Jitsi Flasms Dogfooding: Using your own imperfect solutions helps improve them, – Video


Jitsi Flasms Dogfooding: Using your own imperfect solutions helps improve them,
[+amgD] What I noted to be a difference not so much in social trends, but the difference between the Visionary, who sees something for its potential and easi...

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Jitsi Flasms Dogfooding: Using your own imperfect solutions helps improve them, - Video

Top messaging apps flat-out flunk EFF's security review

Some of the most widely used messaging apps in the world, including Google Hangouts, Facebook chat, Yahoo Messenger, and Snapchat, flunked a best-practices security test by advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The organization evaluated 39 messaging products based on seven criteria it believes such tools should meet in order to ensure the privacy and security of digital communications.

The reviewed products included mobile texting apps, instant messaging clients, voice and video calling software and email services. The results were published Tuesday under the form of a Secure Messaging Scorecard.

The EFF did not perform vulnerability assessments or in-depth technical analyses of the encryption implementations in the reviewed products. Instead it judged them based on principles and features it felt are necessary to protect communications from widespread Internet surveillance by governments, which includes data collection in transit or from online service providers.

When reviewing the products, the EFF asked the following questions:

Six applications, most of them open source, met all of the EFFs requirements: CryptoCat, a Web-based instant messaging application; ChatSecure, an encrypted chat client for iPhone and Android; TextSecure, a text messaging app for Android; RedPhone, an encrypted calling app for Android and Signal, its version for iOS; Silent Text and Silent Phone, the encrypted texting and calling apps by secure communications provider Silent Circle.

One of the few perfect scorers.

There were other apps that came close, failing on just one criteriathe annual code audit or the forward secrecy requirements. These products were Mailvelope, RetroShare, Subrosa, Jitsi, Adium, and Pidgin.

Of the mass-market products, Apples iMessage and FaceTime scored the highest, failing on only two requirementsthe availability of code for independent review and the out-of-band contact identity verification. This means they dont currently provide complete protection against sophisticated, targeted forms of surveillance, the EFF said.

Other widely used communication tools scored much worse, meeting only one or two of the seven requirements. This was the case of Google Hangouts, Facebook chat, Yahoo Messenger, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Viber, AIM, BlackBerry Messenger and several others. None of these products offer end-to-end encryption making communications through them susceptible to surveillance on the providers side.

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Top messaging apps flat-out flunk EFF's security review

Bitcoin and dark wallet could be used by terrorists. So what?

This is a guest post by Jamie Bartlett, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tankDemos. You can follow him on Twitter at@jamiejbartlett

Does the creator of a technology have any moral responsibility for the uses to which it is put? It's an old question. RememberOppenheimer's famous quote, "I am become death; the destroyer of worlds"? Worried about the effect of his creation he determined, in the end, when making the atomic bomb, that it was the job of the scientist to make something if he or she could. Society can then determine what might be done with it.

Over the weekend,BBC Click ran an interviewwith two of the developers of the dark wallet, which is an application for the cryptocurrency bitcoin. The idea behind the dark wallet, simply put, is this: bitcoin transactions, although hard to track and monitor, are not entirely anonymous because the block chain keeps a public record of every bitcoin transaction made. Dark wallet obscures who is behind each transaction by using clever stealth addresses and a decentralised mixing system. While not making transactions perfectly anonymous, it's a significant step forward.

Click showed an unverified Islamist blog, which suggested the terrorist group IS (Islamic State, formerly ISIS) has potentially expressed an interest in dark wallet. The blog read dark wallet could "send millions of dollars worth of bitcoin instantly from the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Ghana, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or wherever else, right to the pockets of the Mujahideen". It is, read the blog, "simple, easy, and we ask Allah to hasten its usage for us". Amir Taaki, the chief developer behind the dark wallet, was quizzed by Click about whether he'd be comfortable with ISIS using the technology he'd built. With admirable honesty he replied: "Yeah." Adding, "you can't stop people using technology because of your personal bias. We stand for free and open systems where anybody can participate, no matter who you are".

Many in the (sometimes vocal and aggressive) bitcoin community were unhappyabout how this had been reported, arguing that it was unfair to saddle bitcoin with IS. IS after all, uses plenty of other technologies far more than bitcoin -- so why focus on this?

