Google Hangouts adds remote desktop support

https://plus.google.com/104749322414399121544/posts/Ym4KfErdvnc

by dkhenry • 13 years ago

185 77 13 years ago

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alexhawdon• 13 years ago

Apparently old news, but I didn't know about it and it looks pretty useful. Another point towards steering my parents towards a Chromebook. Though, almost ironically, the lack of Skype support (on the ARM-based ones, unsure about x86) is one of the negative points.

codereflection3• 13 years ago

And Google continues killing off niche application vendors... WalMart of the Internet.

intrazoo• 13 years ago

I doubt this analogy is perfect. Location/upkeep/convenience are different in the software world, and one of the big problems with Walmart is that they underpay their workers. And whereas mass produced X and artisan X might be different, I don't see any advantage of artisan desktop sharing.

Maybe there is something to soaking up a market (RSS) then dropping it (though it seems the ball is being somewhat picked up there), But, maybe unlike walmart?, there is little reason to believe that was malicious. People (Kevin Rose, for example) were making fun of RSS being super dead in 2011. I am no expert, but I doubt it is a google plus play as much as a twitter defeat. Note: I personally love RSS, but if I was not a tech news junkie, it might be of little use to me.

zanny3• 13 years ago

If you want to carry on the analogy, Google has a debit card that only works at Google and unlike Walmart it won't accept competitors coupons and all the stuff sold in store isn't sold anywhere else. You also can't take it apart, and only people with Google debit cards can see any of it when it leaves the store.

Hangouts is becoming a nightmare of a proprietary locked in mess that is destroying decades of progress in FOSS space towards open standards for communication. They are killing Jingle and XMPP by depreciating Talk, and they are now killing VNC. They may not have played nice together, and they may be painfully outdated, but it isn't an excuse to take your toys from the community sandbox, go home, and build yourself a space rocket in your back yard and fence it off, because very few people will pay to get in your back yard and will stay in the sandbox with Tonka Trucks.

codereflection3• 13 years ago

I wasn't looking for a perfect analogy. Simply put that like WalMart killing off mom & pop shops, Google / Microsoft / Amazon are doing the same thing to niche application vendors who do one thing well to make a simple living.

ajross2• 13 years ago

Screen sharing is a Skype feature. If having a broadly available free tool with deep-pocketed corporate support was going to kill off that "niche", then it's surely been dead for years already. This is just Google achieving feature parity with the existing players.

I mean, I'm as much a cynic as anyone, but I swear that these days it seems like Google can't catch a break on this site.

skeletonjelly2• 13 years ago

Skype has screen share but the quality pales in comparison to RDP/Teamviewer

pisarzp• 13 years ago

I thought Skype offers only screen sharing, but doesn't allow to control other person's desktop. I might be wrong though.

gtaylor• 13 years ago

Do you expect them to stop innovating just to avoid stepping on someone else? This development actually makes a lot of sense for Hangouts, and I'm glad they did it.

There is still room for others, especially in the spheres where using Google products is not an option.

kryten4• 13 years ago

Now the NSA can watch your screen! </sarcasm>

Spearchucker• 13 years ago

That's valid. Remote desktop opens up some interesting attack vectors, whether used by the NSA or just some hacker with malicious intent. There's nothing I can see about security mitigations...

drivebyacct23• 13 years ago

"valid" aside from the fact that there's no way in this world or the next that all of that video and remote desktop traffic is going though Google's servers.

VikingCoder2• 13 years ago

I have to be logged in to my Google account to use it.

Did I mention that I use two-factor authentication?

Show me another Remote Desktop software that enforces two-factor authentication.

ISL• 13 years ago

Can anyone comment on how a browser plugin gets access to the desktop? (even if hangouts doesn't do it, there's a remote desktop plugin)

I'm a curmudgeon, but it seems like it's like designing a washing machine attachment that serves as a home security system and pasta maker.

Are there OS or X11 permissions that can restrict userland apps from deviating far from their original use case?

dman2• 13 years ago

The browser is a native app and can use native apis to access screensharing desktop apis. It can then proxy these via some browser plugin api making those available to browser plugins.

Achshar• 13 years ago

Actually there is a pointer lock api that allows apps to control user's mouse. And it can be added as a permission in chrome manifest. They only need the screen and mouse control. Which essentially means control entire machine.

