3 ms·

Oh this all brings back memories, of Sococo in the 2000's. We faced all these problems and had similar solutions to them all. We even had a rapidly adapting ne

Oh this all brings back memories, of Sococo in the 2000's. We faced all these problems and had similar solutions to them all. We even had a rapidly adapting network make-and-break recovery layer. You unplug your laptop from a wired connection, switch to wireless - we recovered in milliseconds. You heard barely a click. The encryption issue is fun - we had a rotate-key message in-band. The receiver loaded new keys and tried them in sequence to ease the turnover time - out-of-order packets etc could make it ambiguous for a short while which key to use. A cache and aging keys out made it work pretty well. Remixing on user stations proved to be problematic (mentioned elsewhere on this thread). You'd think if 6 people at one site were conferencing with a dozen elsewhere, you could elect one at each site to mix-and-forward. But corporate networks made it hard to determine who was 'adjacent' - they were often layered and without uPNP (is that what the router protocol is called?) you couldn't tell if somebody at the next desk was even in your company. We had up to 100 people in a conference, and our enter-the-conference time was on the order of 100ms. Click into an all-hands, and be able to hear everybody before you finger left the mouse button. It was wonderful. Sococo today is a sad shadow of that. They went open-source and lost all our IP instantly. Just another WebRTC client last I knew.

narush 5y ago
> They went open-source and lost all our IP instantly. Can you explain what this means? Like - other people copied your work? Genuinely wondering, OSS noob here...
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  There was little or nothing in WebRTC to match what we'd spend 5 years creating. So they were back to 1-5 people in a conference, with 1-3 second connect times, and no resilience to network changes. The excuse they gave was "We can't rely on 6 people in Iowa for our core IP". So they switched to some open source mix node that was the pet project of 2 guys in Italy. Two academics, who gave it hardly any attention. And it had zero IP; just a collection of APIs stitched together to give you the impression of having a mix node. We said all that at the time. But such was the power of the magic words "Open Source" that it all bounced off their mental shields.
  - nextaccountic 5y ago
    > The excuse they gave was "We can't rely on 6 people in Iowa for our core IP" But, didn't all this code belong to the company? They could have open sourced it themselves, and it would become an open source solution... What happened to this code??
    - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
      Some of the Engineers involved may have some of the components. Tom I know has the desktop client. Chris may have a mix node machine in a closet somewhere :) The backend I'm not so sure. Guy who wrote most of that, is a middle manager at Microsoft. My son wrote some, but he didn't keep any of it.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Sounds like they just wanted to stop paying for developers.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    Maybe I'm kinda leaning beyond the practical/relevance limits of "old code still interesting", but could you open-source the implementation you came up with given the passage of time? Lots of people are stuck on low-bandwidth links so a codebase optimized for slower connections would absolutely fly (and consistently so, for everyone, under lots of conditions), and everyone always wants to use less bandwidth anyway. From an implementational perspective it's also always good to have explicitly bespoke designs out there to contrast against the bog-standardness of WebRTC with its standard "can't be helped" set of limitations and flaws. I also find it very fascinating to hear that OSS was the cause of (headdesk-inducing) myopia and blindsiding. My (naive, distant, apparently out of date) impression was that open-source was incorrectly perceived as the inferior option in the stereotypical case. I guess the entropy pool really can go in all the directions...
    - codethief 5y ago
      > Lots of people are stuck on low-bandwidth links so a codebase optimized for slower connections would absolutely fly (and consistently so, for everyone, under lots of conditions), and everyone always wants to use less bandwidth anyway. You would think so but why have solutions like Mumble[0], which allows for extremely low-latency and high-quality voice calls and has existed at least since the mid 2000s, not become more popular during the pandemic? Or why didn't people at Zoom and MS Teams at least learn from Mumble? [0]: https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/
blitzar 5y ago
> Sococo today is a sad shadow of that. They went open-source and lost all our IP instantly. Just another WebRTC client last I knew. I did not know the name, given the explosion of this exact technology the last 2 years that is very sad indeed.
Nextgrid 5y ago
You mention that they went open-source. Do you mean the old code was open-sourced?
- snissn 5y ago
  it's not clear but my reading is that they switched from their proprietary stack, set that code aside and switched to a webrtc based tech
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  They switched to WebRTC and some 'open' media node (which was stagnant and feeble)
bradknowles 5y ago
I remember Sococo. As an employee of a company that used it, I hated the damn thing. This virtual anime simulated office is just a really bad metaphor. Skeuomorphism taken to the worst extreme. Slack channels make much more sense.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  It did take a lot of screen real estate, when open. But it had its advantages. You could see who was talking with whom - the bobble-heads even blinked. You could visually show when you were busy (close office door). A company meeting took seconds for everyone to assemble - you'd see folks blinking into the big room. I had a separate monitor for leaving it up, but I had the space for that. It was always an issue.

