New Firefox has no-plugin video-conferencing

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Will this make it easier to hack in to somebody’s laptop and turn on the camera? Or harder?

Assuming I hand delivered the URL in a sealed envelope, and assuming there is decent encryption, this could be very useful to people who don’t like to be overheard.

Hmmm nothing added to my desktop or portable versions after update. Though i am outside the US so staggered release maybe?

As the linked article states, it isn’t on by default. You need to enable it in about:config.

It is good to note that Ubuntu isn’t changing the default search engine in the version they distribute because they have their own search engine contract with Google to be their default provider.

Ahh yes, so i see. Someone in the comments posted where the pesky config entry is. According to ghacks it’s a gradual release to avoid server overload but i was of the understanding it’s p2p so no servers.

The communication doesn’t go through any servers. I don’t know of a server component at all.

It’s offered in partnership with Telefonica, so I assumed Firefox Hello was using Telefonica’s bandwidth at least. I haven’t seen any details about how it works under the hood though.

Just tried version 34. Used it for all of one minute. It’s kinda fucked up. Back to 31.1.1 right NOW!!!

Edit: What seemed to happen was that NoFlash suddenly became absolutely no flash, period. Will have to experiment more to see what the eff is happening.

Telefonica owns the opentok framework that tokbox developed, as the article you linked to mentioned. That framework is used for this implementation. That’s the sum total of their involvement as far as I know. Nothing to do with bandwidth.

Hope you don’t mind zero days then? You’re running a browser with several months of known security holes that have been publicly disclosed…

Kinda like to be able to play flash. Will be checking this problem out more before I keep the new version.

Then why are they charging by the minute for OpenTok if it’s just a framework?

You are confusing the framework for the service that Telefonica offers. You should ask them what they charge for though I assume it is group videoconferencing. The framework is a body of code or library of code. The tokbox service is an end to end videoconferencing service that uses that framework. They aren’t the same thing at all.

Flash works fine in 34. I’ve run it in it today… I suggest you talk to the makers of the noflash extension if it isn’t working right anymore.

Good to see WebRTC getting out more. It’s a promising technology.

And now it is time to say goodbye to my trusty netbook. I want to believe that my installation is just broken, but it looks like a remarkable drop in performance.

Very cool feature, but I’ll take my chances with the aforementioned zero-days and keep my PCs locked in at v27/28. That is until either a terrible enough security risk comes along, or Mozilla puts the add-on bar back and let’s us put the tabs down low again where they belong. (And for those considering mentioning it, ClassicThemeRestorer isn’t good enough.)

Go read the known vulnerability list on mozilla.org/security and count the number of ones marked as critical since your version.

Good luck with your botnet node.