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Google Hangouts adds remote desktop support
- alexhawdon 13y agoApparently old news, but I didn't know about it and it looks pretty useful. Another point towards steering my parents towards a Chromebook. Though, almost ironically, the lack of Skype support (on the ARM-based ones, unsure about x86) is one of the negative points.
- codereflection 13y agoAnd Google continues killing off niche application vendors... WalMart of the Internet.
- intrazoo 13y agoI doubt this analogy is perfect. Location/upkeep/convenience are different in the software world, and one of the big problems with Walmart is that they underpay their workers. And whereas mass produced X and artisan X might be different, I don't see any advantage of artisan desktop sharing. Maybe there is something to soaking up a market (RSS) then dropping it (though it seems the ball is being somewhat picked up there), But, maybe unlike walmart?, there is little reason to believe that was malicious. People (Kevin Rose, for example) were making fun of RSS being super dead in 2011. I am no expert, but I doubt it is a google plus play as much as a twitter defeat. Note: I personally love RSS, but if I was not a tech news junkie, it might be of little use to me.
- zanny 13y agoIf you want to carry on the analogy, Google has a debit card that only works at Google and unlike Walmart it won't accept competitors coupons and all the stuff sold in store isn't sold anywhere else. You also can't take it apart, and only people with Google debit cards can see any of it when it leaves the store. Hangouts is becoming a nightmare of a proprietary locked in mess that is destroying decades of progress in FOSS space towards open standards for communication. They are killing Jingle and XMPP by depreciating Talk, and they are now killing VNC. They may not have played nice together, and they may be painfully outdated, but it isn't an excuse to take your toys from the community sandbox, go home, and build yourself a space rocket in your back yard and fence it off, because very few people will pay to get in your back yard and will stay in the sandbox with Tonka Trucks.
- nknighthb 13y ago> and they are now killing VNC Um, no. This feature substitutes for one small VNC use case -- a use case already largely controlled by commercial products like TeamViewer and Copilot anyway. VNC has much broader uses than this.
- codereflection 13y agoGood points.. however I don't thing they're killing off VNC. VNC, I believe, has a pretty narrow user base. Google's addition of remote desktop control will be doing more harm to small companies and their apps like FogCreek's Copilot.
- simoncion 13y ago"They are killing Jingle and XMPP by depreciating Talk..." As of two or three weeks ago, the Hangouts videoconferencing code used WebRTC, Jingle, and a variety of video and audio codecs (among which one could find Opus.). If you run the software on a *nix system, you can verify my claims by checking the contents of /tmp/gtalkplugin.log while you're in a video call with someone. Note that that file seems to be flushed to disk at irregular intervals, and that it is removed after the call is terminated.
- zanny 13y agoMy point is more even if they continue to use Jingle on the backend they defeat the point of Jabber by putting the auth servers in a proprietary backend. The whole point of XMPP was to stop making messaging / communication formats that don't play in the same sandbox and can't interopt. I can't contact someone in a hangout (via chat or voice) with anything but a hangout.
- codereflection 13y agoI wasn't looking for a perfect analogy. Simply put that like WalMart killing off mom & pop shops, Google / Microsoft / Amazon are doing the same thing to niche application vendors who do one thing well to make a simple living.
- ajross 13y agoScreen sharing is a Skype feature. If having a broadly available free tool with deep-pocketed corporate support was going to kill off that "niche", then it's surely been dead for years already. This is just Google achieving feature parity with the existing players. I mean, I'm as much a cynic as anyone, but I swear that these days it seems like Google can't catch a break on this site.
- skeletonjelly 13y agoSkype has screen share but the quality pales in comparison to RDP/Teamviewer
- pisarzp 13y agoI thought Skype offers only screen sharing, but doesn't allow to control other person's desktop. I might be wrong though.
- gtaylor 13y agoDo you expect them to stop innovating just to avoid stepping on someone else? This development actually makes a lot of sense for Hangouts, and I'm glad they did it. There is still room for others, especially in the spheres where using Google products is not an option.
- kryten 13y agoNow the NSA can watch your screen! </sarcasm>
- Spearchucker 13y agoThat's valid. Remote desktop opens up some interesting attack vectors, whether used by the NSA or just some hacker with malicious intent. There's nothing I can see about security mitigations...
- drivebyacct2 13y ago"valid" aside from the fact that there's no way in this world or the next that all of that video and remote desktop traffic is going though Google's servers.
- ISL 13y agoCan anyone comment on how a browser plugin gets access to the desktop? (even if hangouts doesn't do it, there's a remote desktop plugin) I'm a curmudgeon, but it seems like it's like designing a washing machine attachment that serves as a home security system and pasta maker. Are there OS or X11 permissions that can restrict userland apps from deviating far from their original use case?
- dman 13y agoThe browser is a native app and can use native apis to access screensharing desktop apis. It can then proxy these via some browser plugin api making those available to browser plugins.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Achshar 13y agoActually there is a pointer lock api that allows apps to control user's mouse. And it can be added as a permission in chrome manifest. They only need the screen and mouse control. Which essentially means control entire machine. Edit: never mind, I was thinking of chrome app, not the local plugin that we install for voice and video.
