Nota bene how the description omits the world “encryption”. Timeo Frenchmen et dona ferentes
Microsoft Teams is such a horrible piece of software that productivity will rise after abandoning Teams.
Any exec who makes people use that should be fired
I get that government use needs to be stringently tested for security, and so things take a little longer. But really, there are PLENTY of good FOSS products in existence that can be used as a base framework and a head-start to things like this.
You don’t have to re-invent the wheel when you could easily fork Jitsi-meet and harden it/secure it to your needs in the government.
Jitsi is one of my top 5 FOSS projects that are basically already mature enough to be used in a professional setting
It’s literally the third word on the github readme of the project linked I’m the post :
Powered by LiveKit
Lovekiy is an open source framework for voice and video conferencing
Just created
In testing for the past year
Seems pretty neat. Hopefully it’s somewhat simple to compile and set up. It’s kind of weird that livekit is VC funded though. Not necessarily the best, since they might have to relicense it to make investors happy at some point.
Look at their list of investors: https://livekit.io/about
The programmability aspect of LiveKit is cool, not that it matters much since this “meet” app is just something built on top of livekit.
It looks neat
France has horrible laws for encryption, so how much do you want to bet this thing doesn’t have e2ee.
This is an Intel operation
Its FOSS (or I guess FLOSS for this case since they are French lol), meaning it doesn’t matter if the people creating the app are “good” or “bad” actors. A “good” actor can always create a fork or host their own instance.
This tool is developed for France’s administration, not for the public. They host the servers. So I don’t think e2ee is indeed a requirement.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around? I’d expect e2ee to be a requirement for anything for the administration even if their laws are a little funky (rules for thee not for me, etc).
- A tool used by a state employer only wouldn’t need e2ee, since they hold all the servers.
- The French government has long been trying to make encryption in use by its citizens inspectable by them (the French government)
Still a threat to themselves lol
End-to-end encryption (coming soon)
I hope they do work on e2ee and they it will indeed come soon.
We like to think EU abandoning tech companies will create a new privacy FOSS ecosystem, when in reality they will likely just recreate their own Tech corps like China and US now that they have skin in the game
Zoom has poor encryption. I have seen targeted ads a day after discussing very specific chemical reagents on zoom.
Zoom, Teams, Meet, and all the major providers do not have e2ee on by default. It’s a paid extra and almost nobody turns it on.
Mega uses e2ee by default, and it cannot be turned off.
I’m not convinced Zoom doesn’t just sell your contact information to third parties.
Yeah, it was definitely that and not all the web browsing and searching you and your colleague did before, during, and after the meeting, and the meeting notes you sent over gmail/microsoft mail. 🙄
It says “coming soon”, which I guess probably means it’s a somewhat second-class feature.
This wasn’t built to be a great service, it was built to be a French controlled one.
Never heard about this.
France requires companies to get permission to export cryptography. They’re one of the worst countries in Europe for crypto.
https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/encryption-laws/
The tech isn’t hard to copy, just had to be willing to go and do it themselves.
It is hard when they continually bribe your government
Why didn’t they pour money on Jitsi?
European, mature, FOSS…
I fear grift is there somewhere.
Also, French engineering has a habit of turning sound concepts into messy overengineerd but underbuilt results.
The development is quite transparent. The team is looking at reduced development and more integration, so instead of “pouring money on a project”, they tried various solutions, and picked the “best one”.
One criteria was an integration with their internal communication system: Tchap, essentially a Matrix server. The Matrix video call group didn’t cut it because it requires ElementX, and apparently there are unresolved issue there (no idea if it’s the app itself or due to customization of their Matrix server). They ended up with Visio, that is not a “new” solution: it’s based on LiveKit.
Also, French engineering has a habit of turning sound concepts into messy overengineerd but underbuilt results
Any example ?
The Pompidou. They haven’t even put the facade on it yet!
My guess would be that its because La Suite tries to replace all of Microsoft Office and having all the moving parts under your organisations control makes it easier to create a fully integrated office suite that offers the same UX throughout. Also Jitsi is owned by 8x8, a US company, which might have factored into the decision to create something new.
