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India's Richest Man Takes On Zoom (techcrunch.com) 28

Posted by BeauHD from the ready-or-not-here-he-comes dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: India's Reliance Jio Platforms, which recently concluded a $15.2 billion fundraise run, is ready to enter a new business: Video conferencing. On Thursday evening, the firm -- backed by Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man -- formally launched JioMeet, its video-conference service that looks uncannily like Zoom. Like Zoom and Google Meet, JioMeet offers unlimited number of free calls in high definition (720p) to users and supports as many as 100 participants on a call. But interestingly, it's not imposing a short time limit on a call's duration. Jio Platforms says a call can be "up to 24 hours" long. The service currently has no paid plans and it's unclear if Jio Platforms, which has a reputation of giving away services for free for years, plans to change that.

Jio Platforms, which began beta testing JioMeet in May this year, said the video conferencing service offers "enterprise-grade" host controls. These include: password protection on each call, multi-device login support (up to five devices), and ability to share screen and collaborate. Other features include the ability to switch "seemingly" from one device to another, and a 'Safe Driving Mode' for when a participant is in commute. Hosts can also enable a 'waiting room' to ensure participants have to ask for permission to enter a call. The company did not provide any more details, including whether people outside of India could use the service. On its website, JioMeet claims all the meetings are "encrypted" but does not elaborate whether these calls are end-to-end encrypted.
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India's Richest Man Takes On Zoom More

India's Richest Man Takes On Zoom

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  • Zoom (Score:3)

    by webmistressrachel ( 903577 ) on Thursday July 02, 2020 @07:20PM (#60256016) Journal

    Needs to be taken on. It's servers are in China, the encryption turned out to server based (open at their end to siphoning and surveillance), and governments everywhere are using it for top-level meetings, some classified, all invite-only, notably the UK.

    Are we just stupid?

    • "Its servers are..."; 'fixed that for you' troll eaten...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      It all makes no sense what so ever. Computers have enough power to do that peer to peer over the internet, not servers required. What would you place you business meetings on someone else's server, the idea is crazy. It is a straight forward connection, you only need one computer to act a server only to set up the meeting and they can peer to peer from there. Sounds like a bunch of suckers begging to be data mined, to have all their business ideas, well and truly exposed.

      • It doesn't have make sense, as long as it makes cents.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        Let's meet up online. I suggest 10pm tonight.

        Now, do you host or do I host. What's your IP address, and will it be the same at 10pm? Will you even be online at 10pm, or will you turn up two minutes late, making me continually try and connect for 8 minutes (because I was early).

        Or we could use a server that's always-on, that knows we have a meeting scheduled, that lets us both connect when we're ready. And our 18 mutual friends that will be joining us.

        Since we're using that server we can also now allow it to

    • Are you crazy? India is just as bad if not worse. Actually all countries are pretty bad. Maybe some African country due to pack of resources?

      • Nobody beats China when it comes to not just surveillance, but other rogue behavior as well. Yeah, I'd rather that the servers were in the home country of the people using the service, or in case of international meetings, in one of the participant's countries. But short of that, I'd prefer to see servers based anywhere outside China. If it can't be the US, for whatever reason, I'd settle for India

    • "Stupid" is pretty strong but ignorant seems fair. Ignorant to think that the issues you identify are resolved by switching from Zoom to this other proprietary meeting system which, for all we know, is capable of doing the same thing. Ignorant for thinking that nationality plays a role here—these systems don't become trustworthy because they originate from one country instead of another. Software is deemed trustworthy by inspection, improvement, and we help other computer users by sharing. Thus softwa

  • One less video conferencing program I have to worry about installing.
    • wrong - i have zoom on gentoo
    • Don't you use your phone - in which case, you'd only worry about iOS or Android? I work on this TrueOS laptop, but if I had to use any videoconferencing tool, I'd look for it in the Apple Store or in Google Play.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ukoda ( 537183 )
        No, I don't use my phone, I use a PC. It is where my apps and data etc are for when I am doing a screen share and when others are doing a screen share I want a decent size screen so I can see the details. The 6" screen on a phone will never compete with the 55" screen on my PC for information presentation so iOS or Android is not going to cut it for work.
  • At this point all the news about someone taking on Zoom is just Zoom marketing. It's quite baffling how everybody supposedly keeps waiting for a commercial solution when the free and open solution already exists. Eventually they will realize that they don't need n-way teleconferencing anyway. Most people just need a simple live stream.
    • If there are just 2 people involved, FaceTime or Duo would work fine. Reason Zoom exploded in popularity is that typically, more than 2 people need to meet - whether it's in a class, an office meeting or a club. Btw, where are 'Jitsi's' servers located?
      • Your Jitsi server is wherever you want it to be, and it's not limited to two people. Granted, Jitsi needs beefy devices if you want "many" to participate in a conference, because the server does not merge streams into one. So, no shareholder meetings. On the other hand that makes the server requirements minuscule. In most of those "many" people conferences, people should probably just turn off their video and audio streams anyway until they need to say something.

        • Except that these solutions are promoted as an alternative to physical presence, and have caught on fire this year thanks to the Wuhan virus. When that's the scope of the interaction being suggested - many people in different rooms simulating a situation where they're in one room w/o needing the 6', masks and so on, then cutting off video or audio streams for participants is not an acceptable solution.

          It would be one thing if it were just a meeting of 2 'free software' disciples, but if we're talking abo

  • How can you make end-to-end encryption if you have a 1:100 relation, without each peer uploading a 100 streams to a 100 clients, and each peer receiving a 100 streams from a 100 others? Is that even possible?

    For all i know, end-to-end encryption would only work between 2 peers. But maybe there are mathematical tricks to set up such 1:N encryption, if so, please enlighten me.

  • or BigBlueButton, isn't it?

    • India has major corruption problems and Modi is a pretty terrible guy.

      China controls zoom and their recent laws in HK are written so as to apply to people outside China/HK. Don't use zoom if you ever intend to visit China.

      Maybe google meet? Google is evil but they already have all our information and they don't arrest people with trumped up charges yet.

      • No, all Google does is threaten to demonetize the online publications we read if their comments section don't agree w/ them. It's the closest thing to China's surveillance state

        Ideally, I'd like to see a videoconferencing solution from the US, based on US servers. But failing that, I'd pick an Indian one over anything from China. As for how corrupt India may be inside, it's a state to state issue, but nowhere near the same as being surveiled by a totalitarian regime like Beijing. And say what you will

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