Category Archives: Jitsi

Students should feel comfortable sharing their ideas in the virtual reality without fear or hesitation. This cannot be done without awareness and good knowledge of the basics of cybersecurity.

Narimane Hadj-Hamou Founder of the Center for Learning Innovations and Customized Knowledge Solutions (CLICKS)

Students should feel comfortable sharing their ideas in the virtual reality without fear or hesitation, she said. This cannot be done without awareness and good knowledge of the basics of cybersecurity.

However, Mohamed Tita, an Egyptian scholar specialized in network and technical security, distinguishes between the duties and the digital security measures to be followed by educational institutions and those of individuals, whether they are professors or students.

For students and professors, Tita stresses the need to avoid clicking on anonymous links, the need to use an encryption system to open some suspicious websites, always using a screen lock to prevent others from accessing their device and viewing its contents, as well as the need to use a strong password to secure data and information.

On the other hand, Tita believes that educational institutions that manage digital infrastructure have greater responsibilities in ensuring safety. This requires them to take into consideration security while designing a technical strategy for the programs they use or platforms they launch for their students, along with developing a plan to deal with potential attacks. (See a related article, Arab Universities Are Vulnerable to Cyberattacks, Experts Say.)

As for instant-messaging applications that students and professors are advised to rely on in online education, Tita said that Signal is the most secure program, as it is an open-source free application that does not require an email for registration. Tita also advises using Jitsi for video and audio conferencing. He prefers it over Zoom because it is open source and was developed by a non-for-profit group, and because users can use it on their computers or mobile phones from a browser without the need to install any software.

Here is a list of the top 10 tips for enhancing cybersecurity in a distance-education experience:

See a collection of articles by Al-Fanar Media on the coronavirus in the Arab world and its effects on education, research, and arts and culture.

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Tips on Cybersecurity for Students and Teachers - Al-Fanar Media

A year ago, video calling tools became part of everyday life for many people. Few were spared having meetings with family, friends and co-workers, several in a single day. The advance of the pandemic and the containment measures have relaxed that situation, but they are still very much needed.

If we ask, everyone has their favorite tool, either because they already have the application installed, it is the one they use at work, because it allows them to record meetings, or because it offers more games and funds to have a good time. Google Meet, Microsoft Team, Skype or Zoom they are many and very similar, but Jitsi Meet has gone more unnoticed, despite having been available for years and offer a lot for free.

You never know, maybe after giving it a try you decide that this is your new platform for making video calls. We are going to tell you about its main functions, everything we can do with it completely free and the security measures it offers.

If you are away from your friends, family or co-workers, this is no excuse for not maintaining communication with them. Here are five apps that allow you to make group video calls to keep talking to those people.

This program is the brainchild of Emil Ivov, a student at the University of Strasbourg, who has evolved over the years. In 2015, the Australian company Atlassian bought its technology. Today Jipsi Meet has more than 20 million active users around the world.

It is a platform mainly free and open source so it gives users the ability to create new tools and functions to improve the system as needed. A freer project, with almost no limits of use for its users and that has a lot of personality. Here you have a gallery with several images for you to consult its design.

From your computers browser, this platform is very easy to use. You open the Jitsi Meet website and write the name of the room (the one you have invented or the one that has been passed to you). If the meeting already exists, you will instantly enter it, even if you have not been invited, and if not, you will create it automatically.

As surprising as it may seem, it is that simple, without names or email to identify us. Of course, the platform requires a series of permissions both on the phone and on the computer. Please read carefully and accept if you agree, these are very normal requests to use the camera and microphone.

Once inside we see a series of symbols that represent the main functions, we list them below:

Activate or deactivate the microphone so as not to disturb others Activate or deactivate the camera: It is possible to use an external camera or the mobile one to achieve a higher quality. Here we explain how to do it and we recommend some applications for it. Share screen: To share the screen, it gives us the option to share the full screen and all our movements, only a specific window or only the chrome tab that you choose, which is very practical to avoid revealing personal data by mistake. Open the chat section to send a message to all participants Raise your hand to ask to speak Organize the participant view as a grid Invite more participants Other functions that we show you below Hang up and log out Meeting name and Video quality (top of screen) Your profile and rotate image function (upper right corner): As in most platforms, the image is by default with mirror mode, that is, the program turns our image to see us as if we were looking into a mirror, our right is the left and vice versa. This is so because people are more used to seeing themselves reflected in the mirror and not how others see us.

These are all the options that are quickly available on the main screen. Within the three-point section there are more. For example, video conferences can be recorded and the video uploaded to your Dropbox account. We can also start a live broadcast on YouTube.

All participants are moderators. This democratic option is not frequent in other applications, Jitsi alleges that in the face-to-face meetings that were held before this pandemic there were no people with exclusive privileges that allowed them to silence the rest and the meetings were carried out with education on most occasions, which that should move to the digital realm.

The company ensures that it is better for all participants to be able to silence the rest, so that anyone can block the microphone of another participant who has not realized that it makes too much noise and makes communication difficult. However, since these respectful environments are not everywhere, Jitsi offers its code in Docker and create a more private configuration. This is one of the advantages of open source programs, although only for users with advanced computer skills.

Another interesting option is all the keyboard shortcuts that you can use to navigate the meeting more quickly. You have a list with everyone within the options. It is more practical if you have to be moderating the meeting or you are directing a live show.

It also allows you to blur the screen or include a different background such as views of a city or a mountain. It doesnt offer many funds, but it lets you upload it from your computer, so you can choose the one you like the most. Even so, the quality of the cut leaves to be desired (as in almost all) and depending on the situation it can be more confusing than practical.

It is necessary to download the application on our phone, either Android or iOS, to create a meeting. Once installed, its use is very simple, with almost no need to enter data to create a new meeting, just put a name and invite anyone through an email or by sharing the link. As we have already mentioned before, one of the advantages of this platform is that it does not have time limits or users, you can hold endless and massive meetings.

The functions are practically the same in a smaller screen format. Being able to silence, expel and prioritize any of the participants in the meeting. In the same way, we have an integration with Google Calendar to schedule work meetings and view a call history.

If we do not have the application downloaded, we have the possibility to send the link or the phone number for the other participants to join without any hassle through the browser or as a traditional voice call.

In calls, the video quality can be adjusted, this makes it easier not to saturate the device or the internet connection with an excessive workload. They can also be video or voice, if you do not have a WiFi network at hand this function prevents you from consuming all your mobile data at once. They also provide you with a personalized web address and phone number so that you can join the meeting without the need for a computer.

Video calls host all kinds of conversations that should be private, many companies expose business data that must be protected, so security in these applications is essential. Jitsi has strengths and weaknesses that are important for you to know.

Your meetings are private, created when the first participant enters and deleted when the last participant leaves. If someone rejoins the same room, a new meeting with the same name is created and there is no connection with any previous meeting that has been held with the same name, they explain in their use and privacy policy.

Jitsy does not require the creation of any personal account to use its services, so it is only necessary to indicate a name (it can be invented) to identify ourselves to the rest of the participants during the meeting. Data such as name or email address are, in principle, optional and the platform ensures that they are deleted after the video call ends.

Also other data such as conversations shared by chat or speaker statistics are deleted at the end. However, the recordings are first kept on the Jitsy servers and then saved in the Dropbox account that we have entered. If the system does not find space to upload the recording to your Dropbox, it will keep it for 24 hours and then delete it. That is why it is important to make sure that we have plenty of space in Dropbox so that the recording is stored correctly.