It's a fair criticism -- Bitcoin, and certainly the complicated dark wallet, is hardly the most useful system of financing for a group like IS given its other means. And as I've written elsewhere, Bitcoin has several invaluable societal benefits: such as transforming the wasteful and expensive system of making international remittance payments. Yet the BBC was correct to cover it. Almost anything IS does is newsworthy at the moment: especially when it comes to technology. That's particularly the case when the creator himself doesn't seem bothered by it.

To understand the reason Taaki was relaxed requires you to understand his ideology. I know something of this because I've spent a fair amount of time with him -- including atCalafouin Spain, where he first started work on the project -- and I wrote about the dark wallet in my bookThe Dark Net.Bitcoin advocates sit on a spectrum of belief, and many of them see the currency as a way of improving financial services. But Taaki, like some within the Bitcoin community is more radical, and could be loosely described as either a cryptoanarchist orcypherpunk. He is not interested in building neutral but effective technology: he sees dark wallet as a political project, a direct way of undermining state power. He believes that powerful encryption systems, like the dark wallet, can guarantee individual liberty in a more reliable way than any manmade law -- and he's hopeful it will help precipitate the collapse of modern national states.

With this radical world view, dark wallet has pitted itself directly against the more mainstream bits of the community. "Many prominent Bitcoin developers are actively in collusion with members of law enforcement and seeking approval from government legislators," read the original dark wallet blurb. "We believe this is not in Bitcoin users' self-interest, and instead serves wealthy business interests that make up the self-titled Bitcoin Foundation." This divide -- between those who see Bitcoin as a political or a financial project -- runs through the heart of the community. In fact Taaki is probably closer to Bitcoin's libertarian origins than all those suited businessmen currently falling over themselves to build bitcoin ATM machines or invest venture capital in the currency.The currency's creator Satoshi Nakamoto's posts on the Cryptography mailing list were littered with his libertarian outlook -- and before that Bitcoin's roots can be traced to the 90s libertarian cypherpunks, and cryptography geniusDavid Chaum.

Taaki knows that people will use the dark wallet to do bad things. He has, I am sure, no desire whatsoever to help IS -- who are the apotheosis of his conception of individual liberty. Yet his overarching ambition is to create tools to secure freedom and defang the state. Some people will suffer in the meantime.

This question will keep coming up. Bitcoin protocols can do a lot more than currency exchange. There are social media platforms based on the same distributed system as Bitcoin, making them hard to close down, and its users very difficult to trace. Especially post-Snowdon, hundreds of people around the world have been working on a dazzling array of software to allow people to stay anonymous online. The direction of travel is towards more decentralisation, more powerful encryption, more distributed systems for anyone who wants it: Jitsi, Jabber, Darkmail, Mailpile, and more. That is good news for anyone who cares about freedom and democracy, especially in the less savoury parts of the world. But I daresay IS will be early adopters -- as will other people looking to stay hidden for nefarious purposes.

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Bitcoin and dark wallet could be used by terrorists. So what?

Jitsi (Mac) – Download – Softonic

Jitsi is a free messenger client for Mac, which supports most major protocols and even supports video and audio conversations.

Simply choose the IM protocol that you'd like to connect to including SIP, Google Talk, XMPP/Jabber, MSN or Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Bonjour, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and Facebook chat. In the main window, you'll find all your personal contacts.

In the Jitsi chat window, you can exchange IM messages or initiate video or audio chats including group chats. There are a limited number of emoticons and the Jitsi keeps a history of your chats. Although the interface isn't quite as intuitive as Adium. However, the fact that you can initiate audio and video chats gives it a serious advantage.

Note that this download link takes you to the nightly build page because Jitsi is being updated so regularly, that you can choose the latest version more easily.

Jitsi might not be quite as slick as other IM clients but wide support of IM protocols plus audio and video chatting makes it a very interesting option.

Note that this download link takes you to the nightly build page because Jitsi is being updated so regularly, that you can choose the latest version more easily

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Jitsi (Mac) - Download - Softonic

Softonic – Jitsi – Download

Jitsi is a free messenger client that supports most major protocols and even supports video and audio conversations.

Simply choose the IM protocol that you'd like to connect to from a selection that includes SIP, Google Talk, XMPP/Jabber, MSN or Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Bonjour, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and Facebook chat. In the main window, you'll find all your personal contacts.

