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Mozilla Eyes Decentralized Web-Based Videoconferencing Platform ‘Meething’ (zdnet.com) 25
Fix the Internet had many key themes, including collaboration and decentralization (as well as user-controlled data and privacy-protecting social networks). That event “drew the interest of some 1,500 people in 520 projects, and 25 were chosen to receive the full package and stipend during the development of their minimum viable product (MVP). Below that, as far as pecuniary commitment goes, is the ‘MVP Lab,’ similar to the spring program but offering a total of $16,000 per team.”
And one of those MVP Lab teams is Meething, a new video conferencing and collaboration platform from the innovation lab ERA. Meething “aims to be more secure than existing video conferencing tools and run on a decentralized database engine and leverage peer-to-peer networking” according to ZDNet.
In their video interview with CEO Mark Nadal, he outlined the following selling points:
- Browser based video conferencing gives customers better options for security as well as branding.
- Open source architecture is a win and the peer-to-peer networking is more efficient on compute costs.
- Meething doesn’t require downloads or apps that increase the security attack surface.
The total addressable market for video conferencing is large and can support multiple players.
Their press release quotes Mark Mayo, a former Chief Product Officer at Mozilla who served as Meething’s mentor, arguing that video conferencing on the web “has long promised to enable a whole new world of online collaboration. Frankly, it hasn’t delivered. It’s been way too hard to build cool products with video and Meething aims to be the zero-barrier-to-entry platform that realizes this future. Soon, video conferencing won’t suck!”
- Where you have talkth and gather learningth?
- Where you’re seething because you have to attend another stupid meeting.
Group video Sexeething. Not my kink, but I’m sure its someone’s out there.
Web-Based Videoconferencing Platform ‘Meething’
Not to be confused with the new veggie burgers, “Meathing”.
[ s/veggie burgers/male porn star/ ]
Or the new Nintendo console software, “Mii Thing”.
This has to be the worst fucking name for a product. Some asshole collects a paycheck for this? Hey Mozilla or Mozi//a@ whatever you’re called now. Are you rendering faster than Chrome? How about security, do you sandbox processes? What you’re working on being the google+ of video conferencing? Hey whatever floats your boat.
- Look, it’s hard to beat Microsoft Bob for worst product name.
if you look at it, it appears to be a multi-user version of peerjs.
Not quite what you were expecting I think, that it also comes with a distributed DB so you can do meeting things with strangers is a bonus. Or something, but Mozilla isn’t turning into Zoom, more like playing with new tech toys to give us all something useful. Check the github source out.
Decentralised and P2P. How will the authorities get access?
- At your house. P2P means everyone in the meeting sees your IP, unless you are running through some sort obfuscating network portal. Keep in mind they keep saying Security,not Anonymity.
Mr Methane
Thanks for that memory
All three were promised back in the 70s to be gotten by the year 2000, and we still don’t have those technologies. Prospects don’t appear hopeful either.
- by ludux ( 6308946 )We’ve had flying cars for almost a hundred years. They’re called helicopters.
You can’t move round here for helicopters driving down the road
“Meething doesn’t require downloads or apps that increase the security attack surface.”
No, it just requires that you give your web browser unfettered access to your computer hardware, potentially opening your computer up to the rest of the world.
I’d rather have a single-purpose app.
“doesn’t require”
google the definition of require.
- by Pascal Sartoretti ( 454385 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @04:09PM (#60157070)I guess many people will complain that Mozilla is again losing its focus, but I don’t agree : we need an agnostic web conferencing platform. I don’t want to be tied to Skype, Zoom, WebEx, etc…
- by Kjella ( 173770 )
I guess many people will complain that Mozilla is again losing its focus, but I don’t agree : we need an agnostic web conferencing platform. I don’t want to be tied to Skype, Zoom, WebEx, etc…
The problem is that you don’t get rid of a platform until everyone you talk to drops it. After WebEx refused to work with the company laptops we’re now down to two, Skype for business and Teams depending on who we’re collaborating with. Then again, at home we did drop Skype for Discord for audio chats so… if it works well, it’s not like we have any loyalty. That’s the one good thing about video conferencing, there’s no real penalty to switching.
I’m not a big fan of online meetings. I know it’s the best we have right now but I’m getting really tired of seeing barely-HD badly-lit postage stamp sized windows of people all replicating everything bad with traditional meetings, while throwing this bizarro-world meeting-in-my-bedroom or meeting-behind-my-carefully-curated-bookshelf thing on top of it.
That said, if there’s a way to prevent Microsoft or Zoom or Cisco or Citrix from cornering the conferencing market, go for it. It’s unfortunate that Zoom wo
- I know itâ(TM)s all about privacy these days. But one of the use cases should be logging in with your eID. Online meeting with your government service or doctor or teacher would be benefit from a trusted id
I totally agree that video conferencing is disappointingly pushed toward half-assed centralized services, and I’m glad to see that Mozilla is supporting a project to make it more open and decentralized. But I’d like to know, what other projects are they working on? Because personally, I don’t think that video conferencing is the big glaring problem.
To me, the big glaring problem is text messaging. And no, I don’t mean “text messaging” like mobile text messaging, like SMS. I mean the broader category of
I don’t care if it’s “decentralized” or if FBI can listen in. What I do care about is that in all these tools without a single exception both audio and video suck ass so bad, I dread even launching them, and will do my best to not use them after the lockdowns are over. I believe these problems are technically solvable with today’s technology. Instead we get this “decentralized” bullshit again.
Does anyone remember Firefox Hello? It was a very functional WebRTC video conference functionality builtin to Firefox; it was my preferred way of doing video meetings, until they abandoned because nobody was using it, Google Hangouts and Skype were already too entrenched…
- Something over 25 years ago I was doing research versions of real-time multi-party multi-media conferencing over TCP/IP. (The video was truly ugly, but it ran at 15 frames-per-second and you could tell that it was synched with the audio.) Strong encryption and IP multicast was the easy way to go.
Failure to get the big telecom I worked for to turn on multicast at least for its customers was one of the big failures of my technical career.
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