On the other hand, Jitsi Meet uses Google Analytics on its website. As they explain, they only use it to check which functions are most popular and the possible errors. Even so, the function can be disabled if you decide to be the server to enforce privacy with this code that other developers have created.

For greater security, video calling platforms have resorted to a protection system that we can also find in messaging applications such as WhatsApp or Signal, end-to-end encryption.

With this encryption, communication goes from the sender to the receiver encrypted, so that no one can decrypt it along the way. Jitsi offers this possibility, but it is necessary to activate it in the settings of the tool and make sure that all participants fill in the same password or phrase in the Password section.

It is also necessary to use a browser based on Chromium 83 and higher, that is, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Brave and Opera. You can also use Electron, which supports it out of the box.

In any case, it must be clear that this protection system tends to fail when video calls are recorded, the recordings remain on the Jitsi servers unencrypted and then uploaded to your Dropbox account, which can also be hacked.

Being an experimental class system it can give errors. During the tests that we have carried out, the image and sound have failed on more than one occasion when the end-to-end encryption is activated and a mobile phone with little power is being used.

All these aspects are very important, but perhaps its greatest weakness is in the meeting creation system, by indicating a name you are already in a meeting. So that strangers do not sneak in without any difficulty, the platform has a series of tips that you should follow:

Be careful of where do you share meeting information and how you invite the other participants. Posting the data on social networks can be a very high risk, even if you want to do a live on YouTube. Pick an unusual name For the meeting, Yoga, Coffee or Family Reunion, they are very common. The chances of random uninvited people joining are very, very high, they explain. You can use your random name generator. They are also working on an unsafe name detector to help users create them. Activate the waiting room in the security functions to check who wants to join your meeting and give them permission or not. Set a password for the meeting and share it with participants over a secure network. From the outset, you have already seen that all video calls are open to anyone who knows their name. Passwords enforce privacy and are reset when the meeting is closed.

This is Jitsi Meet, a video calling platform that gives you much more freedom than the main brands like Google or Zoom. It will take less than five minutes to get your design and how it works and if you dont like something you can always find the solution among the many versions that other developers have created thanks to its open source.

Read more:
What is Jitsi Meet and how does it work the best free open source alternative to Zoom and Google Meet | Technology Explica .co - Explica

Image 4 shows a report with a fictitious example. Each of the concepts that appear represents skills that the teacher can define to evaluate throughout the course. In this way, you can customized partial and final reports like the example above as the subject progresses. The tool has a webpage and an app to install on the cellphone. (I want to clarify that Leonardo Di Caprio is not taking my course. It is a default name that appears in the tool.)

Between the in-person and virtual modalities, I noticed a critical change in the operation of one of my favorite tools, Google Classroom. In the face-to-face model, I used this tool as a virtual extension of the class. I configured it to be a place where one could consume a set of contents asynchronously and record some reflections or answers to questions specially designed to optimize learning the contents hosted in that tool.

When we all switched to the virtual modality in the first quarter of 2020, I continued to use Google Classroom, but it did not work the same way. The problem was that both the classes and the extension of the class were virtual, and this did not permit establishing the difference between "synchronous coursing" and doing the task "in a virtual space." It was all the same.

Also, it was difficult for students to manage the multi-channel, although it does not bother me. I had to restrict the communications media because too many were somewhat overwhelming. In the university, we have an official communications platform (which already existed and became relevant at the beginning of the pandemic). My tools for lecturing the virtual synchronous classes were Teams, Zoom, Jitsi, and Google Meet, etc. For asynchronous teaching, I used Google Classroom, and if that was not sufficient, I used Google Drive, Miro, and a WhatsApp group that I always create for every course I have.

Finally, I realized that the asynchronous activities were equivalent to the virtual classroom complementing face-to-face teaching. I then established the following strategy: for virtual and synchronous sessions, we carry out 100% collaborative activities and feedback, which I generally resolve with Miro; and for theory, which is basically to consume different types of content (texts, audios, and videos), we perform as asynchronous activities. The latter is a structure that aligns with Flipped Classroom since, in the synchronous part, they are used to perform activities, practices, experiments, and various dynamics where there is much participation among the students and them with the teacher. On the other hand, theory, which usually has different digital content (texts, photographs, videos, audios, etc.), is consumed by more passive student behavior. They do so as an asynchronous activity in their homes, choosing how they will consume them and the time according to their convenience.

I want to show you how I designed those asynchronous activities and resources in an upcoming article. My experience designing a partial home with PowerPoint aligned with the concept of "learning by doing," where I ask students to copy themselves!

Mavrommatis, Hernn, is Head of Chair of "Entrepreneurism and Innovation" and researcher at the National University of The Matanza. He is an adjunct professor of "Value Innovation" at UADE and a pioneer in lecturing on creativity in public bodies. He researches organizational creativity practices at the University of Buenos Aires. He has published more than a dozen articles on this subject and was a TEDxUNLaM speaker.

Edited by Rub Romn (rubi.roman@tec.mx) - Observatory of Educational Innovation.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

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Choose Your Own Adventure in the Virtual World - Observatory of Educational Innovation

For many, Discord the popular group-chatting platform originally designed for gamers made their pandemic survivable.

This Discord has been my rock through the pandemic, says Callie, an admin for the server of the popular artist-hosted Death Panel podcast. It was the single best mental health decision I made over the pandemic.

Initially designed in 2015, Discord came to be known as Slack for gamers, allowing them to socialize with friends via fluid synchronous and asynchronous communication channels, like text messaging and voice or video calling. Yet within the past couple years, the app has crossed over into other online communities and been embraced by podcasters, Youtubers, and more looking to create a more private networking space.

Describing Discords uniqueness is challenging: with its text-based channels and ability to DM or group chat, its similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams. But Discord also provides a range of communication features including video and music streaming, and the ability to fluidly jump onto a voice call or participate in an in-depth text-based conversation.

Like Zoom, the pandemic gave tremendous growth to Discord it now has over 140 million active monthly users and 6.7 million active servers. Discord, however, is not open-source software. While its free to use, users are encouraged to upgrade to Nitro status in order to access greater individual features, as well as be able to boost their favorite servers. And like many digital forums, its also embraced by anti-government extremists and GameStop financial speculators. While Discord managed to purge its initial predominance of white supremacists by enacting more aggressive trust and safety policies, these issues remain ongoing. Now that Microsoft is currently in talks to acquire it in a rumored $10 billion dollar deal, the greater question remains of what ownership looks like for its server-based communities.

Nonetheless, Discord is worth looking at closely, especially if you follow online communities. In being shaped by its early adopters of gamers and game developers, those values of identity creation and play now imbue its platform. As more artists, artist-run organizations, and even podcasters are entering the fray, heres a glance at how theyre using it to build community and navigate what it means to stay connected during this ongoing pandemic.

For Lee Tusman, a co-organizer with Babycastles, Discord has emerged as just one part of a wider digital infrastructure enabling the NYC-based video game collective to continue its programming during the pandemic. For over 10 years, the collectively-run DIY arts organization has made it its mission to foster and amplify diverse voices in video game culture. Prior to the pandemic, much of its public programming like the monthly computational performance event series or weekly co-working night ran out of its small Union Square gallery space. Now, these events happen via the live streaming platform Twitch or the open-source video-conferencing tool Jitsi Meet.

