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Comment by jtxt | Hacker News Reader

At least we can go self hosted now: https://jitsi.org/

Has Jitsi received any serious security scrutiny? Are they also making rookie mistakes?

If only people had this type of mindset and attitude _before_ they selected a communications platform.

Considering/selecting Jitsi due to the self-hosted option shows evidence of a privacy/security oriented mindset. But I agree -- it's not sufficient.

I imagine a lot of these decisions were pretty rushed this year. There are a ton of Universities, businesses, etc, that hadn't previously done any large scale video conferencing. They didn't have much time to do a thoughtful selection.

Zoom is under scrutiny largely because it's a suddenly a highly popular choice. All the hoopla incented skeptics to take a closer look.

The fact is that almost none of the communications we use on a daily basis are end-to-end encrypted. What response would you get if you told staff, partners, executives, support personnel, etc that the new standard was based on GPG web-of-trust or hierarchical S/MIME emails and that all plain text emails (or any not digitally signed) were going to be binned at the mail servers?

For that, I don't blame organizations for doing what they had to do - it's perfectly reasonable. But the discussion that results from this is mostly healthy. Zoom will suffer from the PR but I think that will give us better options as a result going forward.

This is a bit of shameless plug, but seems relevant as its about providing end to end encryption for Jitsi. My company provides a VPN product (really a full-fledged API driven SDN) that you can plug containers into. So a network edge that supports plugins. We just spun up a Jitsi plugin. All packets run over the encrypted overlay network for VPN clients. We'll post a little blog post on it soon. PM me if it sounds interesting.

vpn: https://www.cohesive.net/workforce-service-edge network edge plugins: https://docs.cohesive.net/docs/network-edge-plugins

edit: And we're offering expanded free licenses during the pandemic, https://www.cohesive.net/blog/helping-business-teams-stay-co...

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