The coronavirus pandemic pushed people to stay in their homes, and in turn, forced them to use video conferencing products. In the past couple of months, Zoom became an almost indispensable app, Facebook had to step up and make a rival product, and Google made its enterprise conferencing product free for everyone.
Amid this video conferencing boom, Zooms security and privacy-relatedproblems made a lot of people skeptical about using its products. Plus, the company wasnt transparent about communicating its mishaps this forced a lot of people to look for free open source products, and Jitsi emerged as a perfect solution for them.
Apart from being open-sourced, Jitsi benefited from endorsements by a few highly-regarded names in the security community. In March, a privacy-focusedbrowser Tor tweeted about the product as an alternative to Zoom.
In 2017, in an interview with WIRED, Edward Snowden talked about using his own Jitsi server. Later, in a security conference, a lot of people saw Snowden using Jitsi to deliver a talk.
The product suddenly exploded during the pandemic. That meant Emil Ivov, Jitsis founder, and the rest of the team had to work even longer hours to keep the ship running.
Ivov originally built Jitsi as a project in 2003, when he was studying at the University of Strasbourg. Later, he spun off the project into an app and kept building it for desktop. In 2009, he started a company called BlueJimp (not to confused with BlueJeans, another video conferencing app) around it.
In 2011, Google open-sourced WebRTC communication standards to facilitate things like video-conferencing over browsers.The team took advantage of that and built abrowser-basedproduct, and so Meet Jitsi was born.
Apart from being open-sourced Jitsis ease of use helped it gain more users. To set up a call, you need to go to its website, and itll generate a meeting link with four words. That makes it difficult for Zoombombers uninvited people who join public video conferences and broadcast pornographic material to guess the link. Plus, you dont need to sign up to set up a meeting.
While the open-sourced version is free-to-usefor everyone. Its parent company, 88 offers a paid version with features such as transcription and meeting history.
In the past few months, the team had to scale up the infrastructure as users started to mount due to lockdowns all over the world.
The company learned that all kinds of people started to use video conferencing products. So they had to make things easier for users and educate them about the product as many of them were used to old-fashioned dial-in calls.
However, the pandemic has popularized the companys product. Ivov claims it pushed the apps growth by 10 years:
The pandemic provided an acceleration of 10 years in terms of growth. The last decade was an indicator of people moving towards remote work. This situation has just put us into the fast track mode.
After the pandemic hit the world, Jitsis open-sourced version and 88s paid version have managed to achieve 20 million unique monthly participants.
The next challenge for the company is to introduce end-to-end encryption for calls. The service already offers end-to-end encryption one-on-one calls and plenty of other security measures.
Ivov told me that hes never heard so many people talk about end-to-end encryption:
Ive never heard so many people talk about security and end-to-end encryption as I have in the past few months. We provide different levels of security for different needs. So primarily, we needed to educate people about the options they have.
He said that end-to-end encryption for a call with multiple people is challenging to develop. Ideally, when someone joins an encrypted call without a valid key, they would only see jumbled up video streams. When they have the legitimate key, the video stream would look normal. You can see that in a demo video below.
Now, this is easy to execute when there are two or three people on the call. When video services such as Jitsi meet use WebRTC, they create a connection with a central server that dishes out a single video stream to all participants.
If a service wants to use encryption, it has to create the same number of encrypted connection to the central server as the number of participants on a call.And the central server has to decrypt every stream, re-encrypt it, and send it to another participant.This works well for two or three-person calls. But puts a lot of load on the server for calls with multiple people.
To solve this problem, Jitsi is going to use Insertable Streams, a new feature released by the Chromium team that lets you add an additional layer of encryption. The idea is to encrypt frames rather than connections.
Ivov says the open-source nature of the app has helped people find bugs and report them and thats why we havent seen a major security scare on the app yet.Plus, this also helps anyone who wants to implement their own set of functions on top of Jitsis app.
For instance, the Italy-based classroom collaboration platform WeSchool has built some features on top of Jitsis open-sourced version. And according to WeSchools CEO, Marco De Rossi, nearly 30% of secondary schools in the country are using that tool. Rocket Chat, a free and open-source enterprise team chat solution also uses Jitsi for video conferencing.
The number of people using video conferencing simultaneously might decrease as countries are opening up, but Ivov believes a lot of people will still prefer this method of communication instead of a meeting packed with people.
He said that conferencing apps will need to try and make peoples lives easier by making meeting itemssuch as slideshows, documents, and transcripts available even after the session ends. However, the challenge for them would be to do all of this without compromising anyones privacy, and Ivov believes its possible.
