Pup Biru

expanding on this, depending on technical skill level:

i’d probably get some SBCs like raspberry pi (or cheaper; raspberry pi is probably overkill here!) to be the terminals, run asterisk and have an extension for each terminal… run a voip client that automatically picks up any call it receives, and connects to a mic & speaker, connect a button to GPIO and write a script to call a conference extension for all devices (or multiple buttons for multiple extensions to call individual locations)… i’d probably add a second button for a “call back”-like feature - a terminal broadcasts a message and there’s a button to reply only to the terminal the last call was from

this would allow you to use phones as terminals too - even receiving “calls”, although in that case the caller would have to wait for the phone user to pick up - just like a regular phone. probably more useful as a transmitter

all of these things aren’t super difficult in isolation - probably setting up asterisk is the hardest part

one of the benefits of using a packet switched solution is that it’s expandable in the future… adding extra terminals anywhere there’s networking is pretty powerful - you can change your mind about location, or even technology in general and not have to worry

… and it’s probably much easier to extend on in the future too - say open source AI assistants get better, you might want to build one that integrates with timers etc, that’s much easier with packet switched … or even more likely, you want to broadcast to the intercom from outside your house or even just make mobile phones able to be transmitters inside the house

you’re totally right that simple point to point intercom stuff like that is a much simpler solution, but packet switched is king for a lot of future-proofing reasons - perhaps not something that OP cares about (a project completed is better than a perfect plan not begun), but worth mentioning

are you sure?

there could be thousands just waiting for a failure to come out and say “HEY THIS IS DODGY”

that’s what automation is for - nobody is going to manually check them, but anyone is able to automatically set something up to check their hashes in change… the fact that it’s possible that anyone is doing that now that it’s a known issue perhaps makes it less problematic as an attack vector

there’s certainly a camp in FOSS that considers “whatever you like including commercial activity” to be the one true valid version of “free software”

like… if someone wants to take an MIT project, add a bunch of extra features to it keeping some available only with payment, and contribute back bug fixes and some minor features etc, i wouldn’t necessarily say that’s harming the project and this is overall a good thing? it gets the original project more attention

like it’s perhaps a little unfair, but if the goal is quality and scope of the original project - or even broader of the goal is simply to have technology AVAILABLE even if it is with a few - then that goal has been met more with an MIT-like license than it would be with a copyleft license

yes and no… competition is good, but we do already have blink, webkit, and gecko… browser engines are biiiiig, complex beasts, and we do have competition already… more competition, at some point, becomes redundant

that only reinforces that you should use firefox… forcing google to pay more money to mozilla and giving mozilla more power to negotiate is a good thing

sure google has some power over them with the money they give, but by using chromium that power is absolute - no need to pay, ask, influence when you just get

it’s possible, but that would seem… odd… for such a large and tech-savvy instance. there’s a lot of reasons why this isn’t a good idea, and very few technical reasons why it is

my guess is that it’s less about obscuring server location for privacy reasons as is the implications in this thread, and more about handling changes cleanly or something like that - in which case, sure it obscures the server location but more that it makes the server “location” (or hardware, etc) irrelevant and fungible

a reverse proxy these days is pretty much just a requirement of any dynamic service. they often run on the same host as the software

i THINK they’re saying that they sublicense a library to do encryption in order to talk to WhatsApp and that it’s this software that they won’t be allowed to be included in GPL-licensed software because it may be that in the future that implies a release of source code?

this doesn’t seem unreasonable as long as you can create a facade or abstraction that’s NOT GPL-licensed to interact with WhatsApp that then interacts with your GPL code?

or i could be misreading entirely

peer to peer is an option too