Edit: never mind, I was thinking of chrome app, not the local plugin that we install for voice and video.

zanny3• 13 years ago

Not X11, any app can see or manipulate any other apps screen buffer. It is one reason Wayland is nice.

If your system has MAC you can restrict its file access, but in general you have library support for this stuff built in.

It is also why in most cases it is a PITA to stream 3d rendered screens. Opengl / directX don't provide easy ways like X11 to look at a completed framebuffer and store / broadcast it.

dman2• 13 years ago

In OpenGL this is fairly easy using FBO's - http://www.songho.ca/opengl/gl_fbo.html . I have never used DirectX but I would be surprised if it did not allow you to read the framebuffer.

ajross2• 13 years ago

Wayland doesn't provide meaningful security for that case. It's true that there's no protocol support for arbitrary buffer access, but if you're running as the same user (as is the case here) it's comparatively trivial to dup the drm file descriptor and remap the buffers. You may need to be able to guess (or just probe for) the handles though, I'm not sure.

justinschuh• 13 years ago

NPAPI plugins, ActiveX controls, etc. are just native libraries that are loaded into the browser's process. So, they can do anything that any other native application can do.

shmerl• 13 years ago

When are they going to publish their protocol, or return support for XMPP federation? Users should avoid them until they do either of those.

mlinksva• 13 years ago

Maybe when users actually avoid them, which means users need an alternative, eg Jitsi which has had desktop sharing a couple years.

simoncion3• 13 years ago

ATM XMPP federation is still up and running. If enough people approach the Messaging folks at Google with coherent, well-reasoned reasons for leaving it up (and perhaps securing it with TLS!), then it might get left up for good.

ralphm• 13 years ago

Sorry, but the new Hangouts does not support federation. The old GTalk network, though, does. If a message comes into the latter from non-Google servers, they only show up in connected XMPP clients, not on Android or GMail after upgrading to Hangouts. If the intended recipient does not use a 3rd party XMPP client and has fully upgraded, he will never see the message!

For outbound traffic some odd stuff is going on. Presence from all Hangouts endpoints still propagates to GTalk and thus federates. Messages can also be sent. But again, that's one way and replies are not delivered to Hangouts. Additionally, XMPP iq-type requests to Hangouts endpoints are not responded to, violating the core XMPP spec.

Ralz4• 13 years ago

Am I the only one who prefers regular gchat to google hangouts? It's super difficult to figure out who on my contact list is online or not. I also mistake old msgs as new ones because of the lack of time-stamps. Maybe I'm missing a check-box or something that could fix all this but I gave up and switched back to gchat almost immediately.

baselessdefense• 13 years ago

There is a green bar below the user's picture when they're online.

Zikes• 13 years ago

Only in the web interface, that feature is entirely missing from the Hangouts app that replaced the Google Talk app on Android.

Ralz4• 13 years ago

Just switched back to check this out. I see the green bar under only one of my friends but the rest that are online or away don't have this. Do they also have to have hangouts enabled for me to see that?

Also, I understand that they are trying to make things minimal and look cool but it's not something that's very intuitive or noticeable. I thought it might have meant that I have a chat window open with that person.

myko• 13 years ago

I see timestamps under messages in both the web and Android client.

I definitely prefer the look of Hangouts. I don't see much difference between it and GTalk utility-wise.

Ralz4• 13 years ago

You're right I messed up, the time-stamps are there I just didn't notice them right away as they are faded and underneath the message.

atondwal• 13 years ago

I don't see much difference between it and GTalk utility-wise.

You see online/idle/offline/mobile/mobile-idle icons and status messages in hangouts?

rogerchucker2• 13 years ago

The worst thing about the new Google Hangouts is that it doesn't expose the phone numbers associated with some of the Google Contacts. So in order to make a phone call, I'd have to recall the number and type it in the search bar. Typing the name in the search bar won't reveal that person's phone number either. This is more intuitively done in the old Google Chat which has a phone button which reveals the numbers. So sometimes I can call and sometimes I can chat with the same person. And searching the name reveals number(s) as well.

drivebyacct23• 13 years ago

This is why I suspect they've drug their feet on Google Voice integration. They want to make that seamless. You want to call [Person] and you shouldn't have to even think about whether it's over Hangouts or PTSN.