- zanny 13y agoNot X11, any app can see or manipulate any other apps screen buffer. It is one reason Wayland is nice. If your system has MAC you can restrict its file access, but in general you have library support for this stuff built in. It is also why in most cases it is a PITA to stream 3d rendered screens. Opengl / directX don't provide easy ways like X11 to look at a completed framebuffer and store / broadcast it.
- dman 13y agoIn OpenGL this is fairly easy using FBO's - http://www.songho.ca/opengl/gl_fbo.html http://www.songho.ca/opengl/gl_fbo.html . I have never used DirectX but I would be surprised if it did not allow you to read the framebuffer.
- shmerl 13y agoWhen are they going to publish their protocol, or return support for XMPP federation? Users should avoid them until they do either of those.
- mlinksva 13y agoMaybe when users actually avoid them, which means users need an alternative, eg Jitsi which has had desktop sharing a couple years.
- simoncion 13y agoATM XMPP federation is still up and running. If enough people approach the Messaging folks at Google with coherent, well-reasoned reasons for leaving it up (and perhaps securing it with TLS!), then it might get left up for good.
- ralphm 13y agoSorry, but the new Hangouts does not support federation. The old GTalk network, though, does. If a message comes into the latter from non-Google servers, they only show up in connected XMPP clients, not on Android or GMail after upgrading to Hangouts. If the intended recipient does not use a 3rd party XMPP client and has fully upgraded, he will never see the message! For outbound traffic some odd stuff is going on. Presence from all Hangouts endpoints still propagates to GTalk and thus federates. Messages can also be sent. But again, that's one way and replies are not delivered to Hangouts. Additionally, XMPP iq-type requests to Hangouts endpoints are not responded to, violating the core XMPP spec.
- Ralz 13y agoAm I the only one who prefers regular gchat to google hangouts? It's super difficult to figure out who on my contact list is online or not. I also mistake old msgs as new ones because of the lack of time-stamps. Maybe I'm missing a check-box or something that could fix all this but I gave up and switched back to gchat almost immediately.
- baselessdefense 13y agoThere is a green bar below the user's picture when they're online.
- Zikes 13y agoOnly in the web interface, that feature is entirely missing from the Hangouts app that replaced the Google Talk app on Android.
- Ralz 13y agoJust switched back to check this out. I see the green bar under only one of my friends but the rest that are online or away don't have this. Do they also have to have hangouts enabled for me to see that? Also, I understand that they are trying to make things minimal and look cool but it's not something that's very intuitive or noticeable. I thought it might have meant that I have a chat window open with that person.
- bluecalm 13y agoHow is hangouts minimal ? In old gchat you have lines of text - very efficient and natural. In new hangouts you have a lot of empty space, graphics and overall about 4x less text in the same amount of space. It's huge UI fail in my opinion. Fortunately there is still an option to switch back.
- tomkarlo 13y agoThat's only online at a PC, I believe. If folks are on a phone, they won't have a green bar.
- 13y ago
- watterso 13y agoThis is great news! After instant-upload/auto-backup got my parents hooked on G+, now I can easily provide them with tech support! Solid user conversion practice imo.
- omniwired 13y agoancient "news" by now. The site is called hacker _NEWS_ :)
- skeletonjelly 13y ago_NEWS_ to me ;)
- clauretano 13y agoOk Google, now do this using the webRTC data channel instead of a plugin (using Vidyo's H.264/SVC) webRTC is going to be really exciting in the next year or so. Google is pushing it, but it'd be great to see them actually using it. I was hoping New Hangouts would be on webRTC, but it is still a bit early.
- simoncion 13y agoHangouts currently seems to use WebRTC behind the scenes. See my comment here for more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5949188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5949188
- DEinspanjer 13y agoI need to go RTFA, so please forgive if it is already in there, but I hope this means there will be some progress to enabling remote assistance / remote control of a Chrome device a like a Chromebook. Two years that issue has been open with hundreds of users complaining and no word. :/
- sergiotapia 13y agoThe best remote desktop software I have used is - http://www.join.me http://www.join.me Just have the other person click 'Share', wait a bit for it to load, then have them copy and paste their share URL. It works right in the browser and is free. If Google Hangouts make this easier for me to fix my mother's laptop I'm all for it!
- lelandbatey 13y agoDang it, I'd been looking for something just like this very recently, and my Google-fu had failed me. Man I wish I'd been able to find this.
- hobs 13y agoBeen using it for about a year, its amazing. The way it is going the free version may be sunset fairly soon.
- iso8859-1 13y agohttp://www.screenleap.com/ http://www.screenleap.com/ is similar. It's a Java applet, works on Linux/Windows/Mac.
- tikums 13y agoIt's 2013. Are we supposed to be amazed by this?
- Legion 13y agoSlightly off topic, but does anyone else experience poor audio echo in Hangout video conferences? At work we would kill to replace Skype with Hangouts, but with the same computers and the same microphones, everyone in Hangouts constantly hears themselves, while Skype reduces hearing yourself to a very rare event.
- mcrittenden 13y agoI've only ever had this issue when someone on the hangout uses speakers instead of headphones and forgets to mute.
- donniezazen 13y agoWill this require Chrome Remote Desktop and or Hangouts extension to work?