Zoom came out of nowhere and now it is the go to video conferencing platform. I have heard about their security flaws but today I experienced one first hand. Don’t know if it is a new one but it is obvious what the flaw is.
Today, I wanted to add a future meeting to my history and also double check if the time was set correctly. After typing the ID and password, I tapped join. I heard a man in mid-sentence and I noped out of there! 
This is a pretty good open source alternative.
Thanks for the suggestions. Keeping young people safe from online bullying and creeps is important. I am considering using another platform but it may take a while to convince the Scout groups and parents.
There’s also Jitsi Meet. No need to register, sign in, or identify yourself, and it properly implements encryption, unlike Zoom.
For this year’s livestream LibrePlanet conference, the FSF installed its own instance of Jitsi Meet on very short notice. I installed Jitsi Meet on a company server a few years ago, and it worked very nicely.
There are currently two large instances of Jitsi Meet that are available for anybody to use:
and
@jpl So that is the one @paperdigits recommended. I am unfamiliar with it or the other two posted. I might need proof (not too technical) that these platforms are secure and reliable in case I need to convince people. An easy to digest (non-promotional) document or video would help. Thanks!
Here’s an overview and tutorial I found on YouTube (you can use youtube-dl to avoid running Google’s nonfree JavaScript).
Jitsi Meet is free software, which means users have the freedom to study the source code of program to independently verify that it does what its developers say it does. You’re also free to modify, share, and use it for any purpose. Here’s the Jitsi source code.
Thanks for sharing this. I did not know about these.
I can definitely recommend Jitsi.
We use it also for working.
Since it’s OS, there are also a few instances out there, a part from the official one, that sometimes are working even better, because less frequented, like:
meet.golem.de (hosted in Germany)
meet.infomaniak.com (hosted in Switzerland)
Curiousity… was it something embarrassing, that caused you to look away. If it were me, I would start pretending to be a part of the meeting.
It was disgust that one’s privacy could be trampled on so easily. I am not that kind of big brother.
Ahh yes, “privacy”. I remember the days you could tune your television set to channel 81 and listen in to people’s cell phone calls. Back in the days of analog.
I can also whole heartedly recommend jitsi meet. I’ve been using it in a pinch to setup impromptu meetings quickly with folks for a while now.
Couldn’t be easier, and you can just add whatever text string after meet.jit.si/{INSERT_TEXT} to instantly start up a meeting.
On a side note, they’re optimized for Chrome - so the best experience is normally using that browser… (ugh, I know, but for that single purpose maybe not too bad).
I use jitsi meet on Firefox and it seems to work fine for me.
I use it on Firefox sometimes, too, but I ran across this:
You can just as well use Chromium 
(the “nice core of Chrome”). Or even better, Brave. This last one is a really good idea (taking the advertisers’ interest away from the content of the Internet).
Is there a way to make the meeting unique and private? Sorry for all these questions. I don’t have the energy to investigate.
Jon Corbet at Linux Weekly News recently posted a short article on Jitsi:
In it, he describes the moderator capabilities, and one of them is to set a meeting password. He doesn’t talk about encryption, but I’ve seen other prose about Jitsi that indicates it has it.
You can assign a password to the meeting