But Tusman is realistic about what it means to leverage for-profit online communication platforms.

These platforms arent inherently democratic. Were a collective and a DIY artist-run organization, the artist and curator said. [When] we try to translate some of our previous live type culture to these platforms, we have to hack them to make them work for us. [] Discord fits into that suite of platforms and tools that we use, but its one of many, and we have to consider the ways they can serve us, or not.

In a way, Discord has become the online hub in which Babycastles community now gathers: creator resources and professional opportunities are circulated, but its also a dumping ground for memes, streams, or programming hacks.

According to Babycastles co-organizer Flan Falacci, the Discord has enabled the organization to gain a deeper understanding of its community. The Introductions channel, for instance, encourages visitors to acquaint themselves in a more fulsome way not likely possible in-person. You might meet someone at an event, but you might not necessarily know everything about them right away, Falacci explains. So this format of writing a bio, almost to introduce yourself in a space and for everyone to see it I feel like it does bring us closer to the community, just in terms of knowing who people are and what their backgrounds are.

Its recent residency program was able to accommodate applications from outside of New York City, with the Discord continuing to keep discussions alive. And when in-person events become possible in the future, Babycastles wants to continue to engage this digital infrastructure to sustain its now broader community-based network: It would be a shame if we lost that ability to do that, says Falacci.

Worldbot, a Discord-based bot game created by game designer and critical creator Kaelan Doyle Myerscough, dives deeper into the apps asynchronous and secret communications for collaborative worldbuilding.

Theres a lot of game designers that are trying to create possibilities that exceed the kind of themes and stories weve seen in games, says Myerscough, alluding to the popularity of tabletop role playing games (RPGs) on Discord. Dungeons and Dragons, an enduring pen-and-paper RPG, focuses on a singular objective or subjectivity at the core of its worldbuilding. But indie game developers like Myerscough want to upend these mechanics: How do we make a game thats not about fighting or conquest or domination or competition? they ask. How do we create games that are creative, imaginative and radical?

Commissioned as an interactive online experience for a fall 2020 exhibition organized by Toronto-based arts organizations Trinity Square Video and DMG, Worldbot operates as a bot. Typically added to a Discord as a means of expanding its features, a bot can act as a community moderator, music-spinning DJ or even event scheduler.

Originating within a private server playtest where a small group of artists and game designers participated via a tabletop RPG, Worldbot unspools two visualizations of a collaboratively-shaped fictional world. These universes include a distant soft pink planet called Ana and a so-called planetary alignment festival with blooming magnolias. Text pop-ups, drawn from the participants own reflections, further contextualize these worlds. But they also allude to the IRL social conditions that shape them, like anxiety (Ana, after all, needs space because shes too overwhelmed) and environmentalism.

In developing the game, as well as participating in Discords via their involvement in gaming communities, Myerscough primarily sees Discords as a space for social and creative play. During the first lockdown, they organized Jamdemic, a month-long game jam via a Discord server encouraging game development inspired by the pandemic. They received over 30 submissions, resulting in atypical game fare like a social distancing dating sims or a crowd control simulator. At a time when our screen-based work and play remains blurred, they see Discords as a throwback to when websites were portals to chat rooms or Neopet-filled virtual playgrounds.

Once you know the link, you can get in, and go there whenever you want, explains Myerscough. It gives me the same feeling that I had when I was younger on the early internet, before everything became part of our online brands or reputations.

When artists Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant began using a private Discord server in support of their podcast, Death Panel, it was largely as a tool to record episodes. Alongside co-hosts Vince Patti and public policy scholar Phil Rocco, the twice-weekly podcast focuses on health care policy, culture, and politics from a leftist perspective. By fall 2019, they created a separate, public server, intended as a small community hub for its listeners and Patreon supporters. This pace accelerated, naturally, during the pandemic.

When COVID-19 hit, people who had been pretty casual on the server started getting more involved. It became a resource to try and sort through disinformation, observes Adler-Bolton. Much of Death Panels inception originated from the disability/health justice activists own challenges with the healthcare system. Diagnosed with a rare vascular autoimmune disease, her arduous experience navigating the administrative hoops and hurdles for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) was radicalizing. Given Death Panels beat, the pandemic not only highlighted the urgency of issues like universal health care and income inequality, but also galvanized the podcasts community to organize and support one another.

Its really not ours anymore, says Vierkant of the server with over 700 members from several different countries, an accessible community-led hub running with the volunteer support of a dozen community moderators. Alongside the typical channels expected of a podcast Discord community news and episode chats there are text-based channels focused on politics, illness and disability, book PDF sharing, and even selfies. Voice channels, meanwhile, are primarily for weekly live programming, like TV and movie streams, and even a weekly meetup.

We talk a lot about social reproductive theory on the show because its important for people to be thinking about and acting on big ideas right now, says Adler-Bolton regarding Death Panels openness to the community ownership that drives the podcasts Discord, inspiring its members to launch their own podcasts or Discords.

When I spoke with some of the Death Panel moderators in a Discord chat, many discussed the ways in which their participation opposed the vertical social hierarchies rampant in public online spaces like Twitter and Instagram. But they also talked about developing safety protocols to ensure community-led initiatives are truly barrier-free. Much of this is because many of the community members and moderators have disabilities themselves: Scott, one of the mods, is autistic and has an OCD diagnosis. He found Death Panels flexible horizontal approach to building community gave him the space to be more confident and able to engage in social interaction.

A key initiative has been its widely popular reading group which even has its own Soundcloud currently focused on the work of the late disability rights activist and author Marta Russell, who is best known for an extensive body of work looking at how disability intersects with capitalism and oppression. When I tuned in for one of the Sunday sessions last month, I appreciated the ways in which the text was treated as a jumping off point. Participants had the option of partaking via the voice or text channels that were happening simultaneously. Customized emojis in the text channel emerged as a visual shorthand to signal when a participant wanted to speak, or offer their thoughts.

The idea was to make the discussions in the group as accessible as possible to push back against the hierarchical and abelist aspects of a traditional learning environment a key tenet is you dont have to do the reading to be in reading group, explains papaya.official, one of the moderators of the reading group.

As semi-private online spaces allow people to disconnect from singular, corporatized online identities, Discords are providing flexibility and safety for those seeking affinity spaces. And, at a time when many question institutions abilities to fully grasp the ways in which the pandemic has upended collective trust, theres potential in the ways online social interactions and gatherings can be reconsidered.Its like part-peer support group, part-collaborative creative thinking, part-grad school level class, part-utopian brainstorming, part-party/casual hang out, says Casey of the potentiality of the gatherings on Death Panels Discord. And all the richness feels really in line with this larger project of community care and mutual aid.

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How Artists Used the Discord App to Build Community During COVID-19 - Hyperallergic

Jitsi Meet is an open source videoconferencing software that you can self-host. It is a good alternative to proprietary services like Google Meet or Zoom.

Jitsi Meet can be integrated with other open source tools like Nextcloud, Rocket.Chat or Synapse (Matrix implementation) to give you a comprehensive solution.

With some limitations, Jitsi Meet can be used for free on their server. For premium features, you can opt for Jitsi as a Service from Jitsi developers. You may also deploy it on your own server? I'll help you with the self-hosting part.

