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Manila Bulletin devider Technews devider Playing with Jitsi Meet

Playing with Jitsi Meet

Published Apr 14, 2020 12:00 am
With all the issues plaguing the video conferencing service, Zoom, there is a demand for a better, secure and private solution, preferably with end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for multiple participants. Unfortunately, there is no easily accessible service that has full E2EE that can support more than 30 users, preserves privacy, and supports multiple platforms.
One of the recommended alternatives is the open source project, Jitsi Meet. Being open source, you can get the source, inspect it, and deploy it on your own server. Is this the Zoom alternative we have been looking for?
Taking it for a spin
Jitsi Meet has an open, public server. Accessing the server using Chrome or Chromium-based browser will allow you to start your own meeting. Unfortunately, Safari and Firefox do not work as flawlessly. You can download an iOS or Android application, too. Yes, no need to create an account to start a meeting.
A Jitsi meet is functional and easy to use. It does not have the bells and whistles of Zoom, but it will do for most.
Rolling your own
Being open source, it is not that difficult to deploy your own Jitsi Meet server. You just need some Linux kung fu to deploy and configure one.
The benefit of having your own server is that you are keeping your meetings private. No third-party provider has access to the logs.
Deploying my own Jitsi server took me around 30 minutes - to spin up a server on the cloud, install and configure the server.
My take
Whilst there are clear benefits to using open source software and deploying and owning your own server, it is not all rosy.  Personally, I have some issues with Jitsi.
1. Does not properly work on Safari or Firefox
•  Whilst Chrome is the recommended browser, if you are looking for privacy, then this is a huge issue. Chrome is Google’s data collection tool. I have yet to try those deGoogled Chromium versions.
2. Scalability
• There is no mention in the documentation as to the server requirements. To know how much server resources you need to support your organization, it is a trial and error thing.
• The software is free, but the underlying infrastructure (server resources and bandwidth) needed might end up costing you a lot.
3. Ease of Use
• Hosting a Jitsi meet is very simple - fire up your browser and start one right away. Contrast this to Zoom’s requirement of having an account before you can host a meeting.
• Similar to Zoom, Jitsi’s ease of use is also its problem. By default, you don’t need an account to host a meeting, i.e. anybody as in anybody can use the service. You can configure it to require only authenticated users to host meetings, like Zoom.
• Even with the required authenticated users to host, anyone can go start a meeting by simply going to the server and appending a random string, e.g. <https://meet.jit.si/pandesal>, and you can start a meeting without being the host. All you need is to share the URL with a friend and both of you can start enjoying your meeting. This is a huge flaw in the design as this makes it prone to denial of service attack or your server being used to host illegal videos.
• You can secure your Jitsi meet with a password, but you can only add it during the meeting and not before you start it. Think Zoombombing, this is also prone to that.
• Hackers have published a list of Zoom meetings that you can try to join in to. With Jitsi, you can do the same - although the scope of the search is way larger considering that web-based meetings are given a long string composed of four random words, users can designate their own meeting ID, and being humans, meeting IDs are prone to being easy to guess.
Recommendation
Frankly, if you can live with the features of Jitsi Meet and you are comfortable trusting the public server, then use it. However, if privacy is your concern, make sure that you only use your the mobile app version.
Setting up your own server, on the other hand, is only recommended if you know what you are doing — you should know how to secure servers, how to scale it and secure your network.
Personally, I’d take my chances with Zoom at the moment — if and only if I cannot use FaceTime.
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