Onionphone - E2EE PTT Voice and Chat
from Used_Gate@piefed.social to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 10 Mar 02:37
https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted/p/1861254/onionphone-e2ee-ptt-voice-and-chat
from Used_Gate@piefed.social to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 10 Mar 02:37
https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted/p/1861254/onionphone-e2ee-ptt-voice-and-chat
Onionphone is a native Android application for anonymous, end-to-end encrypted push-to-talk voice and text communication over the Tor network. No servers, no accounts, no phone numbers — your .onion address is your identity.
Cross-platform compatible with Terminalphone — call between Android and Linux/Termux using the same protocol.
Optionally use your connection as a relay for ephermeral group channels.
Find the release page for version 1.0.2 which supports custom bridges for accessing censored networks.
threaded - newest
Probably a bad idea to congest the limited bandwidth of Tor with voice chat.
Yeah, unless they use specific nodes given by the community, i think it’s a bad idea
The bandwidth is low by design. I’ve excluded files and images to keep it down as well. You could talk 24/7 only use MBs.
If we want Tor to grow we need useful applications useful for everyone. I doubt this will be widely adopted.
I’ve contributed a large amount of bandwidth to the network so why can’t I use some?
Plain speech can be compressed pretty well. I’m not an expert by any means, but I suspect latency would be the bigger issue.
Latency is a huge issue, but it goes away with the PTT model. I tried full duplex on initial prototyping but it was trash.
PTT solves this by simply forcing the listen, digest, then respond. You can expect about 2-3 seconds of delay from when you release the ptt, to when the other side hears it.
That makes sense. Thanks, I was still half asleep and didn’t register the PTT.
Creating more mainstream use-cases is how you get people to donate more bandwidth.
How does a regular person donate bandwidth?
By partaking in it.
Extremely annoyed at devs who think everyone has Android phones when most people in the US have iPhones. Making an app incompatible with the majority of smartphones means you have not made an app
Be mad at apple. This application would never work on the iPhone platform. To many gate keepers and restrictions on the OS.
.
Extremely annoyed at users that think everyone has iOS phones, when most of the world have Android. Thinking that the US is the only relevant place means you have serious tunnel vision. /s
Oh and blame Apple. They are extremely hostile to open-source devs publishing apps on their platform.
Heck, most of the Known Universe. This is how I say it to my fanboy sibling who moves those goalposts just so only America is in-frame and the numbers show a small advantage for the Home Team.
Not OPs fault you’ve picked the wrong os ¯\(ツ)/¯
Lol. Your post is pure US defaultism. The US only has 5% of the world wide population. Worldwide Android has around 71% market share while iOS only has around 27%.
Be better mister American.
It goes even beyond that, their comment is just wrong on multiple different levels
It’s roughly split in OS in US. I fell most security conscious users are android users. Sold might initially give slightly better initial privacy, android is far more customizable to the point there’s no contest.
Plus, I buy my phones outright so I’m not stuck with a $1000+ phone in a contract or subsidized phone plan making payments.
This right here - plenty of good android phones out there that don’t need contract financing.
Especially now that Motorola is gonna partner with GrapheneOS.
I had Pixels for me and spouse. Bot had poor screens (broken / white lines). Now we have Moto phones. I would love to have Graphene on the next one.
If Apple didn’t keep treating smaller developers like shit, maybe you would have more options for applications that respected your privacy and weren’t as monetized.
Consider moving away from the abusive platform and then your options for privacy and security will expand. Maybe look for a phone with GrapheneOS support (previously only Pixels, but Motorola models will come with support soon) for complete control and customization.
Android has a huge market share compared to iOS, plus it’s a lot harder to develop these types of applications for iPhone because of apples policies.
Extremely annoyed at users who expect FOSS devs to go through the rigamarole of paying the Apple tax, and getting Apple’s permission to have the privilege of making it available to their customers.
close, but i think what you meant was: “Extremely annoyed at users who insist on feeding apple”
Buys closed eco system phone. Shocked it’s a closed eco system. Cue shocked Pikachu face?
Check the global total deployments, US is not the only place in the world with smartphones.
