Any of you use Ring?
I heard about this today, looks like a nice Skype alternative: https://ring.cx
On Wed, 27 Jul 2016 01:00:21 +0200 (CEST)
name at domain wrote:
> I heard about this today, looks like a nice Skype alternative:
> https://ring.cx
You might want to look at the `Video & Voice' section of this page:
https://prism-break.org/en/all/
They list CSipSimple, Linphone, Ring, Jitsi, Mumble and Tox as free
software alternatives to Microsoft-owned Skype, Apple FaceTime et al.
It would be nice to hear if anyone has tried these and compared them.
I can comment barely on each.
I'm currrently using Ring.
* CSipSimple, Jitsi, and Linphone: They provide SIP support. SIP is
somewhat old but is similar to telephone communications, although it's
very heavy on the Internet usage. SIP *does-not* connect to telephone
network, but there are services (and software) that allow you to do so
(I can't elaborate more on this since I don't use SIP anymore).
* Jitsi and Pidgin: Provide XMPP support. XMPP is by default text-only,
but overtime, there are extensions that where published (including some
that add video and audio support). Even though these extensions are also
standardized like the main XMPP standard, they're optional (the service
provider can choose what to support), and there's generally no
standardized fall-back (e.g.: If the receiver doesn't support audio,
make the sender send a temporary link that has the audio recorded,
although this would only work with a push-to-talk solution, but XMPP's
audio extension doesn't seem to be push-to-talk).
* Tox and it's clients: I can't talk about the functionalities, but
there are some past happenings that scared away the whole Tox community,
and because of this, I can't really tell how well it is, and how much
it'll endure.
* Ring: Seems to function like Tox but it started to publicized very
different than Tox project. While Tox choose not to appear in public
conferences exclusively related to free/libre software movement, Ring
has taken the first step during LibrePlanet 2016 (which is one of the
few conferences that are indeed aligned to the free/libre software
movement).
* There are other software and projects that you can find to be related
to communications, but *some* of them are browser-based. I have been in
contact with few of these, but my experience shows me that, while their
software is free/libre in the level of code, licenses, dependencies and
such like (and so deserve to be listed in the Free Software Directory),
their mentality/ideology is too much "open source"-only.
I am a translator!
Heh, the prism-break, lots of good info there.
Canonical’s Ubuntu is not recommended by PRISM Break because it contains Amazon ads and data leaks by default. GNU/Linux distributions based on Ubuntu are also currently not recommended due to several other reasons.
Regarding PRISM Break, I don't really recommend using it as basis to see
whether some software is free/libre or not. Just add:
https://directory.fsf.org
http://packages.trisquel.info/
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/
https://www.parabola.nu/packages/
http://archive.gnewsense.org/gnewsense/pool/
http://mirror.fsf.org/dragora/dragora-current/sources/
https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/
http://downloads.librecmc.org/sources/
http://files.proteanos.com/pub/proteanos/pool/
.. to your list of favorites, and you're set, some of these even have
search bar integration to your browser (so you can add them to your
search bar).
PRISM Break isn't about software freedom, it's about security, and
that's a secondary goal for free/libre software.
Yes the prism-break site was very interesting. I read through the entire thread about Ubuntu and derivatives.
I am a translator!
Yeah.. We need reproducible builds -> https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/About
Another good one, actually better, is -->
https://www.privacytools.io/
A good resource on basic sec/priv is -->
https://www.deepdotweb.com/jolly-rogers-security-guide-for-beginners/
As far as gpg, This is a bible -->
https://riseup.net/en/gpg-best-practices
There are many others, but these are the best I can recall now. If you have good related links please do paste them here.
I found the thread replies helpful. Here are some VoIP-relevant
security-related links.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defence guide:
https://ssd.eff.org/
In particular, this page:
https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/introduction-threat-modeling
Riseup has many good documents about security topics:
https://riseup.net/en/security/resources
The Guardian Project makes Ostel (ostel.co) and other tools to help
journalists. This page is relevant to VoIP:
https://dev.guardianproject.info/projects/ostn/wiki/Wiki
It might be worth noting that Ostel's servers are hosted in the USA.
Despite this, I like the look of this project and will probably use
Jitsi+Ostel for VoIP in the future.
I only have experience with Jitsi.
Installing it isn't straightforward at all, specially since you need to create an XMPP account (or any of the other choices offered at first, like SIP and other stuff I'm supposed to know about as a new user).
Another small issue is that enabling remote control is done by a small checkbox, rather hard to notice when you don't know much about computer (exactly the kind of person I'm supposed to help remotely). It should be way more obvious.
Other that this, it's really great. maybe a tiny bit slower than Skype/Teamviewer, but really not by far in my experience. Oh, another small issue is the keyboard input not being the same when connecting remotely on a Mac for example. Probably the easiest way to solve it is to go and display the on-screen keyboard for those specific but vital keys.
So yeah, a couple of hurdles, but it works really great.
It just needs a simpler user guide.
I am a member!
I just built and installed the Ring Gnome client onto my Parabola setup. No calls yet, so I dont' know how that part works, but startup was as easy as would be with skype. My machine-generated number is:
ring:50ba038c8b3f0f1faa10a5ff6fbb379decc489f9
I am a member!
I'm back on Belenos and have trouble installing Ring; some dependencies not available or are wrong versions. If you're using ring on Trisquel 7, perhaps you can help?
Thanks,
Dave Hunt
stalk me on gnusocial: name at domain
Unless I'm terribly mistaken, I don't remember having dependency
conflicts. In any case, can you tell me what are the conflicting
packages?
I am a member!
On the ring page, I chose Ubuntu 14.04 from the drop-down list; the page showed me the instructions for Debian 8, which I followed. After adding the repositories and updating my system, the attempt to install ring resulted in the following.
dhunt@belenos:~$ sudo apt-get install ring
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
ring : Depends: libcamel-1.2-49 but it is not installable
Depends: libcogl-pango20 (>= 1.17.4) but it is not installable
Depends: libcogl-path20 (>= 1.17.4) but it is not installable
Depends: libcogl20 (>= 1.17.4) but it is not installable
Depends: libqt5core5a (>= 5.3.0) but 5.2.1+dfsg-1ubuntu14.3 is to be installed
Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 4.9) but 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.3 is to be installed
Depends: ring-daemon (= 20160803.1.e4c8ed3~dfsg1-1) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
dhunt@belenos:~$
dhunt@belenos:~$
On the Ring official site, I clicked on "Join the Ring" button (which
automatically takes me to the "GNU/Linux" option of the "Download"
page), and I also selected "Ubuntu 14.04", but the instructions changed
accordingly (from "Debian 8" to "Ubuntu 14.04"), I'm using Abrowser
47.0.
I'm currently viewing the information of the "ring" package I have, and
the following dependencies seem to be non-existing (that is: they're not
used/needed by the "ring" package I have):
* libcamel
* libcogl-pango20
* libcogl-path20
* libcogl20
* libqt5core5a (>= 5.3.0) (the package I have depends on >= 5.2.0)
* libstdc++6 (>= 4.9) (the package I have depends on >= 4.8.1)
As for "ring-daemon" package, make sure it's not being held, or broken.