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This would be huge- but also a replacement forJitsi Meet, which just started requiring registration using google, Microsoft or Facebook accounts. So, anonymous

This would be huge- but also a replacement forJitsi Meet, which just started requiring registration using google, Microsoft or Facebook accounts. So, anonymous E2EE( well, they used insertable streams, Firefox didnt have this fully implement Yet but was working on it, spurred on by jitsu meet, actually) Im a web browser accessible OR electron app form for any OS, open source, and totally anonymous, while able to host a good number of people all securely, for free, is not accessible to people anymore. ( there are other jitsi meet instances that likely will not require the same but this badly hurts nontheless, as they were perhaps the main free zoon competition in some ways.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37316959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37316959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381508 You'll be filling that gap, and it is a badly needed one from an anonymity /E2EE functionality perspective.

holmesworcester 3y ago
That's really interesting. Jitsi offers a React Native SDK and we were interested in using it (in e2ee mode) for Quiet. Twilio offers one too (FOSS on client side and Twilio SaaS on the server side) but it would be nicer to use Jitsi. If we only offered it to paying customers it would have the same downsides as using Jitsi though. One question: speaking for yourself and the use cases you know well, how much latency or call quality would you give up for anonymity? Would you give up video? Would old-school VOIP level lags between speakers be okay? Doing something like push to talk would be trivial now, over Tor. But an anonymous video call with lots of participants would be really hard. Sometimes I think about something in between... like a voice activated push to talk where everyone's audios are played continuously. But nothing exists like this afaik so it would be costly to explore.
- LWIRVoltage 3y ago
  My apologies on my former post, the auto correct on my phone did a number. For the use cases I know, some quality loss wouldn't be to much of an issue, but at least rudimentary video would be desired. Lag of that sort wouldn't be too bad of an issue considering it'd be to maintain a level of security and privacy that is difficult to match.( Since Signal is still working on not needing to use phone numbers, to add a privacy/ anonymous benefit to it) I know both Jitsi Meet and Google Duo( now google Meet) have a bit of info out there about the challenges they encountered upon finding methods to implement multiple-person E2EE video chat. Duo had a cap of about a dozen give or take, callers at first before they could scale up. Jitsu added E2EE as a toggleable option after getting their initial product out- so this might be the sort of thing where it doesn't start out with lots of Participants, at the beginning. Finally, you mentioned exploring some of these options not over TOR. That might be beneficial for those seeking anonymity, since TOR usage has been used to fingerprint people when no one else on a network was using it. ( VPN's and Bridges are other methods of course to plug that hole, but usually have to come from the user side at cost and some technical familiarity.) Push to talk is not something I've seen before- I take it the technical load would be less in that format?
  - holmesworcester 3y ago
    We can maybe do usable video calling over Tor if it's okay to have higher than normal latency. I've read about some tests with TCP WebRTC over Tor where it was usable. I should test it sometime. Push to talk was a thing in old-school mobile telephony. It's basically audio messages but they play as soon as you receive them (or stream) so it feels more like a conversation.

holmesworcester 3y ago

That's really interesting. Jitsi offers a React Native SDK and we were interested in using it (in e2ee mode) for Quiet. Twilio offers one too (FOSS on client side and Twilio SaaS on the server side) but it would be nicer to use Jitsi. If we only offered it to paying customers it would have the same downsides as using Jitsi though. One question: speaking for yourself and the use cases you know well, how much latency or call quality would you give up for anonymity? Would you give up video? Would old-school VOIP level lags between speakers be okay? Doing something like push to talk would be trivial now, over Tor. But an anonymous video call with lots of participants would be really hard. Sometimes I think about something in between... like a voice activated push to talk where everyone's audios are played continuously. But nothing exists like this afaik so it would be costly to explore.

LWIRVoltage 3y ago
My apologies on my former post, the auto correct on my phone did a number. For the use cases I know, some quality loss wouldn't be to much of an issue, but at least rudimentary video would be desired. Lag of that sort wouldn't be too bad of an issue considering it'd be to maintain a level of security and privacy that is difficult to match.( Since Signal is still working on not needing to use phone numbers, to add a privacy/ anonymous benefit to it) I know both Jitsi Meet and Google Duo( now google Meet) have a bit of info out there about the challenges they encountered upon finding methods to implement multiple-person E2EE video chat. Duo had a cap of about a dozen give or take, callers at first before they could scale up. Jitsu added E2EE as a toggleable option after getting their initial product out- so this might be the sort of thing where it doesn't start out with lots of Participants, at the beginning. Finally, you mentioned exploring some of these options not over TOR. That might be beneficial for those seeking anonymity, since TOR usage has been used to fingerprint people when no one else on a network was using it. ( VPN's and Bridges are other methods of course to plug that hole, but usually have to come from the user side at cost and some technical familiarity.) Push to talk is not something I've seen before- I take it the technical load would be less in that format?
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  We can maybe do usable video calling over Tor if it's okay to have higher than normal latency. I've read about some tests with TCP WebRTC over Tor where it was usable. I should test it sometime. Push to talk was a thing in old-school mobile telephony. It's basically audio messages but they play as soon as you receive them (or stream) so it feels more like a conversation.