&yet

One of our goals with Talky is to make the service itself and its underlying components as secure as possible. For example, as Bear explained recently, we use a variety of industry-standard encryption techniques, including strong cipher suites to enable Perfect Forward Secrecy whenever possible.

Unfortunately, encrypting video conferences end-to-end with more than a few people is difficult. The challenge is that in peer-to-peer, “full-mesh” mode, your laptop or tablet or mobile phone needs to encode and encrypt one outbound video stream for each person involved. This works well for one-to-one video, but even the most modern computing devices simply can’t encode that much video data if you have more than a few people in the session.

To overcome that challenge, a service like Talky needs to use a server in the middle (e.g., the Jitsi Videobridge) that accepts one incoming video stream and fans it out to all the other participants. Unfortunately, this kind of Selective Forwarding Unit has to decrypt the video streams that it receives in order to do its job.

We’re excited that one of our yetis, Henrik Joreteg will be teaching a Frontend Masters workshop on June 25-26 on Building Modern Single-Page Web Applications.

You can attend either online or in-person.

Here’s Henrik’s description of what he’ll cover in the workshop, but more imporantly, why:

Even the final feature set of the app you’re working on right now is probably a bit vague -- the future of the apps we build and the tools we use is vague at best.

Paul Irish dropped us a line about our Talky Kickstarter and asked:

Can you detail the open source plans? What parts of Talky are not open sourced right now, but will be from this kickstarter? What parts of Talky will not be released as open source components?

For starters, let’s be clear that Talky is not a simple turnkey open source project. It’s too powerful for that, and we want to put that power in developers’ hands.

One of the greatest lessons we can learn from watching internet platforms and applications grow in popularity is how crucial users' safety can be in utilizing those services. The safety of our Talky users is extremely important to us.

In keeping with discussing the security and privacy of our service, we also want to share our best practices for safety when using Talky. Below are some tips you can use to help ensure that you have great conversations with the people you choose, and avoid stumbling upon explicit, unwanted content.

Tip #1 - Don’t share Talky rooms publicly

By default all rooms within Talky are public. When two or more people land on the same link they will be connected with video and audio streaming to each other. Sharing a link to a Talky room via Twitter or Facebook is essentially inviting everyone else. To avoid having an Internet party with strangers, only share links via direct messages or other private methods of communication.

At &yet, we take privacy and security seriously. We even have a dedicated security team (Lift Security) that performs security audits for many well-known companies.

Talky security is more than just making sure the “lock” icon is present in your browser’s tab for your Talky.io session. It involves that, but also the connection between your browser and other people in the session, which can be direct (for one-to-one calls) or through the Jitsi Videobridge (for multi-party calls). Another aspect of security is what we do with any information gathered during the session, such as logging and log storage.

To answer these questions we need to examine the two primary ways Talky is used—making a one-to-one call with someone else or making a many-to-many call.

Next week, on Tuesday, June 2 at 10am PDT, ticket sales for RealtimeConf 2015 will officially begin! Early bird tickets for $1299 will go on sale.

What’s included

Tickets cover the following:

• admission to each day of the event
• three nights of accommodations
• six meals
• and a wall-to-wall experience starting when you arrive into town, so you don’t have to worry about logistics and can spend your time enjoying the conference and spare time activities

We’re continuing our series of Navigator Office Hours—next Thursday, June 4, I’ll be hosting a session focused on frontend development, design and community-related issues.

You might have heard me chat about technology at Shop Talk Show or recently on The Start.fm—this time we’re going to concentrate on frontend architecture; style guides, maintainability, all things HTML/CSS as well as topics circling around tech community in general, from running diverse events to enhancing team collaboration.

You can sign up here.

Talky is &yet’s premier plugin-less, just a link in a browser, group video and chat service. To add to the list of adjectives, we can also claim open standards-based, but not by inventing new ones.

So many services claim to be open, but roll their own API and call it open because they published a document; we didn’t do that. Our team has been contributing to real open standards for decades before we were even a team -- that’s part of why we recruited them.

Starting with WebRTC, the browser feature that allows us to do video, audio directly between browsers without a plugin, we get the core functionality of Talky, however not the intelligence of it. WebRTC wisely doesn’t include a means of signaling (connecting the call), so we’re left to “roll our own.” On the surface, this is pretty easy -- just set up a server that exchanges the WebRTC signaling payloads between the two browsers and let it go peer-to-peer -- but this is a very naive approach, and ends up being difficult to add features to, maintain, secure, and scale in the long run.

Did you know that group management, call signaling, presence, chat, federation, and all of those other features you might want to add later have been done before? Not only that, but these features have been painstakingly reviewed and iterated to ensure security, feature-extensions, and interoperability by large communities of professionals, and then documented as RFCs and XEPs.

Our Kickstarter has officially launched!

You can contribute to Talky — The First Truly Simple Video Chat project now.

Please help us spread the word!

For those of you with eagle eyes, yes we said we were going to launch it earlier this month, but when it came time we discovered we needed to tweak things just a little bit more.

Now we're ready.

I’m excited to share with you that at 10am (PDT) tomorrow, May 27, the Kickstarter for Talky will go live and so will the opportunity to help push forward both the open web and WebRTC.