Deploying Jitsi is incredibly easy with Docker. I am going to show you the steps for Jitsi deployment. I'll cover both reverse proxy and regular method.

How to Use Nginx Reverse Proxy With Multiple Docker Apps

Learn how you can deploy multiple web services on the same server using Nginx reverse proxy and docker containers.

There are a few things that need to be taken care of before proceeding.

Basic knowledge of Docker and containers: This isn't a must, like all of our tutorials, but nice to have.

A custom domain: This deployment won't be IP-served, that is I will walk you through the deployment under an actual domain (or subdomain) with HTTPS. Deployments like http://[some IP]:[some port] are fine for testing, but don't serve any purpose in these guides.

A Linux server either a physical one or in the cloud: I recommend using Linode but you can use any other provider like DigitalOcean, Vultr or UpCloud. Deploying under AWS can be very platform-specific and I won't be talking about that here.

As per official recommendation, a server with 4 GB memory with a dual-core processor would be suitable for around 10-20 users.

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Optionally, our reverse proxy setup: If you want to put it behind a reverse proxy so that you can deploy several web services on the same server. If Jitsi is the only application that's going to run on the server, you don't need the reverse proxy.

Having a domain name isn't enough. You need to make sure the DNS records are in place as well. For this tutorial, I'm going to use a domain openexperiment.in which I've had lying around for quite a while.

Make sure you change all instances of the domain from the examples to your domain.

Once you have a domain and deployed a server (not with Jitsi, just the server), gather the server's IP addresses (IPv4 & IPv6 both), and add A and AAAA records for each respectively. After that's done, you'll also need to add a CNAME record. You can add a specific subdomain or like me, add a wildcard entry (if you are hosting it on the main domain).

See the screenshot below if you are still confused. I blurred the actual IP addresses (I am very secretive ... shhh).

You may have to wait some time for the DNS changes to take effect. You can check that using the ping command.

ping the domain until you see your server's IP address like this -

You can also use the dig command to check the DNS records.

You should see something like the following

Before moving forward I believe it's helpful to know what these components are, and why they're important, along with which ones you're going to be using for this deployment.

If you don't care for this, obviously skip to the deployment section of this article.

jitsi/web:latest: The web UI of Jitsi Meet, which you see on your browser, is inside this image. Along with Nginx for the webserver.

jitsi/prosody:latest: This is the XMPP server, this is what's responsible for the audio/video calls or the text chats. This can be considered the heart of Jitsi.

jitsi/jicofo:latest: The focus component of the XMPP server, responsible for managing video sessions between the participants and the videobridge, in other words, this is what manages the conferences. This is another mandatory component of Jitsi.

jitsi/jvb:latest: The Jitsi Videobridge is responsible for relaying the incoming video channels to all the participants.

These are the mandatory parts of an operational Jitsi deployment, and I will only be using them for this guide. There are other components like Jibri, Jigasi, but since they're optional, I'm going to leave them out for now.

Enough reading, it's time for some hands-on work.

If you're going to deploy this alongside a reverse proxy, make sure you have that set up before approaching this one.

How to Use Nginx Reverse Proxy With Multiple Docker Apps

Learn how you can deploy multiple web services on the same server using Nginx reverse proxy and docker containers.

This repository contains all the files that we're going to need for this deployment (with obviously some modifications).

Clone the repository and change your PWD to the cloned directory.

Since you are using Docker, you have to modify some environment variables. Start by copying the example configuration file.

Now open the .env file, and look at the first 6 environment variables.

Since all these components are basically some sort of servers running in containers, you need a way to make sure the servers are really who they say they are. These secrets are there for that reason. The clients must authenticate first before establishing a connection.

You don't have to set these secrets by yourself. There's already a script there to make your life easier. Run the following command while you're inside the repository directory

Once run, you can reopen the .env file, and the secrets should be filled out.

You won't be needing all those secrets for this deployment, but leave them be, there's no need to remove or comment them out.

There now are going to be three subsections here, one for the common variable assignments (reverse proxy or no reverse proxy), another for the reverse proxy, and the last one for no reverse proxy. All of them go to the .env file.

Here are the variables common to both deployment methods and you add them in the .env file.

CONFIG: You can change the value of this, but it isn't necessary. The value of this variable is a directory in your host, which will be bind-mounted inside the containers to store persistent data. So modifying this is entirely up to you.

PUBLIC_URL: The domain Jitsi is going to be hosted on (with the protocol). In my case the value is https://meet.openexperiment.in

ENABLE_AUTH: Do you want authentication? With authentication, the user is going to have to put in a username and a password before they can join or create a meeting. If so, uncomment this line and make sure it's set to 1.

AUTH_TYPE: If you'd set ENABLE_AUTH to 1, then set this one to "internal". I won't go over LDAP or JWT authentication in this article.

RESTART_POLICY: Restart policy of the containers. The default is unless-stopped. I prefer always or on-failure.

TZ: Set this to your system's timezone. Since my servers are running in UTC timezone, I don't have to change it.

If you are not using reverse proxy, you should add these variables to the .env file:

HTTP_PORT, HTTPS_PORT: Change these to 80 and 443 respectively. These are the ports your container is going to bind its to.

ENABLE_LETSENCRYPT: Set this to 1, you need HTTPS.

LETSENCRYPT_DOMAIN & LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL: The domain your instance will be hosted on, and your email id for your certificate-related notifications.

ENABLE_HTTP_REDIRECT: Set this to 1, HTTP traffic must be relayed to HTTPS.

ENABLE_HSTS: This will, in a way force the browsers to use a trusted connection. Set this to 1.

If you have opted for the reverse proxy, you should add these variables to the .env file:

DISABLE_HTTPS: Since HTTPS is going to be handled by your reverse proxy's web server, you don't need to have HTTPS enabled from Jitsi itself.

ENABLE_HTTP_REDIRECT: Not necessary, set this to 0. HTTP/HTTPS is going to be handled by our reverse proxy.

VIRTUAL_HOST & LETSENCRYPT_HOST: These variables are not there by default. Add these, and for the values, use the domain name where your instance is going to be hosted. For more information read my revere proxy article.

Open the file docker-compose.yml in your favorite text editor.

The only service definition that needs editing is the web service. Modify it according to the following list

Assuming the network name is net, change it to whatever you set yours to.

Once all the editing is done, you can deploy Jitsi with docker-compose up -d command.

Make sure your reverse proxy containers are running IF you opted for reverse proxy method.

You are almost done with the Jitsi Meet deployment except for the last step which is to create authenticated users for your Jitsi server.

If you enabled authentication (with ENABLE_AUTH), you're going to need to register the users before you can use Jitsi.

To do so is quite simple. Head over to the cloned repository directory and run a command similar to the following

You can also remove a user using the unregister command like I've shown here:

Finally, you can go ahead and check the Jitsi Meet front end on the designated URL in a web browser:

Still have questions or suggestions? Please feel free to drop a comment.

If you like this tutorial and would like to see us produce more such helpful content, please consider opting for Pro membership or make a one time donation to support us 🙂

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How to Self Host Jitsi Meet With Docker [Step by Step Guide]

Please join us for a panel discussion on what it means to protest in the age of mass surveillance. We will be examining different kinds of surveillance and military technology and how they are deployed against protesters, and what impacts this technology has on the civil liberties of protesters.