That's what Google Voice will give them. You call them from the Hangouts app and they pass it through Google Voice if they're not signed into any Hangout machines. It roughly works this way already for existing GV users.

heyheyhey• 13 years ago

Yes, I used gchat for its instant-messaging purposes, which is essentially what the app is all about. Hangouts pretty much got rid of anything instant about it (online/offline, away indicator, status messages, etc.). I eagerly looked forward to Hangouts and installed it the day Google announced it only to switch back to Talk an hour or two later.

I suppose I wouldn't care if I didn't have gchat on 100% of the time I'm on a desktop but I dread the day Hangouts replaces Talk.

clarkm• 13 years ago

I complained about this for a while, but then I saw someone use Hangouts on mobile. I suddenly realized why Google designed it this way. Of course the designers noticed that it was hard to determine who was offline and who was online. In fact, that's the whole point.

Google is incrementally eliminating the distinction between the online and offline world. Pretty soon, the concept of offline won't exist anymore -- everyone will be thought of as online all the time.

But there's no place for old-style instant messaging in this mental model. So they're moving away from it. But they can't make this change all at once, so they're doing it slowly. When the distinction goes away, Hangouts will be just like SMS. If you think about it, Apple already beat them to this with iMessage, and Google is playing catch-up. But instead of launching a new product, Google is just extending their existing IM ecosystem to take over the SMS space.

timdorr• 13 years ago

In fact, they will be integrating SMS "soon": http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/16/google-hangouts-sms-integ...

Ralz4• 13 years ago

That seems like a good idea but I only use gchat on my PC, for my phone it's text messages. I don't like it when someone assumes that I'm on my PC and starts to have a conversation with me as when I'm on the go I'm not able to have a serious chat. At least with txt msgs both parties know that you may not respond in time and that you may be brief with your responses.

noblethrasher• 13 years ago

So do you suppose that is why you can't be invisible when using the iOS Hangouts app?

djloche• 13 years ago

As it is currently, Hangouts is not a real time communications service. It's a messaging service. Unfortunately for the Hangout team, Gmail is the superior messaging service.

The real shame is that Google already had a fantastic offering and they killed something beautiful: an integrated product that included a real time communication client (gchat), a messaging service (gmail), and a group/community based social network (g+).

watterso• 13 years ago

This is great news! After instant-upload/auto-backup got my parents hooked on G+, now I can easily provide them with tech support! Solid user conversion practice imo.

omniwired• 13 years ago

ancient "news" by now. The site is called hacker _NEWS_ :)

skeletonjelly2• 13 years ago

_NEWS_ to me ;)

clauretano• 13 years ago

Ok Google, now do this using the webRTC data channel instead of a plugin (using Vidyo's H.264/SVC)

webRTC is going to be really exciting in the next year or so. Google is pushing it, but it'd be great to see them actually using it. I was hoping New Hangouts would be on webRTC, but it is still a bit early.

simoncion3• 13 years ago

Hangouts currently seems to use WebRTC behind the scenes. See my comment here for more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5949188

DEinspanjer• 13 years ago

I need to go RTFA, so please forgive if it is already in there, but I hope this means there will be some progress to enabling remote assistance / remote control of a Chrome device a like a Chromebook. Two years that issue has been open with hundreds of users complaining and no word. :/

sergiotapia• 13 years ago

The best remote desktop software I have used is - http://www.join.me

Just have the other person click 'Share', wait a bit for it to load, then have them copy and paste their share URL. It works right in the browser and is free.

If Google Hangouts make this easier for me to fix my mother's laptop I'm all for it!

lelandbatey• 13 years ago

Dang it, I'd been looking for something just like this very recently, and my Google-fu had failed me.

Man I wish I'd been able to find this.

hobs• 13 years ago

Been using it for about a year, its amazing. The way it is going the free version may be sunset fairly soon.

iso8859-1• 13 years ago

http://www.screenleap.com/ is similar. It's a Java applet, works on Linux/Windows/Mac.

tikums• 13 years ago

It's 2013. Are we supposed to be amazed by this?

Legion• 13 years ago

Slightly off topic, but does anyone else experience poor audio echo in Hangout video conferences?

At work we would kill to replace Skype with Hangouts, but with the same computers and the same microphones, everyone in Hangouts constantly hears themselves, while Skype reduces hearing yourself to a very rare event.

mcrittenden• 13 years ago

I've only ever had this issue when someone on the hangout uses speakers instead of headphones and forgets to mute.

donniezazen• 13 years ago

Will this require Chrome Remote Desktop and or Hangouts extension to work?

Google Hangouts adds remote desktop support

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