Huh, why not just https://www.opendesk.eu/
Why would they name it “Visio”? That is already the name of a different Microsoft product.
Because that’s the French word for it, a visioconférence.
An incentive for the users to also drop Microsoft products, starting with Visio?
Outlook was trademarked.
Be like the French
Well, I wish you could just say that, but “the French” is not a consistent body of people.
While we have this team working on a sovereign suite, Macron is rushing a law to ban <15 years old on social network, so… they will soon require all users to provide an ID. It will have to go through a “trusted third-party”, not directly to Meta/Twitter/etc., and not to the gov directly, but we all know how much corporates and governments have been trustworthy historically. And once the data is collected, you’re just one law away from all abuse.
Needless to say that the teen will rush to VPN, so they also mentioned a potential ban on VPNs! (France would then join the short-list of great democratic VPN-banning countries: North Korea, China, Iran…)
Can we be like the Beneluxians or Scandinavians instead?
Why? Benelux and Scandinavia are completely dependent software from technofascist pedophiles and some even let these technofascists store the sensitive data of their own citizens in the US.
This is awesome!
But I am confused, isn’t github Microsoft though? Why host it there?
Because it’s free, convenient, and works. And it’s a git project so the code is already distributed, so if Trump has another tantrum and decides the EU can’t use any American tech, the deleted PRs and issues would be annoying but we’ll still have the code.
PRs and issues can be a huge part of a project
I’m sure we can all agree that they are not as important as the code, though ;)
isn’t codeberg free as well? And it’s in Germany
I don’t think anyone said or implied that there were no alternatives.
Well, the point is that GitHub is owned by Microsoft, so if they’re already developing an alternative to a Microsoft service, they would probably want to also use an alternative to a Microsoft service for their source code hosting.
They want to be less dependent on US tech. Using something whose code is hosted on US tech is far less dependent than using something whose entire everything is American.
fair. Well I guess GitHub is also the most popular
I couldn’t find any particular justification going through their website and other communication, it’s not perfect but it’s probably not that big a deal for an open source project to host their code their? If I remember I’ll try to send them a message asking about it
I wonder what is wrong with jitsi…
It supports e2ee, so the French government can’t listen in on the calls
It’s American.
It’s licensed under Apache license:
Apache License 2.0 A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
Permissions Commercial use Modification Distribution Patent use Private use Limitations Trademark use Liability Warranty Conditions License and copyright notice State changes
You know that they could just fork it, right? Saying that “it’s american”, just causes FUD for opensource.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I didn’t say it was a good reason.
I believe this was mostly about stability with 100+ meeting participants. This is second hand information though.
As others said, large meetings with many video feeds at the same time.
Have you tried selfhosting it? For me, it was unusable, despite a beefy cloud server, even for just 2 people. And thats ignoring setup complexity.
This one is optimized and kubernetes ready, which makes it super easy. Will try out soon.
I was hosting it 5 years ago in a 2gb or 4gb VPS. We were able to run 1440p@120hz, if not higher, streams of our games. The server didn’t seem to care much about the load.
That sounds amazing, because I tried it last year and it was like 12 fps with 2 people in a 720p videocall
Was worried they’d use it as a walled garden or a monitoring system. MIT license iirc allows forking, so at least if things go downhill, there are ways to mitigate it.
MIT is the “do whatever you want” software license, as long as you include the original copyright and license, and don’t hold the authors liable for damages.
What’s the license on Firefox and why is it so impossible to create a fork of that browser that doesn’t suck?
Nothing to do with license.
Firefox is a massive piece of code and following modern browser standards is so difficult that it’s a feat for big teams of developers and no small team seems to be able to pick the pace needed.
Yeah, one of the largest pieces of software humanity has created, next to Google Chrome and the Linux kernel, which are all around 30 million lines of code.
To give a frame of reference: With a team of 5 full-time devs at my dayjob, we can dish out a codebase of about 20 thousand lines over the course of two years.
A browser might be somewhat quicker to build, because the requirements are relatively clear at this point and you can start implementing many standards in parallel. But yeah, it’s still just an insane amount of code.
Mozilla Public License, and there are a number of forks. A browser is a lot of work though.
What’s holding you back from doing that?
what would you want changed