Moderator: Jo Facklam: Program Associate for Restore the Fourth, protester and agitator based in Minneapolis.

Panelists:

Bruce Schneier Cryptographer and Fellow and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School, a board member of EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

Mahesha P. Subbaraman Appellate attorney at Subbaraman PLLC and chair of the Restore the Fourth Litigation Working Group.

Freddy Martinez is a Policy Analyst at Open The Government, a non-partisan coalition, where he focuses on policing, surveillance and public access to information.

Isabella Nascimento Staff Attorney for the ACLU of Minnesota.

In keeping with our values on privacy and data sovereignty, for this event we will be using Free and Open Source software (Jitsi and Owncast) which respects your privacy and runs on hardware owned and under the physical control of our friends at https://cyberia.club, a friendly Minnesota hacker collective.

The rest is here:
Protesting in the Age of Mass Surveillance - EFF

If the installation is on a machinebehind NATjitsi-videobridge should configure itself automatically on boot. If three way call does not work further configuration of jitsi-videobridge is needed in order for it to be accessible from outside. Provided that all required ports are routed (forwarded) to the machine that it runs on. By default these ports are (TCP/443 or TCP/4443 and UDP/10000).

The following extra lines need to be added to the file/etc/jitsi/videobridge/sip-communicator.properties:

org.ice4j.ice.harvest.NAT_HARVESTER_LOCAL_ADDRESS=org.ice4j.ice.harvest.NAT_HARVESTER_PUBLIC_ADDRESS=

And comment the existing

org.ice4j.ice.harvest.STUN_MAPPING_HARVESTER_ADDRESSES.

See the documentation of ice4jfor details.

Default deployments on systems using systemd will have low default values for maximum processes and open files. If the used bridge will expect higher number of participants the default values need to be adjusted (the default values are good for less than 100 participants). To update the values edit/etc/systemd/system.confand make sure you have the following values:

DefaultLimitNOFILE=65000DefaultLimitNPROC=65000DefaultTasksMax=65000

To load the values and check them lookherefor details.

By default, anyone who has access to your jitsi instance will be able to start a conference: if your server is open to the world, anyone can have a chat with anyone else. If you want to limit the ability to start a conference to registered users, set up a secure domain. Follow the instructions athttps://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain.

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Jitsi | Quick Install | Advance Configuraton | Some Fixes

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We follow industry best practices and primary and secondary research methodologies to prepare our market research publications. Our analysts take references from company websites, government documents, press releases, and financial reports and conduct face-to-face or telephonic interviews with industry experts for collecting information and data. There is one complete section of the report dedicated to the authors list, data sources, methodology/research approach, and publishers disclaimer. Then there is another section that includes research findings and conclusion.

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Market trends and outlook coupled with factors driving and restraining the growth of the Web Conferencing market Jumbo News - Jumbo News

The pandemic, the lockdowns, bring new focus, Ive noticed, to the mythos of the enclave, the citadel, the haven, the safe space inside which lovely things can flourish while the world outside it continues to go to hell. Lauren Oya Olamina, the visionary heroine of Octavia Butlers Parable books, lived until she was 18 in a gated neighbourhood in Robledo, southern California, with her clever father, a Baptist preacher, and resourceful stepmother, who kept a garden with peppers, tomatoes, squashes, carrots, lettuce and melons, sunflowers, beans, corn. But then, on 30 July 2027, the outside world got in, raping and killing and setting fires: so Lauren dug up what she could of the emergency packs she had hidden across the compound and, not for the first time in the literature of her country, lit out for the road.

The Pox, Butler writes, is what many call the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as the Apocalypse, an instalment-plan World War III that starts sometime between 2015 and 2030. Theres no rain, water costs more than petrol, police and fire services charge by the call-out, and even so, dont come. A state, a government, still exist, but so weakened that they dont much matter. Some think they can escape by buying into a company town such as Olivar, a previously rich and white coastal suburb, the beaches now submerged by rising sea levels, the land and infrastructure owned by a single offshore trust. Others stuff their faces with street drugs such as pyro, which makes fire-starting feel even better than all other drugs put together. On the East Coast, the invention of pyro caused an immediate increase in arson; and then it came to dry-as-straw southern California. As Butler often writes, in the flat teenage voice she made for Lauren: Yeah.

By the time catastrophe overcomes Robledo, Lauren has been prepping herself for years. She has been reading, too, about the plague in medieval Europe, and how different life became afterwards for the survivors: Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. Laurens father, the best man I know, sees so far but no further, which is the reason we will shortly be considering whether it is his arm, smooth, white bone [sticking] out at the shoulder, that the children find in the scrub. But Lauren sees farther yet, partly because she suffers from a surfeit of empathy, an unshakeable belief that when she witnesses pain in another human being, she feels that pain herself: this is an organic delusional syndrome, as Butler calls it, an effect of foetal brain damage caused by her mothers addiction to smart drugs. The condition makes life complicated, in that Lauren is unable ever to cut herself off from the agonies of others. But it makes other things simple. When under attack and fighting back, she can only save herself from the suffering of her enemies if she kills them quickly.

Theres another thing that makes Lauren different, dangerous, a missile, ready to go off. She has developed her own religion, Earthseed, the credo of which is that God is not love, not personal, but Change: the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe. We do not worship God We learn from God. We adapt and endure. And beyond endurance comes the Destiny: Earthseed will go on. It will grow. It will force us to become the strong, purposeful, adaptable people that we must become It will force us to become more than we might ever become without it. The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.

Parable of the Sower (1993) tells how Lauren leaves the ruins of the family compound to join the shuffling hordes journeying north, gathering disciples as she goes. By the end of the book they have reached their promised land, where they found a farmstead they call Acorn and plant the seeds from Laurens pack. At the start of Parable of the Talents (1998) Lauren is Shaper of this refugee community, flourishing and well ordered, while outside, a president promises to make America great again and the social fabric continues to collapse. Acorn has just celebrated its fifth anniversary fried rabbit, baked potato acorn bread and sweet potato pie when it is invaded by militias with big crosses on their tabards and turned over to become a Christian concentration camp. I wanted to lie down on the floor in a tight knot around my uselessness and my aching breasts and scream.

It wont spoil the books too much to know that Lauren going now by her Yoruba surname, Olamina recovers, starts anew, builds a worldwide network of Earthseed schools, farms, intentional communities, a bank. Earthseed becomes, in other words, merely an unusually well-run New Age foundation, prosperous and banal. Except that it also lobbies congressmen to get support for shooting its people into space: We need the stars We need purpose! We need the image the Destiny gives us of ourselves as a growing, purposeful species If were to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialise and die, we need the stars.

By the time of Olaminas death in 2090, space shuttles fat, squat, ugly, ancient-looking are travelling regularly to the moon, where the first starships are assembled, then loaded with seeds, tools, embryos, adult humans, sunk in suspended animation. But Olamina dies before the starships actually take off. The first is called the Christopher Columbus, in spite of her objections. This ship is not about a shortcut to riches and empire. Its not about snatching up slaves and gold and presenting them to some European monarch. But one cant win every battle. One must know which battles to fight.