😂 lol, lmao even 😂
Get a android you lunatic
I think this is the most downvoted comment I ever saw on lemmy. Gratz.
What’s the selfhosted component of this?
Self hosting your own private P2P voice service.
Optionally use your device as a Audio relay for group calls, in which case you become the ‘server’ to all connected clients.
You do realise that’s a contradiction, right?
Unless you’re hosting a TOR node (which is outside of the scope here and, in the case of exit nodes, extremely risky), there’s nothing here that’s relevant to self-hosting.
I don’t agree with that. Both sides are acting as a server and a client, connecting via a onion service to either parties rendezvous. And then when you include the fact that you can become a relay, that is clearly self hosting a server in a pure sense.
There are no exit nodes involved in onion services. It all stays within the network.
@Used_Gate I suggest getting this in f-droid if you want to see more usage.
Also, it looks like the actual development happens in private and then is thrown over the fence; https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/onionphone/-/commit/2c4afc462a42852f0d54dda0b333db9019f3d69e
Yes, I am seeking that out to put it on fdroid and actually tried but ran into a few roadblocks.
I am tracking changes since v1.0.0 in the changelog. From here on out the changes are all public. The initial commit has no history because it was brand new, and the architecture was forked from terminal phone for cross compatibility.
How can I contribute?
I need ideas for what everyone wants. Features and niceties to make the expirence more polished. I have a limited set of devices that I can test on so finding bugs and edge cases is something I can fix, but limited to my environments/devices.
I’ve played with the ability to have a dedicated secure database built in for contacts but unsure if it’s really needed and worth implementing.
Sounds good. I’ll pull the latest build to my graphenOS test mule.
I’ll target a secured db as a vault for contacts. That’s a really good idea.
A matrix bridge would be nice and could open up a large user base.
This is sick! Thanks for sharing your project with us! I would have never guessed you could do voice over TOR but PTT was a clever solution. Its like the old nextel phones that had PTT. I wonder if its possible to remap the volume button to be a hardware PTT button.
Happy to contribute! So, currently (only while in the app for now) you can activate the mic with a double pressdown on volume if the setting is enabled.
My attempts to trigger the mic while outside the app came with a few unwanted side affects so I removed it for now until I find a solid way to do that.
This is stupidly cool omg
Wow so awesome going to try it out.
Nice a real step forward for private communication.
Would be awesome if it ever has a messaging section without having to make a call, still, an awesome start!
I’ve put some thought into this. The biggest roadblock to P2P is 24/7 persistence. You have to be online.
I think the most straightforward path to this is having the ability to setup a mailbox sort of how the relay works but on a machine that’s on a 24/7 stable connection. Because it’s already cross compatible with Linux systems, it would make the most sense to have a dedicated mailbox there, and have it forward your messages that were missed while you were offline.
Once the mailbox is set up, it’s just a matter of tieing the separate mailbox identity to forward messages to you once your online. Ideally integrate tors built in authorized client protocol to ensure only one person is authorized to the mailbox.
convenient in one app, but we already have briar for that
This is extremely cool.
Super cool!
What a small world! I made a TOR P2P messaging app using symmetric encryption as a POC in college! I was just getting around to re implementing it into something more polished!
Not sure if I have a reason too now!
Old college app, new project doesn’t have much progress
github.com/Givlucas/noctua-messenger
why go with tor and not with i2p?
tor is actually a bit more secure than i2p from my understanding. mostly it has to do with the routing, which is both the strength and weakness of tor.
I would like to test a garlicphone varient. I’m not opposed to i2p, I am just alot more familiar with Tor integrations than i2p.
Onionphone uses prepackaged binaries from the guardian project. https://github.com/guardianproject/tor-android.
I would basically need to find the same thing, but for i2p.
Omg! I was just looking for a walkie talkie type app!
I love the idea of the app! I must ask though, to what degree or extent was AI/LLM used in coding this project?
I see an em-dash on a comment in MainActivity.kt on line 278, so I’m guessing it was used extensively. Also, a “→” character on 291.
Impossible. Signal said they have no choice but to use AWS for this kind of thing.