GNU Jami Taranis Released For Free Software Conferencing, Peer-To-Peer Communication

[Volta]

Sounds great for criminal activity.

Rather against it. Violating privacy, spying users is criminal activity.

[billyswong]

Sounds great for criminal activity.

The biggest criminals in the world are those who own government and "sovereignty" status. They also own armies and navies. Police are their friends or they are the police themselves.

[Monsterovich]

- Mom, can we have Tox?
- No, we have Tox at home.
Tox at home:
Jami

[phoron]

Sounds even better for being a private citizen who shouldn't have to cope with multiple nervous, paranoid governments who believe that the only route to stability is control and surveillance.
[...]

Great comment. I could only add

Sadly, those areas really aren't as far away as we like to pretend.

Not far both in time and space, in all directions, so help projects like this too keep it somewhat away.

[idcmp_]

Another SIP client without the ability to use my existing SIP account on another provider. ☹️

[tildearrow]

Not really. On one end of spectrum, there are drug cartels and terrorists and similar advanced groups that have their own tooling, and will never take the risk of using anything digital if they had to do something important.

On the other hand, many criminals aren't smart enough to know what is good encryption and which app is privacy respecting. After all, they are criminals, not IT/security experts.

As a result such opensource projects are more useful to privacy conscious nerds, IT/security experts (and their friends and families), political dissidents and journalists. Though a small percentage of these projects may gain a bigger audience (think signal or jitsi) but not as often as in commercial projects.

Agreed. Most criminals here in my country just use WhatsApp, and that's used by 99% of non-criminals here as well.

[coder]

Then let me tell you that the important criminals, those with a brain, those with power, operate perfectly on plain sight and don't require any encryption to communicate. Never needed it, besides many of them are in power and commit crimes with total impunity and with help by law enforcement.

Your idea of a criminal is that of what the media portrays as a criminal.

This is some very fuzzy thinking. You seem to define "criminal" as anyone who acts in an anti-social fashion, rather than those who break actual laws. There's a useful distinction between malefactors operating within the laws and societal structures vs. those who do not. Not least, in thinking about how to stop or mitigate their destructive behavior.

There are plenty of criminals who do not act with the sort of impunity that you describe, and they indeed inflict a great deal of harm. Traditional law enforcement isn't obsolete. Far from it.

With that being said, I think it's a general human trait to get lazy and desire for more powerful tools to make your job easier, and security/law enforcement is no different. They always decry these sorts of technologies, but that's to be expected when faced with any developments threatening to make one's job harder.

The tricky part is finding the right balance between privacy and security. Since I'm US-based, my thinking is rooted in the 4th Amendment and it doesn't ban search & seizure - only unreasonable ones. In that is recognition that, while precious and worthy of protection, the right to privacy is not absolute. What we ultimately need is a transparent and auditable system for invasions of privacy, so that proper oversight cannot be avoided or circumvented.

[coder]

Rather against it. Violating privacy, spying users is criminal activity.

Do you define anything as "criminal activity" which you don't like? Why stop there? Maybe define them as terrorists or baby-eaters. That'll stoke moral outrage, for sure!

Violating privacy is and should be criminal in certain cases, only. Your apparent lack of nuance is not constructive.

[Steffo]

Nice, but I guess because of the peer-to-peer approach, it doesn't scale well for many users? Say you have a class room with 100 people; is this possible?

[coder]

Nice, but I guess because of the peer-to-peer approach, it doesn't scale well for many users? Say you have a class room with 100 people; is this possible?

If you're asking specifically about video conferencing, you can read more about that here:

https://jami.net/the-jami-conferencing-system/

It doesn't appear to use the same swam-based technology as the core product, but I don't claim to know any more than I gleaned from skimming that page.