I hope this crisis causes Jitsi to get some serious funding. I've been trying Jitsi on and off for about 6 years and it's never been this good. It also could be a lot better.
After all the zoom privacy/security nightmare stuff, we've started looking at alternatives, but we have a set of features we need that either aren't in Jitsi or we couldn't figure them out. So in the mean time we've been stuck with zoom.
* breakout rooms * annotations on screenshare (being able to draw on the presenter's screen) * something other than dropbox for exporting recordings
There may be other shortcomings, but we'd be willing to "downgrade" except for these that leave management going "well, i guess we'll just deal with the security issues of zoom rather than lose features"
is free software, has breakout rooms, collaborative drawing on slides, synchronized playing of youtube and a few other features.
Works quite well in my experience.
While I'm sure it could be made worse, I didn't exactly hear anything good about LinkedIn pre-aquisition, either.
It is curious how Skype was started by Kazaa engineers basically to find a legit use for their p2p streaming tech, and now it's not even p2p anymore.
Also as another user mentioned, skype was a DOS vector for individual users.
I'm not sure I follow the Skype comparison. If you're talking about Skype historically (and it seems you are) - then that was before a lot of the strong privacy and encryption conversations were being had in the larger audience of consumers. Setting this comparison is a slippery slope. Yes, we know Skype was used and abused by nation state actors - but for the time encryption was not the norm. Things have changed and today misrepresenting encryption and privacy is a much more grave sin that consumers are more concerned about. Businesses lying or misrepresenting it should have been held accountable back then - but they only finally are now.
Not disagreeing but I think we have to remember that 99% of consumers are not HN tech gurus and really don’t care. They only care about the quality of the product/experience, and clearly Zoom has topped the market on those (similar to slack for enterprise chat).
[0] https://www.apple.com/privacy/ [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-tied-to-new-privacy-website-...
That is an extremely. weak defense. There were plenty of other companies taking user security seriously. Many of our encryption standards and security certifications in use today were created in the 90s and 00s.
> "If you're talking about Skype historically (and it seems you are) - then that was before a lot of the strong privacy and encryption conversations were being had in the larger audience of consumers."
Note that I was speaking of "consumers" for the point in time referenced. Many of those consumers were not aware of why they should care about privacy or encryption, you seem to be conflating industry and consumers - of which I was making a much more specific point. This point is obvious when you look at the trend of total encrypted traffic volume which was not the majority in the 90s or 2000s compared to today - of which it is. For reference (and to put this in perspective) Facebook didn't start rolling out required encryption until 2012 [0] - less than 10 years ago. Today most of us couldn't fathom logging into a service that wasn't encrypted. So, while I feel you took my statement out of context - I'm also pointing out that consumer encryption wasn't generally taken seriously in consumer oriented services until into the 2010s.
I fail to see why this matters; let's assume this is true and everything else is just as bad (and a lot of stuff is just as bad, so this may be a fair assumption): the answer is that they should be put under the microscope too and forced to clean up their act and stop lying to users or putting them at risk unnecessarily with bad development processes. The answer is not to just say "meh, everyone else is just as bad" and keep using Zoom.
It doesn't need to be a part of Zoom's business model to watch everything so there's no excuse not to. And after that people will stop bringing this up every time their brand is named.