Encrypted Video Conference Calls With Signal

No intro paragraph needed. Title says it all. Let’s get started:

If a group chat for everyone that needs to be on the conference call doesn’t yet exist, you’ll need to create one and add participants. Once it exists, anyone can join in a conference or bail out at any time. They can do it by text, audio, and/or video as long as the group exists.

You can inform everyone that you’d like to start at a particular date and time and they’ll need to set their own reminders to show up.

To Create a Group

(To JOIN an existing conference call, go to your existing Signal group, then skip ahead to step #8)

  1. Start Signal.
  2. In the lower right, tap the blue icon with the pencil in it to start a new conversation.
  3. You’ll see “New group” at the top.
  4. Type in someone’s name from your contacts. Tap their name in the search results and they’ll be added to the group.
  5. Repeat step 4 for everyone you want to be in the group.
  6. Once done adding participants, in the lower right, tap the right arrow in the blue circle.
  7. Enter a Group Name. This will be visible to all participants. Then hit the blue pill button in the lower right with “create” in it.
    1. The group now exists
  8. Anyone in the group can now text the whole group or join a video or audio call. Tap the camera icon in the upper right hand corner.
  9. You will join an existing video conference OR if you’re the first one, you’ll start one.
  10. While IN the conference call, tap anywhere on the screen where there is NOT a button or other control… for example, tap on someone’s face, and you’ll get 4 icons at the bottom of the screen. To toggle your camera, hit the camera icon. To toggle your microphone, tap the microphone button. Swipe up to switch between views of each member.

Anyone in the group can come and go as they please. Anyone can participate as video+audio or audio only or just send texts.

The group stays forever until someone deletes it.

Enjoy your encrypted conference calls!

Brave now part of the Decentralized Web

On January 19, 2021, the Brave browser released version 1.19.86. A MAJOR feature was added:

IPFS support

Now, if you enter an IPFS URL, such as:

ipfs://Qmf93BEm2UsgEm949QY3uSrXxn5UfDH83ZFSvQsBGyxPRt

It will resolve the reference and deliver to you the file.

The method in which it resolves this depends on your local settings and whether or not you’re running a local IPFS node, the IPFS browser plugin, or neither. In all 3 cases, it will still resolve the URL and find and deliver the file.

In addition to that, it will give you the option of running an IPFS node on your PC. I highly recommend doing that, IF you’re not low on resources. All it takes is a single button click.

Then YOUR PC becomes part of the global InterPlanetary File System network, increasing the geographical distribution of files and speeding up the global performance of the entire network, in addition to speeding up YOUR use of it. Any file, DAPP (distributed application), or decentralized website (which is just a DAPP, BTW), will load for you much faster the second time you access it AND it’ll be available to you even when you’re offline!

IPFS is a critical part of the infrastructure of the new world wide web, which is being built out as fully decentralized and censorship resistant. Unlike centralized websites that get bogged down and slow down when more people use them, DAPPs actually get FASTER as more people use them!

This is a BIG deal that IPFS is now fully supported in a browser.

Go get the Brave browser here. It’s build from the Chromium source code, so it looks and feels similar to Chrome and all Chrome extensions work in it. It also strips out all the Google spyware and has an ad blocker built in, so browsing is faster without all the page loading delays caused by the ridiculous amount of ads loaded in most web pages these days.

IPFS: Bypassing Big-Tech Censorship

Government Censorship

It used to be abusive, dictatorial, tyrannical 3rd world governments that blocked and censored information from the victims that lived in oppression under their rule. Technologies like TOR and encryption products were invented to help squeak through the iron fists of the banana republic tin pot governments hold on information flow.

Tech Censorship

Now, as you’re probably painfully aware by now, web sites, apps, and even PEOPLE in FIRST WORLD countries are being DELETED from the internet by a small group of emotional and sanctimonious people with little interaction with the vast majority of the public. But they are running the technology services that everything runs on and they’ve decided that THEY are your moral superiors and overlords and have appointed themselves the arbiters of “truth” and “morality” and are now ENFORCING that, aggressively on everyone, especially those in the first world. And the scary part about it, is these are the same people the created many of the technologies to HELP third world victims circumvent their government’s censorship!

Liberators

Now, there’s a NEW group of technology experts working to create new technologies to liberate the victims of censorship in the first world, as well as those in the third world. They’re reinventing the world wide web. The problem with the current (legacy) web is that it’s centrally controlled. All the technologies for creating your own website are dependent on multiple 3rd parties, each of which are in control of one or more aspects of your website. They are:

  1. DNS (Domain Name System)
  2. Registrars
  3. ISP (Internet Service Provider)
  4. Web Hoster
  5. Storage Provider
  6. Database Provider
  7. Client Software for users (Browsers)

IPFS solves the problems of:

  • Web Hosters
  • Storage Providers
  • DNS (partially)

Here’s how it works…

Volunteers, like you and me, and even some organizations, run software on their PCs that makes them nodes in the IPFS global network. If you want to “publish” a file, you simply make it available via your local node. That’s it. It would probably help if you give out the hash of the file. With that hash, people can request the file form the IPFS global network. The network will hunt through the nodes until it eventually finds YOUR file, then will deliver it to the requester. As a result of that request and transfer, your file is now in more than one place. The NEXT person that requests the file could get it from any of those places, and it gets replicated again.

The more a file is requested, the more it spreads and the faster its found by those requesting it. After it’s been replicated once, you could even turn off your machine and people can STILL get it.

You can even publish a website onto IPFS instead of a web hoster. Now your website is decentralized and available even if you shut down your PC from which you originally published it. Side note: If it’s decentralized, it’s an “app”, not a website.

Since there’s no central server, there’s no one place to attack to try to bring your site down.

Since there’s no central server, NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE, not even the U.S. government can take down your app. In fact, not even YOU can take it down! The ONLY way it disappears is if people stop requesting it AND no one has your files “pinned” (marked as “do not delete”). Most files will eventually get deleted if they’re not accessed enough as newer files being requested start filling up the nodes’ storage space, older ones get flushed out.