The story of what the true believers found, on the fresh green breast of whichever new world they came to, was to have been told in a third book, Parable of the Trickster, which survives as dozens upon dozens of false starts in a pile of archive boxes at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, some petering out after twenty or thirty pages, others after just two or three, in the words of Gerry Canavan, who in 2013 became the first scholar to open them. Butler had been reading James Lovelock and thinking about what would happen if humans migrated to other worlds while continuing to be part of an earth organism in some literal way: phantom-limb pain was a phrase she used in the notes in the boxes. A somehow neurologically incomplete amputation. Graft-versus-host disease a mutual attempt at rejection.

After Trickster, Butler had dreamed of writing at least three further Parables, maybe more, as the Earthseed pilgrims scattered over time and space. Like Lauren, she had been working on Earthseed over many years in her notebooks, and talked in interviews about her hopes for humanity: I was a kid during the space race. I used to get up early in the morning and watch as the preparations were made and the Mercury capsules and then the Gemini and the Apollo went off Later, I thought this was our way of having a nuclear war with the Russians without having one. Religion has kept us focused and helped us to do any number of very difficult things So why not use it to get us to the stars?

In her writing, however, Butler was unable to make the Destiny happen. Tiny fragments of possible Trickster episodes are lodged in the published Parables: the astronaut whose dying wish is for her body to be left behind on Mars, the one thing she had wanted all her life; the Martian slime moulds, both a great discovery and a great sadness, since the minute they come into contact with the human, they die. Butler was ill and often depressed while she worked: tired all the time, frightened that her blood-pressure medications were wrecking her libido, her ability to think. Like Lauren, however, she had been depending on her work ethic since childhood. On and on and on she pushed with the Trickster, for much of the last decade of her life.

She did take time out to write what she called her fun novel, Fledgling (2005), about a melanated young vampire called Shori, whose people the Ina secrete a hormone in their saliva that bonds their victims to them, whereupon they move happily into polygamous communes, to live as symbionts. It isnt very good, Butler fretted, and I think shes right: for a tale intended to be lightweight, its horribly weighed down with Ina rules, Ina lore, Ina feuds and an exceedingly long and boring Ina court case. And it may be nice, if thats what youre into, to read about freely consenting adults enjoying sex with superhumans; its less so when participants have, in effect, been drugged. Or when Shori, whos 53, were told, in Ina years, looks like shes about ten. As Lauren put it. Yeah.

Butler was 58 when Fledgling was published, and barely a year later, she fell and hit her head on an icy pavement and died. Her papers arrived at the Huntington in 2008: two filing cabinets and 35 large cardboard boxes, containing drafts, notes, sums, receipts and bills, an order form for mens-size Star Trek jerseys; to-do lists and to-get lists Potatoes Wiener Fish Sticks T Paper. The archive is vast and frankly, imposing, Lynell George reports in the book she made from her exploration of it, a sensitive combination of facsimile scraps, biographical fragments and indirect-discourse speculation. George herself is Black and Los Angelena, and first came to know of Butler as a local author, a public character in the Jane Jacobs sense, signing books at readings, seen around the place in the sidewalk ballet. Dont you need a car in LA? George asks of Butler a committed pedestrian in her book. She will smash this canard [on] each long walk she takes It slows the city down to moments and voices The city itself is a story, a seed.

An authorised biography is in progress, Butlers estate tells me, but can say no more because of Covid-related delays. Butler has in the meantime been added to the Library of America canon, under the editorship of Nisi Shawl, previously the co-editor, with Rebecca Holden, of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices and Octavia E. Butler (2013); and Canavan, who is white, male, an academic scholar of science fiction, and previously published a short biographical survey in 2016. With this first volume of Octavia Estelle Butlers work, Shawl writes in their introduction, the Library of America kicks off its canonisation of discomfort, not the least of which must be the discomfort of white readers, and male readers, and readers of all sorts accustomed to assuming that they dont need to be thinking about race and racism, sex and gender, world-historical violence and domination, as they read. Theres also the question of how to properly represent the partial, unfinished and unedited material of a writer who very jealously guarded her public presentation, and who was very concerned about being made to look silly, foolish, uneducated or unsophisticated, as Canavan wrote in his study from 2016. I have sought to honour Butlers choices in such matters I sincerely hope I have succeeded.

One good thing about lockdown is the sightings we get, via Zoom and Jitsi, of peoples bookshelves: but Ive seen none as enticing as Butlers in a photograph by Patti Perret from 1984. Most of the titles I cant quite read, but theres one called Leader, theres an Atlas of the Bible, theres Alive, which is that book about the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes in the early 1970s who got so hungry that they ate a fellow passengers leg. I generally have four or five books open around the house, Butler said in one of the interviews collected by Consuela Francis in Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009). And Ill go out for my morning walk and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce.

The voice of the interviews is pretty much like the voice of Butlers few but marvellous essays: laidback but crisp and clear, the voice of a self-confessed news junkie and far-sighted African American intellectual who grew up through Project Mercury and the March on Washington, the Watts uprising and Vietnam, the moon landing and the assassination of Martin Luther King; whose inspiration for Xenogenesis, her great biopolitical trilogy of the 1980s, was both the then recent revelation that scientists had stolen cancer cells from Henrietta Lackss body without her familys knowledge, and Ronald Reagans fantasy of a winnable nuclear war. To read Georges book is to see a little of how hard Butler had to work for her calm and crispness, how much pain she encased in its smooth, thin shell: What good is a writer who doesnt write, George catches her despairing in her diary. We are trash if we dont write. Were good for nothing if those words arent down.

The word Afrofuturist is often used of Butlers writing and unsurprisingly, it being so gorgeous and hauntological. It comes, as far as I can tell, from Black to the Future, an essay published in 1994 by a white critic, Mark Dery. Why do so few African Americans write science fiction? is the question it asks, though the bulk of the essay consists of interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, Tricia Rose. The word is now much used when talking about the interest so many Black artists and musicians show in SF myths and machinery, from W.E.B. DuBoiss fictional writings through Sun Ra, Ishmael Reed, George Clinton, Janelle Mone; but it doesnt seem to me precise enough to get at the subtle severality of what Butler barely mentioned in Derys essay was doing in her work.

She had already come at the matter in her own way, in an essay for Essence in 1989: What good is science fiction to Black people? What good is SFs thinking about the present, the future and the past? Its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organisation and political direction? Disciplined extrapolation, a phrase Mike Davis has used about Butlers method in the Parables, gets at it much better. She extrapolates from what she sees in the world around her, she extrapolates from her reading, she extrapolates from painful personal experience, and all of it so measuredly, its as if shes working with dividers on a map.

Black existence and science fiction are one and the same, as Tate explained in the Black Audio Film Collective documentary The Last Angel of History (1996). All the stories about alien abduction, all the stories about alien spaceships, Kodwo Eshun went on, taking subjects from one planet to another, genetically transforming them Well look, all these things, look they already happened! How much more alien do you think it gets than slavery, entire populations moved and genetically altered, entire states moved and forcibly dematerialised It doesnt really get more alien than that!

The existential Black condition in America is all about deliverance, Tate said in an interview in 2012: ships and arks and forced migrations, rivers crossed, peoples freed; tales and images layered from memory and history and the Bible and traditions of popular song. So Lauren took her people north from Robledo; so Olamina built spaceships to take them to the stars. And Butler, meanwhile, was working too, maybe, on the sort of Destiny her grandparents had hoped for when they left Louisiana for the North:

taking a part of the Southto transplant in alien soilTo see if it could Respond to the warmth of other suns

Richard Wrights lines became the epigraph to Isabel Wilkersons 2010 study of the Great Migration. Butler didnt get as far as she had hoped with the Tricksters journey, but she knew it started in a verse from Earthseed:

Theres nothing newunder the sunbut there are new suns.

