Realistically speaking, how difficult would it be to make a simple VoIP program, and why has no one tried to stick it up to the utter shit that is Skype?
I imagine, streaming would be the most difficult part, and it's just opening sockets on two machines, then polling the microphone at a fast rate in both machines, then encoding them in some light codec and sending it to the other machine through the socket. The other machine should only poll the socket at a fast rate and play all incoming sounds. Anything past that would just be UX improvements that would probably be much simpler than this, which is already as simple as it can get networking-wise.
Is there something I don't know about streaming audio that complicates this task, or is it just that nobody is willing to replace all shit VoIP programs?
Tox is not a simple chat program. It's far from simple; its distributed architecture is a convoluted mess that doesn't provide many advantages over a federated one, and as far as I know, it still has no group voice chat, probably because of this.
Daniel Wood
Discord is replacing Skype in a lot of places, and it's as simple as can be.
Xavier Myers
Discord is centralized and its client is proprietary, not to mention the underlying service provider, WebRTC (at least in browsers), is not exactly simple or transparent. It's most certainly not a real alternative, although it's a better Skype than Skype.
Juan Morgan
its not as simple as that though, and you don't constantly poll the microphone and send packets
Learn about networking, packet-switched vs circuit-switched networks, and then maybe you'll understand why VoIP is difficult to guarantee solid performance in.
It's the best alternative to proprietary programs I've found yet.
Robert Carter
VoIP is never circuit switched. That's exactly why it is VoIP and not a regular telephone.
Hunter Parker
Is this just Tox as made by non retards?
Asher Moore
It's from a company called SavoirFaireLinux that took their VOIP program(SFLPhone) and forked it to add p2p communication. It's just as focused on secure communications as Tox is but their logo isn't as cool looking and most of their developers are French.
Unfortunately as happens with any Skype competitor, no matter how serious a threat, Microsoft gets involved in no time
I still use SFLPhone for SIP calling as getting people to install and use a free internet voice chat that's still in beta and uses a complicated 40 character RingID instead of a typical username is practically impossible. Your average computer or smartphone user doesn't know about copy and paste.
Leo Bailey
I've never had any problem with Tox.
Justin Moore
There's Matrix/Riot.im which seems to be moving along at a much faster pace than Tox AFAICT
Daniel Turner
You have an issue with centralized voicechats and yet you shit on Tox?
Sebastian Thomas
Take into account his reason for shitting on Tox and you wouldn't have any confusion.
Parker Long
well there is retroshare the only bad side (not finished) is conference calls with multiple people it can work thought tor also
Gabriel Gomez
What was even wrong with ventrilo/teamspeak/mumble? Discord is spyware and I refuse to use it.
Chase Watson
One of my problems with mumble is that text chat is garbage. I don't want to have 2 different programs for chat and then voice. And I also wouldn't want to invite someone to my server for every situation I need to use voice.
I really want something like Discord that's open source and isn't centralized.
Hunter Martin
Mumble also lacks individual user audio controls. This is a must because my friends' microes are always acting up. We basically need an improved Mumble, perhaps federated so you don't have to fuck around with servers and all of them happen to be interconnected with each other.
Lincoln Gutierrez
qtox has group voicechat. the architecture it uses has nothing to do with how simple it is to use. And yes, non mitm, end to end crypto is a advantage over federated servers. please die in a fire you shillfuck
Aaron Russell
i just use wire. it's kind of like you but with more updates. the only thing i don't like is that there is a ten person group limit
Elijah Myers
What is wrong with teamspeak ?
Andrew King
By that definition, VPN, proxies and Tor are all MitM. Fuck, you are being MitM RIGHT NOW by your ISP bouncing your packets in their nodes. Tor and VPN are no longer secure because an user on Holla Forums said so, stop the presses. Even fucking WhatsApp offers end to end encryption, but it doesn't matter because it leaks metadata and that's all Facebook needs to know to datamine you. Tox also leaks metadata to ISP and the NSA by virtue of being P2P unless you run it over Tor, by the way, but I doubt you want to voice chat over Tor
Alexander Wright
Without crypto? Absolutely. There's no way to know if any of them changed the data or not if it isn't encrypted. ISPs have done this many times too, either by injecting their ads or by redirecting misses on their DNS to their ad-ridden pages.
Ryder Rivera
meet.jit.si/ werks. Doesn't cover all of Skype's use cases, but it's good enough for a one-time voice chat and it's Stallman-compliant. All the other people need is a link and a reasonably modern browser.
This project might be a big deal a few years from now as Skype only becomes worse with time, I'd claim a few usernames while they're available. Although since this is in beta you might lose all of them and have to re-register.
Leo Torres
The fact that Skype is still used blows me away. Even the "sp00ky" types are too retarded for Jabber + OTR
TOX "werks", as does Ricochet or w/e it's called. You can also use god olde GPG encryption. Seriously, nothing beats GPG.
And a little story.
Ryan Wright
How us tox these days?
Jason Bennett
Development of toxcore seems abandoned by "irungen2"
Other than that, the protocol and the security work fine.
John Thomas
Alright. So it's going down like all other open source projects. No one gives a fuck, infighting and 10000 forks which all die the same way as the original one.
Tox was never going to end successfully as the idea itself was wrong.
Jeremiah Myers
So the FSF finally listened to that poll they made some time ago's suggestions and decided to pick up and develop a "libre IM champion" to win Skype in its own game. Nice, hope this gets far.
Oh nice, I just hope you don't have to pay Ethereum coins for username registration and retrieval. Turns out Hotwheels was wrong and Ethereum IS useful. Also hope it isn't vulnerable to 51% or Sybil attacks.
GPG and OTR are pretty much opposite encryption schemes, though. I personally think OTR is largely unnecessary for privacy unless you are talking to strangers about shady stuff
Chase Brooks
I'm pretty sure the only reason you would have bad performance in VoIP is bufferbloat. That's purely to do with the quality of your ISP and home network.
Carson Myers
You don't. It just werx.
Nathan Perry
You can use ffmpeg if your friends aren't retarded
Encryption != signing
Dominic Richardson
Tampering with non-malleable encryption schemes is not possible, or at least from a third party perspective. Leaks always exist, but I doubt ISP have access to CA. Now, the NSA, on the other hand...
Joseph Morales
riot.im and ring.cx both exist, though I'm not exactly sure of how usable they are right now
