are those really the reason to bury this? There are several other programs mentioned in the article besides Jitsi and Jami, some I didn't know about.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, we'll unbury it. Thanks!

saagarjha 7y ago

Meanwhile Zoom uses a bunch of open-source software without the required attribution…

okprod 7y ago
Report to the license holder/s so they can start compliance.

driverdan 7y ago

If all you need is audio and text Mumble works very well. It used to be the primary audio chat app for gaming but unfortunately the field has become fragmented with game built in voice chat and platform voice chat (eg Steam).

kdrag0n 7y ago

I wish replacements like these would be practical, but the problem is that they all have flaws for many use cases, while Zoom just works. Jitsi Meet is the best I've found so far, but even that has some issues — I did a quick test with myself and the Android client wasn't able to send or receive audio. It also doesn't have any notion of a "host", which is normally good, but it doesn't work for a school setting where participants can't be trusted to not kick others.

jeremija 7y ago

I've been developing peercalls.com on and off on since 2015. It's an open source peer to peer WebRTC audio/video calling service, allows the users to chat, share their desktop and send files (sending files is a little buggy at the moment, works best in Firefox). It has gotten a lot of interest in the past month and I noticed a spike in web traffic so I'm actively working on making it more scalable. I'm planning on implementing an SFU to support calls with more than 3-4 people. Right now the peers establish a mesh network and it quickly gets expensive to send video to more users. I've also been paying attention to the criticisms of Zoom and other WebRTC conferencing services and am hoping to implement end to end encryption for intermediate servers using Insertable Streams once the functionality is supported in most browsers.

timeuser 7y ago
Thanks for sharing. It doesn't seem to work well in Safari on desktop or iOS. Seemed to connect but if you make the video larger than thumbnail or fullscreen it either doesn't show or only displays a small sliver.
- jeremija 7y ago
  Thanks for reporting the bug! I thought I'd fixed this issue. Which version of MacOS/iOS/Safari are you using? Edit: I just realized that I just hadn't pushed the latest version which contained this fix. v3.0.17 is up and running now (was v3.0.15). Please let me know if you continue to experience this or any other issue!

app4soft 7y ago

> Audio chats: 1) Mummble ; 2) Asterisk/SIP 3) Walkie Talkie radio[0]-like apps?[1,2,3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie [1] https://github.com/murtaza98/Walkie-Talkie https://github.com/murtaza98/Walkie-Talkie [2] https://github.com/js-labs/WalkieTalkie https://github.com/js-labs/WalkieTalkie [3] https://github.com/dhammikamare/android-walkie-talkie https://github.com/dhammikamare/android-walkie-talkie