Read next: Ben Goertzel: I'm just another neuron in the goddamn global brain
Why is queer representation so important? What's it like being trans in tech? How do I participate virtually? You can find all our Pride 2020 coverage here.
Read the rest here:
A look at how Jitsi became a 'secure' open-source alternative to Zoom - The Next Web
- Jitsi - Business VoIP Phone Service | OnSIP - April 26th, 2014 [April 26th, 2014]
- Softonic - Jitsi - Download - April 26th, 2014 [April 26th, 2014]
- The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Jitsi - April 26th, 2014 [April 26th, 2014]
- Jitsi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - April 26th, 2014 [April 26th, 2014]
- FLOSS Weekly 293: Jitsi Meet - Video - May 9th, 2014 [May 9th, 2014]
- Jitsi Overview: FLOSS Weekly 293 - Video - May 9th, 2014 [May 9th, 2014]
- NetSecDemo Secure FTP over Jitsi - Video - May 9th, 2014 [May 9th, 2014]
- Eliyah Moore, Barum Jiu Jitsi Vs Cahel Gonzalez, 5 Star Martial Arts - Video - May 16th, 2014 [May 16th, 2014]
- Jitsi (Mac) - Download - Softonic - August 31st, 2014 [August 31st, 2014]
- Using XMPP chat with Jitsi - Video - September 12th, 2014 [September 12th, 2014]
- Jitsi - SIP Softphone - Video - September 12th, 2014 [September 12th, 2014]
- The Luminosity of Free Software Episode 20 - Video - September 13th, 2014 [September 13th, 2014]
- FOSDEM 2014 - Jitsi Videobridge And Webrtc - Video - September 16th, 2014 [September 16th, 2014]
- Just Linux touch screen and Jitsi - Video - September 16th, 2014 [September 16th, 2014]
- Bitcoin and dark wallet could be used by terrorists. So what? - September 24th, 2014 [September 24th, 2014]
- Top messaging apps flat-out flunk EFF's security review - November 5th, 2014 [November 5th, 2014]
- When I say join me in a jitsi meet... - Video - November 7th, 2014 [November 7th, 2014]
- Jitsi Flasms Dogfooding: Using your own imperfect solutions helps improve them, - Video - November 10th, 2014 [November 10th, 2014]
- IETF91 chairs meeting Honolulu Jitsi Meet presentation - Video - November 17th, 2014 [November 17th, 2014]
- IETF91 chairs meeting Honolulu Jitsi Meet questions - Video - November 17th, 2014 [November 17th, 2014]
- jitsi videollamada - Video - December 26th, 2014 [December 26th, 2014]
- Your first OTR text chat with Jitsi - Video - December 31st, 2014 [December 31st, 2014]
- Skype Encrypted Alt. SIP Jitsi Combo - February 7th, 2015 [February 7th, 2015]
- Jitsi Wikipdia - February 7th, 2015 [February 7th, 2015]
- Jitsi for Mac | MacUpdate - Apple Mac OS X Software & Apps ... - February 11th, 2015 [February 11th, 2015]
- Nexi Unified Communication Jitsi Presentazione full - Video - February 19th, 2015 [February 19th, 2015]
- JITSI - Video - April 8th, 2015 [April 8th, 2015]
- Jitsi Configuration and Review - November 21st, 2015 [November 21st, 2015]
- Jitsi: A Multi-Protocol, Cross Platform Compatible Chat, Call ... - November 21st, 2015 [November 21st, 2015]
- Jitsi (Build 3132) - Business VoIP Phone Service | OnSIP - November 21st, 2015 [November 21st, 2015]
- Jitsi | Tiki Suite - March 26th, 2016 [March 26th, 2016]
- Jitsi - - January 28th, 2017 [January 28th, 2017]
- Jitsi for Mac - Download - jitsi.en.softonic.com - February 5th, 2017 [February 5th, 2017]
- Jitsi | Prometheism.net - February 8th, 2017 [February 8th, 2017]
- GitHub - jitsi/jitsi-meet: Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and ... - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- Edward Snowden's New Job: Protecting Reporters From Spies - WIRED - February 14th, 2017 [February 14th, 2017]
- Snowden helping develop tools to protect journalists and whistleblowers - 'to make the game a little more fair' - Press Gazette - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- Jitsi - Download - February 18th, 2017 [February 18th, 2017]
- Jitsi Meet - Android Apps on Google Play - March 11th, 2017 [March 11th, 2017]
- Jitsi for Mac OS X Secure instant messaging and VoIP - March 12th, 2017 [March 12th, 2017]
- How to Configure and Set-Up Jitsi - Liberty Under Attack - June 6th, 2017 [June 6th, 2017]
