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Comment by aloukissas | Hacker News Reader

This statement from Zoom makes me believe that even for encrypted calls they may give authorities a back door (i.e. something that Apple and others have been very vocal about not doing).

Do enough people care about privacy to warrant a "Signal for video conferencing" Zoom competitor?

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I work at Signal on video calls, and we're working on adding video conferencing so that Signal can be the "Signal of video conferencing".

Best news I've seen all week. Keep it up! And please keep us posted.

There was already a controversy over Zoom marketing their calls as "end to end encrypted" when in fact they're only encrypted on the way to and from Zoom's servers, where they're unencrypted (and easily wiretap-able).

There are a variety of better Zoom alternatives from fully end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer ones like GNU Jami (which requires an install) to Jitsi Meet, which runs in a browser with better quality¹ and IMO better ease of use than Zoom but requires running everything through a central server (though at least allows you to host it on your own).

1: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-video-confer... See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitsi

Zoom is popular because it can support 50+ person conferences. P2P really can’t support that many users.

That's part of why I mentioned Jitsi and not just Jami. The former supports partial p2p on one-on-one calls, but uses a central server to support 50+ person calls (though they do recommend 75 max on the free instances they provide IIRC).

Jitsi is a great replacement

Sadly, not for all use cases, in particular not for large meetings (>50 people) with video.

And, ironically, it doesn't seem to work in ChromeOS (Chromebooks).

It does.

The administrative tools of my local school district block the official community instance https://meet.jit.si/ on school-issued Chromebooks (as well as probably millions of other sites, at one point they even blocked a subdomain of the school district's own website), but the same service hosted at the other official instance https://8x8.vc/ works wonderfully.

Edit: detail

It is safe to assume that lawful access is possible on all major commercial platforms. In theory I don't see an issue with this if it is controlled by warrants and judicial process/oversight. Unfortunately the US did away with this with the Patriot Act and the CCP and Russia don't even have such a concept as mass surveillance is the law.

The point of E2E encryption is to make this mathematically impossible. Anything labeled E2E that doesn’t provide that guarantee should be pointed out.

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