I have actually been receiving much spam from gmail addresses lately and have considered banning the domain altogether.
> I was surprised to find out that my friend Peter Eckersley — a very privacy conscious person who is Technology Projects Director at the EFF — used Gmail
I find that the EFF does this more often than not, like how they also criticize Amazon for giving police warrant-less access to Ring cameras... and then stream their online gatherings live on Twitch. I find their messaging sometimes does not tie well with their actions.
>police warrant-less access to Ring cameras... and then stream their online gatherings live on Twitch
Streaming a public event on twitch vs on-demand warrentless police access to on-prem cameras? Am I missing something or are these two things not just not in the neighborhood, they are on different planets.
>Am I missing something or are these two things not just not in the neighborhood, they are on different planets.
Amazon owns Twitch. I think OP is highlighting that the EFF speaks out against Amazon's privacy practices while simultaneously supporting Amazon financially.
That isn't supporting Amazon financially, that's meeting people where they live in a world you don't control.
This is like saying I'm a hypocrite for using crosswalks if I also believe that our cities shouldn't be dominated by cars. If it's true, it's not true in a way that's interesting or useful. It doesn't suggest my views are insincere or without merit. Maybe my views do suck, and maybe the EFF sucks too, but you're going to have to do more work to establish that than pointing out that we're imperfect beings living in a world that may thwart our intentions. You'll actually have to engage with the substance of the argument and the facts in dispute, and make the case that there's a deficiency there.
Are you offering to pay for them to host their own streaming solution and volunteering to handle technical support for users who have trouble with it?
This gotcha-game is tiring. People don't have to like Amazon to realize that they and YouTube are the only practical game in town for free live streaming.
Debian manages to do global streaming for DebConf every year using only libre software and VMs running Debian at cloud providers. Seems like this is their setup using ansible:
DebConf does host their own HLS streams. (They use video.js, which was started by the cofounders of my former employer Mux; I'm pretty familiar with it.)
I don't intend to suggest that it's impossible by any means; I've done it recently for a project of my own. But it's work, and it's expensive work, and it becomes a question of quality of experience. They make compromises to do their own hosting; bandwidth is always a little bit scarce and DebConf's live streams are 2Mbps @ 720p as a max rendition. For their audience, that might be fine. For others, it's not, and a good way to drive viewers away. I don't have an intuition as to whether the EFF's target audience feels that way, but their overlap with the free-software set isn't complete and wanting their live streams to look roughly competitive with everybody else's isn't unreasonable; how you look and the reliability/QoE of your stream does impact credibility.
The second tine of the fork is user accessibility. "It's just Twitch, everybody uses this" is a powerful argument for that accessibility if, unlike DebConf, you can't reasonably expect everybody to read a man page if there are problems.
Hmm, my memory tells me there was just a web page you could visit to watch them, plus links if you wanted to watch in an external media player. Post-conference you can look through the schedule to watch individual talks.
"Online gatherings" as in 1:M live streams, or "online gatherings" as in "pack everyone into a WebRTC room and hope it holds"? Because Twitch and YouTube do the former and I don't see anything in BBB that natively emits HLS or DASH. I see plugins that will talk to an RTMP server, but that leaves a very long row to hoe.
1:M live streaming is very, very difficult to get right--it's is why video providers can charge so much for private video in the first place.
Its not really the streaming persay its this is TV broadcast tech running over IP.
Its a networking problem, not a software issue. You will have to change the format or be independently wealthy to compete, 1:M will always by nature be a matter of outsized resources on the transmit versus receive side.
It's one of the reasons why these days I'm bearish on the future of independently-run video. The numbers are aggressively bad. People use YouTube and Twitch because they have to, not because they want to.
It works relatively well on a beefy BBB instance. Jitsi from my experience craps out on low-bandwidth scenarios, but I've attended BBB meetings of respectable size with no issue.