Iam a 34-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects some day to be a seventy-year-old writer: according to Canavan, the Butler archive contains this potted autobiography in close on forty different versions. Im also comfortably asocial a hermit in the middle of Seattle a pessimist if Im not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive. Over the years Butler updated her age, her ethnicity from a black to African American and her location: shed longed for years to move near Mount Rainier, but only managed it in 1999. The question of her sexuality is mysterious. I called the Gay and Lesbian Services Centre, she once said. I wound up going down there twice, at which point I realised. Nope At any rate, I was intrigued by gay sexuality, enough so that I wanted to play around with it in my imagination. As well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and solitary humans, Butlers work also features troilism and polyamory among creatures of several species and genders, sometimes libertine, often bonded for life; rape as an act of war and intimidation; and something else, between humans and aliens usually, that is harder to categorise. Canavan calls it blurred consent.

Octavia E. Butler was born in Pasadena in 1947, and grew up as an only child: I had four older brothers [but] my mother lost them all. Her father, Laurice, worked as a shoe-shiner, but died when she was a toddler. Her mother, Octavia M., was born in 1914 on a sugar plantation in Louisiana It wasnt that far removed from slavery, the only difference was they could leave and worked as a cleaner. The girl grew up in a strict Baptist household, which may be a source of Butlers interest in charismatic leadership, as well as her scriptural references. At home, she was known as Junie, after the month she was born. Outside, she went by her middle name, Estelle.

I was the most socially awkward person you can imagine, Butler said. She remembered being called ugly for the first time in first grade, and I went on being called ugly all the way through junior high school. If youre called ugly that often, you start to believe it. She was six feet tall by the time she was 14, so that also helped. She was accustomed to being misgendered, and chased out of womens toilets, and called horrible homophobic names. I hid out in a big pink notebook: theres a picture of it in Georges book. There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these.

Octavia M.s big dream was for her daughter to become a secretary. Octavia E.s was never to be a secretary in my life. I mean, it just seemed such an appallingly servile job. As a child, she had hated hearing her mother bullied and insulted by her white employers: I did not blame them for their disgusting behaviour, but I blamed my mother for taking it This is something I carried with me for quite a while. But Butlers mother also brought home all the cast-off books she could get her hands on, and a second-hand typewriter. When in the 1990s Butler won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, she immediately paid off her mothers mortgage. Octavia M. was by then in her eighties, and died within a year.

As a girl, Butlers first obsession was with horses. But she quickly moved on to stars and planets, asteroids, moons and comets, and in particular to Zenna Hendersons books about the People, aliens who live in secret among us, using Signs and Persuasions to talk about us behind our backs. In her childhood diaries, Canavan reports, Butler wrote about herself as though she, too, were in possession of special powers, enhanced, perhaps, by a keen interest in self-hypnosis, affirmations and self-help. Her bedroom, her bathroom, her doors, are decorated with messages, George adds, with carefully spaced sentences in felt-tip marker or ballpoint pen. They ring out with boosts or reminders.

Tell stories Filled with Facts.Make People Touch and Taste and KNOW.Make People FEEL! FEEL! FeeL!

Butler began planning her first novel, Patternmaster (1976), when she was 12 and her second, Mind of My Mind (1977), a few years later. There would eventually be five Patternist novels published, about a secret superhuman people who have been evolving for centuries already, and are all telepathically connected in a tidal wave of light. The saga begins in ancient Nubia, as the evil Doro hatches a plan another teenage fantasy of Butlers to live for ever and breed people, and extends far into the future, to a utopia in which supremacy is won by those with the greatest psionic powers and all the work is done by the normies, who are known as mutes. Mind of My Mind, however, is set in Pasadena as Butler knew it, with a distressing memory of overhearing a neighbours children being beaten undergoing a characteristic extrapolation. In the midst of their transitions, latents suffer uncontrollable access to the thoughts and feelings of others, which is the reason telepaths make terrible parents. They cant stand hearing all that undisciplined mental shrieking.

After high school Butler worked by day food processing, clerical, warehouse, factory, you name it while studying history at Pasadena City College. In 1970, she attended the annual Clarion College science-fiction workshop in Pennsylvania, at which she met the mighty Delany, and sold two stories. I was overjoyed No more failure and scut work. In fact, I had five more years of rejection slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me. She focused on novels because she decided that was where the money was, but I think its the tales that show her at her best: neat, odd little formes frustes that dont bother much with SF bits and bobs, and so become richer in details drawn from life. The terrible sickness that causes you to feel cursed, tempted, constantly, to destroy yourself (The Evening and the Morning and the Night): based on Huntingtons, Butler said, and a couple of other, more obscure diseases. There was trouble aboard the Washington Boulevard bus, Speech Sounds begins, a story conceived in weariness, depression and sorrow as Butler rode on that bus herself, trying to keep people from stepping on my ingrown toenail and wondering whether the human species would ever grow up.

Its the everyday 1970s details that bring much of the power to Kindred (1979), Butlers most famous novel, which begins with 26-year-old Dana, whos just moved with her husband, Kevin, into their first house together, sorting their shared books into a bookcase: Fiction only. We had so many books, we had to try and keep them in some kind of order. Dana and Kevin met when both were working for a labour agency we regulars called a slave market: both are struggling writers of SF. Their relationship is comradely and affectionate, but their families dont like it because Dana is Black and Kevin white. Home Dresser, closet, electric light, television, radio, electric clock, books. Home It was real.

In form, Kindred looks like a straightforward time-travel caper, in which Dana finds herself flung back to antebellum Maryland, where her mission, she discovers, is to act as guardian angel to her accident-prone great or maybe great-great-grandfather, so he can survive to get together with her great or maybe great-great-grandmother, thus allowing the beginning of the bloodline that will eventually produce her. Except that for Dana, matters of parentage and ancestry are not simple, because Rufus, the impregnator, is white and owns a plantation, and Alice, the impregnated, is Black, which means that the impregnation that needs to happen will be rape. It was all such fun for Marty McFly: no grief or fretting about the politics of amor fati, no need to worry about being whipped and raped and killed. Or to wonder whether actually, if this is what it takes to get yourself born, is it even worth it? And if it is, what will you do to make it up to the people who suffered so you could live?

When I got into college, Butler explained,

the Black Power movement was really underway and I heard some remarks from a young man who was the same age as I was but who had apparently never made the connection He said, Id like to kill all those old people who have been holding us back for so long. But I cant, because Id have to start with my own parents.

To begin with, Butler thought it would be this young man shed send back in time in her novel, but she quickly realised it would be impossible. Everything about him was wrong: his body language, the way he looked at white people, even the fact he looked at white people at all. She also realised her novel would have to be a clean version of slavery, because the intimate details of what people had to go through were too ugly and awful, as well as potentially exploitative. Such details inure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity, as Saidiya Hartman explained, and especially because they reproduce the spectacular character of black suffering. Butler put her plantation in Maryland for its proximity to the Mason-Dixon line, allowing at least a hope of escape, as it had for Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. She did her research at George Washingtons plantation at Mount Vernon in Virginia, where the founding father of democracy held more than three hundred enslaved people servants, as tour guides were still putting it in the 1970s by the time of his death in 1799.

