The above was Jitsi. It is an open source project. Dimme was good enough to set up the server portion on his server.
It works fine but is not as slick as Zoom in the audio and video delay time. This makes it difficult to have a conversation because in a normal conversation you wait for a gap, and if there is say a 2 second delay in what you are hearing, by the time you jump in, the person has started talking again and nobody hears you.
OTOH Jitsi doesn’t need a “host”. The first person who starts it up becomes the host (the moderator, who can remove others, etc) and sets up the password for the others to use. So I don’t have to be there at 1900 UTC to get it started like I do for Zoom, although the paid version of Zoom can be scheduled to start by itself.
Zoom seems to have reverted to enforcing the 40 min time limit.
If anyone is still interested please join the telegram group (above) or post here, and indicate when you might want to have a go.
Reverting to Zoom.
I am sorry but I am fed up with having to respond to this stuff getting constantly posted, here and in the telegram group for the video meet-up.
Loads of people are stupid enough to use the same password on loads of websites and some of these get hacked and the credentials get stolen and traded. Linkedin got their database stolen, Yahoo likewise, loads of others and these sites had stupid enough sysadmins to be storing passwords rather than just hashes which is what every website should have been doing for about the last 10+ years. Maybe Zoom got their passwords stolen too at some point in the past.
If you are gonna discuss blowing somebody up then you can’t use Zoom, but you also can’t use anything else because if the NSA is delivering on their taxpayer funding they are reading it already.
The simple answer is that if you think talking aeroplanes and such is of sufficiently earth shattering importance, don’t bother to use this. Anybody participating in a video conference can record it and publish it many years later so if you slagged somebody off in there you are going to regret it. It’s no different to emailing nude photos of yourself to somebody – as many teenagers (and some older ones) have discovered to their cost.
I suggested this after getting suggestions from others who were all f——ng stuck at home because we cannot fly! I am trying to do everybody a bloody favour and all people manage to do is regurgitate the same old “security” crap which is all over the internet.
Half the world is on Zoom now.
Peter wrote:
Half the world is on Zoom now.
And the other half will soon be. Agree with Peter – most of these concerns are overblown and/or user error, e.g. recording a session and then uploading it to some server. Btw, as of April 18, you will be able to opt out of region-specific servers (albeit not your ‘home’ region) if you have a paid sub.
The 1st prize, however, goes to…
The above are not disingenuous. The concept of “security” is relative to what you are trying to hide or protect, and who is going to be attacking it.
At work we use webex, extensively nowadays I might add. There is a free version for personal use.
Only the one starting the webmeeting needs to register, the others don’t, they can just connect to his meeting room.
I have used the iPhone app while on the go, and it worked perfectly. There’s an android app too but I don’t have an android phone/tablet, so I don’t know if it’s as good.
It’s quite seamless.
I am posting this in this older Zoom thread because people expressed concerns about Zoom security.
I’ve been reading up on this and AFAICT there is no way to “hack into” a Zoom conference. The way it has always been done is a mixture of
In many scenarios, there are many potential delegates, and nobody can recognise them all, which means the waiting room is worthless because everybody popping up in it has to be allowed in anyway. This is a typical issue with schools etc where nobody knows half the kids, so it is easy for an impostor who guessed the password to get in and chuck in a load of p0rn etc. Passwords are often not used because a lot of non-IT people are simply intellectually unable to deal with a password! If you have a school or “college” of say 500 kids, perhaps 100 of them will not be able to deal with a password.
As a result of some bad publicity over the “gatecrashing”, Zoom now have a new policy and require either a password, or the waiting room feature to be enabled. By choosing a nontrivial password, people can’t get in. And if you aren’t using the waiting room properly, it is only your fault.
The remaining issue is that somebody can get in and leave their webcam disabled, so they can’t be recognised. But you can do that with any videoconferencing product. The only easy way to deal with that is to insist in webcams being enabled (which is only polite really) but then participation drops off greatly unless the conference is mandatory.
BTW the meetups are now Tuesdays 1900 UTC but the Zoom thing is paid up so anybody can use it anytime. No mandatory Host is enabled now.
Peter wrote:
As a result of some bad publicity over the “gatecrashing”, Zoom now have a new policy and require either a password, or the waiting room feature to be enabled.
I guess that’s for the free use of Zoom. At my university (which has a paid service) we can still create meetings without either waiting rooms or passwords.
That’s because they got a big pushback and had to postpone that requirement until September, I think 
Just got an email while on a trip.
Clearly a lot of their users prefer the easy access.
Like I said, I would speculate simply that a lot of people cannot deal with the concept of a login. It is like so much in “IT”. For every small barrier you put up, participation drops by X%. If you want people to sign up on a forum, for every item you ask them to fill in on a profile you will lose tens of percent. And an educational establishment can’t just chuck away say 50% of participants.