WebRTC as currently implemented has very hard and by its nature has very low audience caps. There's a reason why WebRTC-to-HLS gateways exist; WebRTC by itself isn't substitutable, and if you're going to act like this I'd think there's a pretty significant onus upon you to provide something substitutable.
The substitutable thing is "another content provider that does HLS or equivalent", and we're back where we started, because doing so independently, as discussed in another subthread, either costs a lot of money or comes with compromising tradeoffs, as well as a support burden that somebody has to pay for and do.
Independent web video is mostly awful. The best answers are bad ones. Sorry.
You can be against something and still find yourself having to use things you complain about.
Folks still eat food even though they are aghast at how farm workers are exploited in the world.
You can support robust public transportation yet drive a car due to poor-to-no public transit.
Sometimes, facebook is the best place to organize demonstrations against facebook.
Just because you have complaints about the world doesn't mean that you don't live in it and need to use it as designed. If you don't, how else do you expect to change it?
Food itself isn't optional, but folks that aren't absolutely poor generally have choices in which foods they eat.
You can spend more on eggs so the chickens are being treated slightly better.
You can look for meat that isn't produced using confinement farming.
You can buy fair trade coffee.
You can check out how the local grocery store treats its employees, and choose the one with the best treatment. You can try something similar with food producers.
If you have a local butcher, you might consider buying there instead of a factory meat plant.
You can vote for folks that will look out for workers (the ones working the fields and with animals), both in your country and abroad.
Most of these aren't available for folks that are poor enough: You can't very well shop ethically if you are stuck getting food from a food bank, for example, and you might understandably be more worried about getting enough calories for yourself or your child.
jjulius, I did not state that they were helping them financially, though I also had not thought of that. I think Twitch does not display ads on non-profits streams (is this right?), but it's also extra visitors at the end of the day.
My comment was more along the general line of criticizing something verbally, but then taking actions that, in my view, undermine that same message. Contrast this with the FSF, for example, which is feverishly uncompromising about its values.
That is a bit of my feeling too, funding aside. Often it appears that they are slapping Big Tech on the wrist. Still do great work in general though, just nitpicking since we're on the topic.
I find their messaging sometimes does not tie well with their actions.
Not everybody can be RMS. As an EFF supporter, I don't want them to waste my donations by withdrawing from the world and handicapping themselves unnecessarily.
Who says boycotting Amazon? Strawman much?
Rolling your own streaming solution is not hard these days, you have plenty of FOSS options to do that. But the EFF is too lazy to care.
> I have actually been receiving much spam from gmail addresses lately and have considered banning the domain altogether.
For some accounts I block all Gmail usernames ending with a number: from 0@gmail.com to 9@gmail.com. The only exceptions are addresses that I have added to my whitelist. A bit drastic, but it did wonders to my mailbox.
It’s pretty hard to distinguish spam accounts by domain. They skip domains regularly. Much more often than actual humans. If your spam filters are only able to filter by domain you might want to find some more sophisticated filters.
He's saying the @gmail.com domain is useless to him, because it he gets so much spam from it.
I could certainly see that being the case, and if you can block the whole domain and whitelist the few contacts you actually have, it probably could work decently well.
I experienced it maybe a couple of months ago. Then it went away. Since so many use gmail, it's only logical for the spammers to focus on playing gmail filters and one obvious factor would be using a gmail address as the source.
Yawn. That's a classic "you say we can improve society? yet you participate in society, curious". Yes they use Twitch because millions of people are there and they need to reach a wide audience.
You don't even know what you're talking about. Their gatherings don't address "millions", but are typically just a hundred or so guys, mostly other donors. This could be hosted fine on an alternative like BBB.
Writing lazy and uninformed comments like yours on HN certainly is a classic though.
> I was surprised to find out that my friend Peter Eckersley — a very privacy conscious person who is Technology Projects Director at the EFF — used Gmail
I find that the EFF does this more often than not, like how they also criticize Amazon for giving police warrant-less access to Ring cameras... and then stream their online gatherings live on Twitch. I find their messaging sometimes does not tie well with their actions.