In the Jitsi chat window, you can exchange IM messages or initiate video or audio chats, including group chats. There are a limited number of emoticons and Jitsi keeps a history of your chats. Although the interface isn't particularly intuitive, the fact that you can initiate audio and video chats gives it a serious advantage over many slicker IM clients.

Note that this download link takes you to the nightly build page because Jitsi is being updated so regularly, that you can choose the latest version more easily.

Jitsi might not be quite as slick as other IM clients but is a serious alternative to classics like Miranda.

Note that this download link takes you to the nightly build page because Jitsi is being updated so regularly, that you can choose the latest version more easily

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Softonic - Jitsi - Download

The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Jitsi

Jitsi is an application that allows people to make video and voice calls, share their desktops, and exchange files and messages. More importantly it allows people to do this over a number of different protocols, ranging from the standardized XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to proprietary ones like Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger (MSN). It runs on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. It is written mostly in Java but it also contains parts written in native code. In this chapter, we'll look at Jitsi's OSGi-based architecture, see how it implements and manages protocols, and look back on what we've learned from building it.

The three most important constraints that we had to keep in mind when designing Jitsi (at the time called SIP Communicator) were multi-protocol support, cross-platform operation, and developer-friendliness.

From a developer's perspective, being multi-protocol comes down to having a common interface for all protocols. In other words, when a user sends a message, our graphical user interface needs to always call the same sendMessage method regardless of whether the currently selected protocol actually uses a method called sendXmppMessage or sendSipMsg.

The fact that most of our code is written in Java satisfies, to a large degree, our second constraint: cross-platform operation. Still, there are things that the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) does not support or does not do the way we'd like it to, such as capturing video from your webcam. Therefore, we need to use DirectShow on Windows, QTKit on Mac OS X, and Video for Linux 2 on Linux. Just as with protocols, the parts of the code that control video calls cannot be bothered with these details (they are complicated enough as it is).

Finally, being developer-friendly means that it should be easy for people to add new features. There are millions of people using VoIP today in thousands of different ways; various service providers and server vendors come up with different use cases and ideas about new features. We have to make sure that it is easy for them to use Jitsi the way they want. Someone who needs to add something new should have to read and understand only those parts of the project they are modifying or extending. Similarly, one person's changes should have as little impact as possible on everyone else's work.

To sum up, we needed an environment where different parts of the code are relatively independent from each other. It had to be possible to easily replace some parts depending on the operating system; have others, like protocols, run in parallel and yet act the same; and it had to be possible to completely rewrite any one of those parts and have the rest of the code work without any changes. Finally, we wanted the ability to easily switch parts on and off, as well as the ability to download plugins over the Internet to our list.

We briefly considered writing our own framework, but soon dropped the idea. We were itching to start writing VoIP and IM code as soon as possible, and spending a couple of months on a plugin framework didn't seem that exciting. Someone suggested OSGi, and it seemed to be the perfect fit.

People have written entire books about OSGi, so we're not going to go over everything the framework stands for. Instead we will only explain what it gives us and the way we use it in Jitsi.

Above everything else, OSGi is about modules. Features in OSGi applications are separated into bundles. An OSGi bundle is little more than a regular JAR file like the ones used to distribute Java libraries and applications. Jitsi is a collection of such bundles. There is one responsible for connecting to Windows Live Messenger, another one that does XMPP, yet another one that handles the GUI, and so on. All these bundles run together in an environment provided, in our case, by Apache Felix, an open source OSGi implementation.

All these modules need to work together. The GUI bundle needs to send messages via the protocol bundles, which in turn need to store them via the bundles handling message history. This is what OSGi services are for: they represent the part of a bundle that is visible to everyone else. An OSGi service is most often a group of Java interfaces that allow use of a specific functionality like logging, sending messages over the network, or retrieving the list of recent calls. The classes that actually implement the functionality are known as a service implementation. Most of them carry the name of the service interface they implement, with an "Impl" suffix at the end (e.g., ConfigurationServiceImpl). The OSGi framework allows developers to hide service implementations and make sure that they are never visible outside the bundle they are in. This way, other bundles can only use them through the service interfaces.

