Just some rambling…

I wish more folks would "follow the rules" to stay safe. But for now I have been okay. Some of this feels like the internet just got popular again, 90s style. Other parts feel like I have to stay home sick, but without actually feeling ill.

1 The virus(es)

I think that if it is racist to call COVID-19 the "Chinese virus" and I do think so, then MERS should probably not be called that either, even under the best intentions. Would something similar to COVID-12 not have worked?

2 Internet software

Over the last several years I have used quite a few software and hardware options for making video conference calls. Some lack a free license, thus proprietary. Most of them I have used for work. Some of them I just used for playing video games and others, more recently, I have used for calling family. Some of them have chat features.

• Discord
• GoToMeeting
• Google Hangouts (multiple)
• Jami (formerly Ring, SFLphone)
• Jitsi
• Pidgin
• Polycom (multiple)
• Riot/Matrix
• Roll20
• SIP (various impmlementations)
• Signal
• Skype
• Slack
• TeamViewer
• WebEx
• WebRTC (mostly Firefox)
• XMPP/Jabber (various implementations)
• Zoom

In addition to these, I also want to mention mumble. For a while I used it on a regular basis for voice-only calls.

Personally, I could do without many of these. Having just one good option chat that could work on more than one device (eg, desktop and mobile), remember history for async communication, remove history (eg after x number of days), and have end-to-end encryption. Then the chats could exec to whatever video chat, such as Jitsi Meet.