- Jitsi PediaView.com | Prometheism.net - June 17th, 2017 [June 17th, 2017]
- Provisioning | Jitsi | Prometheism.net - June 26th, 2017 [June 26th, 2017]
- Provisioning | Jitsi - June 26th, 2017 [June 26th, 2017]
- FAQ | Jitsi | Prometheism.net - June 26th, 2017 [June 26th, 2017]
- Tsirang vegetable vendors commit to selling local chillies - Kuensel, Buhutan's National Newspaper - June 27th, 2017 [June 27th, 2017]
- FAQ | Jitsi | Prometheism.net euvolution.com - July 3rd, 2017 [July 3rd, 2017]
- FAQ | Jitsi | Futurist Transhuman News Blog | Prometheism.net - July 4th, 2017 [July 4th, 2017]
- Jitsi Meet (advanced) Projects | Prometheism.net - July 6th, 2017 [July 6th, 2017]
- FAQ | Jitsi | Prometheism.net euvolution.com | Futurist - July 6th, 2017 [July 6th, 2017]
- Jitsi | Futurist Transhuman News Blog - prometheism.net - July 14th, 2017 [July 14th, 2017]
- Gladstone gold does club proud | Gladstone Observer - Gladstone Observer - July 18th, 2017 [July 18th, 2017]
- Jitsi softphone for Windows OnSIP Support - July 26th, 2017 [July 26th, 2017]
- Jitsi for Mac : Free Download : MacUpdate - August 1st, 2017 [August 1st, 2017]
- OpenFire Jitsi as Skype(desktop sharing) and Temviewer ... - February 9th, 2018 [February 9th, 2018]
- Jitsi Download - softpedia.com - March 29th, 2018 [March 29th, 2018]
- Jitsi Meet (advanced) Projects - June 14th, 2018 [June 14th, 2018]
- Jitsi (Build 3132) - OnSIP - November 9th, 2018 [November 9th, 2018]
- Download Jitsi 2.10.5550 - softpedia.com - November 9th, 2018 [November 9th, 2018]
- Jitsi Community Forum - November 9th, 2018 [November 9th, 2018]
- FAQ | Jitsi - November 23rd, 2018 [November 23rd, 2018]
- Jitsi for Windows - Secure Instant Messaging and VoIP - February 12th, 2019 [February 12th, 2019]
- How to Create Your Own Video Conference Server using Jitsi ... - March 6th, 2019 [March 6th, 2019]
- What is Jitsi? - open source video conferencing API's ... - April 9th, 2019 [April 9th, 2019]
- 8x8 Acquires Jitsi Video Communications Technology From ... - April 15th, 2019 [April 15th, 2019]
- Latest users topics - Jitsi Community Forum - developers & users - April 15th, 2019 [April 15th, 2019]
- Jitsi - Should I Remove It? - April 20th, 2019 [April 20th, 2019]
- Appear.in Vs. Jitsi: Subscription WebRTC Faces Off Against Open-Source VC - VC - VC Daily - November 18th, 2019 [November 18th, 2019]
- Philippines eyes fitting end to best SEA Games performance ever - Sports Interactive Network Philippines - December 12th, 2019 [December 12th, 2019]
- Fox Sports 1 Dials Up VCC for The Herd With Colin Cowherd - TV Technology - December 21st, 2019 [December 21st, 2019]
- Fox Sports 1 Utilized Video Call Center to Extend Reach of Shows Like The Herd with Colin Cowherd - Sports Video Group - December 21st, 2019 [December 21st, 2019]
- GoodFirms Discloses the Most Recommended Software of 2020 to Streamline the Business Work Processes - Yahoo Finance - February 23rd, 2020 [February 23rd, 2020]
- How The Coronavirus Is Forcing Italy To Become A Digital Country, At Last - Forbes - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- Here's how Zoom is fixing all of those security issues - The Union Journal - April 12th, 2020 [April 12th, 2020]
- Five Zoom alternatives to combat social isolation with video chat - The Star Online - April 12th, 2020 [April 12th, 2020]
- Zoom Has Privacy Issues, Here Are Some Alternatives - CoinDesk - April 12th, 2020 [April 12th, 2020]
- This is Jitsi Meet, the open source video calling application that the Government uses to prepare for press conferences - Explica - April 12th, 2020 [April 12th, 2020]
- Zoom security: I've researched problems with video conferencing for years here's what you need to know - The Conversation UK - May 3rd, 2020 [May 3rd, 2020]
- Group video calls of up to 100 participants, with encryption and noise cancellation - Explica - May 3rd, 2020 [May 3rd, 2020]
- The best Skype alternatives for video calls on your smartphone - AndroidPIT - May 3rd, 2020 [May 3rd, 2020]