narush 5y ago

> They went open-source and lost all our IP instantly. Can you explain what this means? Like - other people copied your work? Genuinely wondering, OSS noob here...

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
There was little or nothing in WebRTC to match what we'd spend 5 years creating. So they were back to 1-5 people in a conference, with 1-3 second connect times, and no resilience to network changes. The excuse they gave was "We can't rely on 6 people in Iowa for our core IP". So they switched to some open source mix node that was the pet project of 2 guys in Italy. Two academics, who gave it hardly any attention. And it had zero IP; just a collection of APIs stitched together to give you the impression of having a mix node. We said all that at the time. But such was the power of the magic words "Open Source" that it all bounced off their mental shields.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  > The excuse they gave was "We can't rely on 6 people in Iowa for our core IP" But, didn't all this code belong to the company? They could have open sourced it themselves, and it would become an open source solution... What happened to this code??
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Some of the Engineers involved may have some of the components. Tom I know has the desktop client. Chris may have a mix node machine in a closet somewhere :) The backend I'm not so sure. Guy who wrote most of that, is a middle manager at Microsoft. My son wrote some, but he didn't keep any of it.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Sounds like they just wanted to stop paying for developers.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Maybe I'm kinda leaning beyond the practical/relevance limits of "old code still interesting", but could you open-source the implementation you came up with given the passage of time? Lots of people are stuck on low-bandwidth links so a codebase optimized for slower connections would absolutely fly (and consistently so, for everyone, under lots of conditions), and everyone always wants to use less bandwidth anyway. From an implementational perspective it's also always good to have explicitly bespoke designs out there to contrast against the bog-standardness of WebRTC with its standard "can't be helped" set of limitations and flaws. I also find it very fascinating to hear that OSS was the cause of (headdesk-inducing) myopia and blindsiding. My (naive, distant, apparently out of date) impression was that open-source was incorrectly perceived as the inferior option in the stereotypical case. I guess the entropy pool really can go in all the directions...
  - codethief 5y ago
    > Lots of people are stuck on low-bandwidth links so a codebase optimized for slower connections would absolutely fly (and consistently so, for everyone, under lots of conditions), and everyone always wants to use less bandwidth anyway. You would think so but why have solutions like Mumble[0], which allows for extremely low-latency and high-quality voice calls and has existed at least since the mid 2000s, not become more popular during the pandemic? Or why didn't people at Zoom and MS Teams at least learn from Mumble? [0]: https://www.mumble.info/ https://www.mumble.info/

blitzar 5y ago

> Sococo today is a sad shadow of that. They went open-source and lost all our IP instantly. Just another WebRTC client last I knew. I did not know the name, given the explosion of this exact technology the last 2 years that is very sad indeed.

Nextgrid 5y ago

You mention that they went open-source. Do you mean the old code was open-sourced?

snissn 5y ago
it's not clear but my reading is that they switched from their proprietary stack, set that code aside and switched to a webrtc based tech
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
They switched to WebRTC and some 'open' media node (which was stagnant and feeble)

bradknowles 5y ago

I remember Sococo. As an employee of a company that used it, I hated the damn thing. This virtual anime simulated office is just a really bad metaphor. Skeuomorphism taken to the worst extreme. Slack channels make much more sense.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
It did take a lot of screen real estate, when open. But it had its advantages. You could see who was talking with whom - the bobble-heads even blinked. You could visually show when you were busy (close office door). A company meeting took seconds for everyone to assemble - you'd see folks blinking into the big room. I had a separate monitor for leaving it up, but I had the space for that. It was always an issue.