Published on Thu Jul 28 2022
During the COVID-19 pandemic, video conferencing turned out to be an invaluable tool for online collaboration. While many used proprietary tools for this, there is one proven free and open source video conferencing tool that also gained much traction and stayed popular: Jitsi Meet Primarily known for its publicly available service meet.jit.si,...
Published on Fri Aug 12 2022
72 hours out. A bead of sweat slides from your brow, falls to the marred chassis of your local build server, and sizzles into mist, leaving a scant salt stain to tell the tale. It’s the start of the hottest Summer of Nix on record, and you have three days to research, provision, configure, and deploy. With or without you, this lecture is going live. The deadline was 19 July, 2022; at five o’clock on that glistening Tuesday afternoon, one Eelco Dolstra – a living legend to those who understand – would take to the webcam from the verdant city of Utrecht to deliver a highly anticipated slice of fresh perspective on his now-19-year-old brainchild, Nix. It was the inaugural event in the premier Summer of Nix (SoN) Public Lecture Series. The hype was real, but so was our predicament: no self-hosted livestreaming infrastructure was yet in place. Would we simply fall back on the usual gatekeeper platforms, surrendering control of the narrative and feeding our own to corporate leviathans in a vacuum of moral agency? The ubiquity of these platforms suggests that most would.[^ubiquity] This, however, is SoN, and we aren’t most. Defying norms of defeatism and manufactured consent, we dare to declare a world of configurability. We celebrate that self-hosting empowers us to maintain ownership of both our content and its presentation, allowing us to introduce to our audience – our community – a way to engage with said content free from third-party influence. Note that our solidarity is no coincidence; SoN begins with a contractual agreement between each participant and Eelco himself to uphold both NGI Zero’s aim to contribute to an open internet and the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, which emphasizes among other points the importance of respecting privacy. Needless to say, the prospect of streaming Eelco’s lecture exclusively to closed-source, centralized, and infamously privacy-disrespecting services was an irony too plain to ignore. Fortunately, infrastructural improvement is a fundamental objective of the program, and Nix is the definitive tool for the job. In short, the Public Lecture Series livestreaming infrastructure was a natural first target. Time was not on our side, but good people were: The NixOS Foundation was at the ready for server provisioning and DNS management....