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The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Jitsi

Jitsi – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jitsi Original author(s) Emil Ivov Developer(s) Jitsi Team and Contributors Initial release 2003(2003) Stable release 2.4 (build.4997) (January7, 2014; 3 months ago(2014-01-07)) [] Preview release 2.5 (nightly) [] Development status Active Written in Java Operating system Linux, Mac OS X, Windows (all Java supported) Size 33 MB Windows[1] 23MB Mac OS X[2] 16MB GNU/Linux 60MB source code[3] Available in Asturian, English, French, German, Bulgarian, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Greek and 25 more Type Voice over Internet Protocol / instant messaging / videoconferencing License LGPL Website jitsi.org

Jitsi (formerly SIP Communicator) is a free and open source multiplatform[4]voice (VoIP), videoconferencing and instant messaging application for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It supports several popular instant messaging and telephony protocols, including open recognised encryption protocols for chat (OTR) and voice/video/streaming and voice/video conferencing (SIP/RTP/SRTP/ZRTP), as well as built-in IPv6, NAT traversal and DNSSEC. Jitsi and its source code are released under the terms of the LGPL.[4]

Work on Jitsi (then SIP Communicator) started in 2003 in the context of a student project by Emil Ivov at the University of Strasbourg.[5] It was originally released as an example video phone in the JAIN-SIP stack and later spun off as a standalone project.[6]

Originally the project was mostly used as an experimentation tool because of its support for IPv6.[7][8] Through the years, as the project gathered members, it also added support for protocols other than SIP.

Jitsi has received support from various institutions such as the NLnet Foundation,[9][10] the University of Strasbourg and the Region of Alsace[11] and it has also had multiple participations in the Google Summer of Code program.[12][13]

In 2009, Emil Ivov founded the BlueJimp company which has employed some of Jitsi's main contributors[14][15] in order to offer professional support and development services[16] related to the project.

In 2011, after successfully adding support for Audio/Video communication over XMPPs Jingle extensions, the project was renamed to Jitsi since it was no longer "a SIP only Communicator".[17][18] This name originates from the Bulgarian "" (wires).[19]

Jitsi supports multiple operating systems, including Windows as well as Unix-like systems such as GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and BSD. An Android version is planned for Q2 2014.[20] It also includes:[21]

The following protocols are currently supported by Jitsi:[4]

Jitsi is mostly written in Java[26] which helps reuse most of the same code over the various operating systems it works on. Its GUI is based upon Swing. The project also uses native code for the implementation of platform specific tasks such as audio/video capture and rendering, IP address selection, and access to native popup notification systems such as Growl.

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Jitsi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jitsi – Business VoIP Phone Service | OnSIP

Unbeknownst to many people, there are a growing number of free stand-alone VoIP clients, some of which arent half bad. Today Im going to be doing an in-depth look at one of these free downloadable clients, Jitsi, which is described as an audio/video Internet phone and instant messenger that supports some of the most popular VoIP and instant messaging protocols such as SIP, Jabber, AIM/ICQ, MSN, etc

The list is extensive, but it had me at SIP and Jabber.

Jitsi, which is written mostly in Java, is a free and open source VoIP, and instant messaging application for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Its currently in alpha. Stable releases come out every so often while nightly builds are released several times a day. When appropriate, users are automatically prompted to download and install the latest build (or you can just tell it to do this all without asking).

What separates this application from others like it is the inclusion of enterprise VoIP features such as attended and blind call transfer, call recording, call encryption, conferencing, and video calls.

This version of the application looks and feels great. The main UI is simple and clean, the pop-up call handling screen is easy to use, and the instant messaging feature is handled nicely. Jitsi certainly aims to accomplish a lot. While you can almost expect a few glitches here and there, it is certainly worth trying out.

[ Relevant Sidenote: This review was conducted on a Macbook Pro. ]

As usual, I am going to do a quick walk through of how to setup OnSIP with Jitsi. A lot of these steps apply no matter which VoIP provider youre using so I noncustomers will also find this useful. Youre going to need your user credentials. They can be found in your OnSIP admin portal under users. Here is an example of the fields you will need:

Setting Up VoIP Calling

Open up Jitsi and select +Add New Account under File. You should see a screen pop up that looks like this:

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Jitsi - Business VoIP Phone Service | OnSIP