To read Kindred now is to undergo a little of the experience that college boy had with his relatives, that Butler herself had with her mother as a child: the story is so neat and cunningly crafted, Dana is so sensible, that its easy to skip over the horror and the peril, the pain of Danas whip-scarred back and missing arm. Butler, as the clich goes, has read all the source material so you dont have to, and you could criticise what shes done with it as a bit too cleaned up, a little bit YA. In doing so, however, youd only show that youre not as grown-up as you think you are. Written in this way, Kindred is an act of generosity, an embodiment of the hope that one day, it will be nothing to write home about when a Black woman sits in her new house with her white husband, happily surrounded by piles and piles of books. History, Butler often said, is also another planet the only one we know to bear any life.

It startled me, Butler said once, when I began going to science fiction conventions, that a lot of people really did tend to think of going to other worlds or meeting aliens as though they were meeting other humans We dont have a clue. Her own more realistic assessment of likely scenarios resulted first in the magnificent story Bloodchild (1984), in which a human boy explains how he has come to accept his impregnation by the gigantic insect who is also his beloved godmother, not to mention his owner: I tried to write a story about paying the rent a story about an isolated colony of human beings on an inhabited, extrasolar world It wouldnt be the British Empire in space. It wouldnt be Star Trek. Sooner or later, the humans would have to make some kind of accommodation with their um their hosts.

The idea had come, she went on, from a trip to the Peruvian rainforest, during which she had been told about the botfly, which lays its eggs under the skin of a living host: I found the idea so intolerable, so terrifying, I didnt know how I could stand it. She was in the rainforest to research tropical plants for her Xenogenesis project, in which the paying-guest analogy would be extended to a near future Earth almost completely destroyed by nuclear war. In the Xenogenesis books since reprinted under the title Liliths Brood the few human survivors of the cataclysm are picked up by the Oankali, a highly advanced alien race that swaps genes and adapts itself according to whomever, whatever, it finds near: Oankali who work on spaceships look like giant caterpillars and communicate non-verbally, in images [and] pheromones; a depressed Oankali hides away and de-evolves into a kind of mollusc. And the Oankali who come out to meet the humans are primatoid and bipedal, except with tentacles like writhing, dying nightcrawlers instead of eyes and nose and mouth.

The Oankali are interstellar gene-traders, driven from deep in their evolutionary history to meet and mingle with what they find: We acquire new life seek it, investigate it, manipulate it, sort it, use it. We carry the drive to do this in a minuscule cell within a cell a tiny organelle. They live in symbiosis with their spaceships, which grow in a process a bit like 3D printing whatever food or habitat their symbionts might need. They repair the ruined Earth by planting larval entities with the look and feel and functions of grass and trees and so forth, but which have an inclination eventually to turn themselves into spaceships and fly away. When that happens, millions of years later, less than the corpse of a world is left behind, small, cold, and as lifeless as the Moon.

The Oankali pick out Lilith as their pilot project because of what they call her talent for cancer her familial genetic predisposition which they find beautiful and can use in all sorts of projects. Humans in general they find irresistible but exasperating (Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it), a plight they understand with reference to what they call the Contradiction: the coexistence in humans of great intelligence with an evolutionarily prior attachment to hierarchy and competition. It was fascinating, seductive and lethal. In interviews Butler sometimes glossed the Contradiction as men.

We meet Lilith in Dawn (1987) as she meets and learns about her rescuers and what they want her to do. The Oankali, we discover, have three genders, male, female and ooloi, the last one bigger and more powerful than the others, and equipped with two extra tentacles which Butler often calls sensory arms. Oankali mate in threes, Butler tells us, male and female with their ooloi in the middle; but this is where Lilith comes in. The Oankali want to mingle genetically with humans, with Lilith going first like a Judas goat, as she puts it to encourage the others to follow. She and her human partner become unable to have sex unless an ooloi slips between them, parasitising their feelings even as it amplifies them to an impossible intensity ablaze in sensation. Humans who refuse to have sex with oolois are not forced, but sterilised; which is not to say that humans who do not refuse exactly consent. Your body said one thing. Your words said another, as an ooloi says to one of its humans, moving a sensory arm to the back of his neck.

In Adulthood Rites (1988), one of Liliths part-human, part-Oankali children is kidnapped by a runaway tribe of sterile humans, desperate for children to raise as their own. The human in him, maybe, helps him understand what humans find horrible about the Oankali utopia, so he campaigns for his people to get a choice: to stay on Earth, but sterile, or to go to Mars, where they can start again and breed. In Imago (1989) another of Liliths part-human children spontaneously develops as neither male nor female but ooloi, which Butler stresses is not any sort of male-female ambiguity or mixture, but a completely different third term: The connection to grammar is both explicit and full of unexamined possibilities, as Joan Scott wrote in her essay Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis in 1986. Liliths children find a group of mysteriously fertile humans on Earth and want to stay with them and breed: the Oankali arent happy about it, but theres not a lot they can do. Human purpose isnt what you say it is or what I say it is. Its what your biology says it is. So there we are.

Arguments rage among Butler scholars as to whether the Oankali are better or worse than human beings. Better because they make decisions by consensus, worse because they dont listen when humans tell them No. Better because they dont blow each other up, worse because they devour whole planets. Better because their three genders excitingly explode the conventional sex-based binary; worse because the pairings in which the ooloi insert themselves are exclusively heterosexual and aimed at procreation. The connection to grammar is both explicit and full of unexamined possibilities. Canavan goes so far as to quote the 1948 United Nations Convention to show that the Oankali, in his view, are genocidal, the entire Xenogenesis sequence a plain retelling of the brutal history of imperialism. I dont see how it could have been expected to be anything else.

We can call Butlers method disciplined extrapolation; we can also call it tak[ing] existing helter-skelter and turn[ing] up the volume Mike Davis again. The young Lauren, on a not-as-bad-as-the-other-one presidential candidate: A kind of human bannister a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as were pushed into the future. And on outer space: Well We have to be going someplace other than down the toilet. And on politics in general: Politicians have been promising to return us to the glory, wealth and order of the 20th century ever since I can remember Were still a great, forward-looking, powerful nation, right? To which she gives the only answer possible: Yeah.

Now use your imagination. Is there anything on your family bookshelves that might help you if you were stuck outside? Any kind of survival information from encyclopedias, biographies Even some fiction might be useful, Lauren, back in Robledo, told a friend. Were going to have to leave, sooner or later, because were dying here, and the Earth is dying with us. Were going to need those new suns that might be out there. But how will we know its time to go?

Butlers considerations on the botfly may help. All that I heard and read advised botfly victims not to try to get rid of their maggot passengers until the fly finished the larval part of its growth cycle. Try digging it out any sooner, and youll just break off bits that will sit rotting inside you, making you weak and ill. Let the parasites develop at their own pace, munching away on you as they do. Theyll crawl out of their host at maturity, and fly away.

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Jenny Turner Ready to Go Off LRB 18 February 2021 - London Review of Books

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Read more:
Want a goat to stand in for you on Zoom? Itll cost you around R102 for 5 minutes - SowetanLIVE