Ring: Free software for distributed and secured communication

by martgnz • 11 years ago

55 50 11 years ago

mosselman• 11 years ago

Empty promises and no screenshots.

When I click through on one of the blog posts I see:

"Advanced users can also help to correct problems: we welcome contributions. We expect people to tell us what needs to be corrected, but they can also do it and submit their patches. This is the way it worked with SFLphone and it works pretty well."

So you have no idea IF there are any problems, or do you know that there ARE problems, but you assume they will be corrected soon? If any of the above then how can you state "Ring gives you a ... an unmatched level of privacy."?

I am sorry to be negative about something that seems like it has our privacy at heart, but promising privacy when it might not be there at all is reckless. We in the first world have issues like "I don't want my e-mails scanned by companies" or "I don't want companies to see what I write", but in other parts of the worlds you can be killed if the wrong piece of communication falls in certain hands. So it is pretty important to get it right. You (Ring) provide no information on the site about the state of the code, reviews being done, etc.

desdiv• 11 years ago

I think this is their code:

GNOME client: https://github.com/max3903/SFLphone

KDE client: https://github.com/Elv13/sflphone-kde

Sounds like they recently relocated from their old homepage at http://sflphone.org to this new domain and just don't have everything in order yet.

leni5362• 11 years ago

Their wiki:

https://projects.savoirfairelinux.com/projects/ring/wiki

According to this their code repos:

Daemon:

https://gerrit-ring.savoirfairelinux.com/ring-daemon

Client library:

git://anongit.kde.org/libringclient

Clients:

https://gerrit-ring.savoirfairelinux.com/ring-client-gnome

git://anongit.kde.org/ring-kde

https://gerrit-ring.savoirfairelinux.com/ring-client-macosx

Not really well organized.

jordigh• 11 years ago

Savoir-Faire Linux are a local Montréal company with a lot of clout. I don't consider their promises empty, and I'm excited to see them working on this.

Elv1312• 11 years ago

Ring-KDE announcment: https://elv13.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/announcing-ring-a-dis...

(I am one of the developer, ask me anything)

EDIT: There is screenshots on that page

madez10• 11 years ago

As I asked in my direct comment on this submission:

What are the advantages compared to Tox?

I see one advantage of Tox compared to Jitsi. Account management is decentralized on Tox and federated on the protocols Jitsi supports.

Are there plans to support Tox as a backend?

BuildTheRobots2• 11 years ago

The ZRTP encryption mechanism is no longer supported (please use TLS+SRTP)

I thought SRTP used certificates rather than the diffie-hellman handshake used by ZRTP -or to put it another way, doesn't this destroy forward secrecy?

mrmondo• 11 years ago

First time I've seen anything on .cx since 'the goat', interesting choice of domain.

krrrh• 11 years ago

Years ago the Christmas Island registry used to give away free domain registration for open source projects. it used to be really common for projects like this one.

mtrn2• 11 years ago

Pity, I get a 403 on http://gpl.savoirfairelinux.net/ring-download/mac_osx/ring-n....

bresc• 11 years ago

second that. please fix

unicornporn3• 11 years ago

http://gpl.savoirfairelinux.net/ring-download/mac_osx/

PipoloyJo• 11 years ago

Hey, I'm the main developper on the Ring OSX client. I've just confirmed the issue and it's been fixed.

Thanks for your input. We are in alpha release and the website is also a work in progress.

mtrn2• 11 years ago

Thanks!

JoachimS• 11 years ago

Fairly thin on description on what it actually is. But according to the botttom of the page this is SFLphone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SFLphone

leni5362• 11 years ago

Seems to be the case:

https://projects.savoirfairelinux.com/projects/ring/wiki

However the interesting part is the new decentralized "DHT calls". I wonder how well it works.

mdumic• 11 years ago

Seems legit.

madez10• 11 years ago

What are the advantages compared to tox?

dublinben• 11 years ago

Or Jitsi. There are plenty of "secure and decentralized" free software options. Most people just don't use them.

unicornporn3• 11 years ago

I think mostly because they don't work seamlessly on desktop/mobile...

madez10• 11 years ago

For account management, Tox offers complete decentralization while Jitsi uses federation.

Elv1312• 11 years ago

Ring aim at being both standard compliant and (optionally) decentralized. Please check comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9511782

staticelf• 11 years ago

I unfortuantely didn't understand what this was.

mironathetin• 11 years ago

The download link for Mac does not work for me. Tried this instead:

http://gpl.savoirfairelinux.net/ring-download/

Choose a directory from here.

ssalenik2• 11 years ago

The link on the website should work now: http://ring.cx/en/documentation/mac-osx-installation

unicornporn3• 11 years ago

There's a fair amount of criticism brought up here, but I'd like to say that there are bunch of things that looks very promising, at least in the OS X version. Lots of software like this sucks terribly from a usability perspective, but here you have a nice web page (yeah, you need screenshots), a beautiful icon and a usable GUI.

What I'd REALLY like to see is a way to share one or multiple folders of files with my private darknet. If that's possible or not with the technology you use, I don't know. I've been missing a WASTE[1] like communication tool for as long as I can remember.

I guess one of your "competitors" will be Tox. But going to https://tox.im/ I still can't just download a client without going to a messy wiki and get nightly binaries. How many casual users know what a binary is?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE

Zaphot• 11 years ago

You don't have permission to access /ring-download/mac_osx/ring-nightly.dmg on this server.

Lol

abcd_f• 11 years ago

Lol

Care to elaborate on this insightful remark?

ssalenik2• 11 years ago

Should be fixed now.

fulafel• 11 years ago

Why not use a memory safe language?

It looks like this is a real christmas tree of protocol implementations in C/C++ facing the network.

jharig23• 11 years ago

I tried the windows version. It hung after I entered a username.

Ring: Free software for distributed and secured communication

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