It keeps users away from government surveillance

Feb 25, 2016 01:00 GMT  ·  By

Founder, maintainer, and CTO of ownCloud, Frank Karlitschek, was happy to inform the world that the upcoming ownCloud 9.0 self-hosting cloud server will implement a free and secure WebRTC teleconferencing system based on Spreed.

As usual, we were very curious to find out what's the fuss all about, and to our surprise, we found out that Spreed will, in fact, bring private and secure video calls to ownCloud 9.0, which should hit the streets in a few weeks from today, based on Spreedbox.

What's Spreedbox? Well, as you can see from one of the tweets attached at the end of the article, Spreedbox is an aluminum cube with 4.5-inch (11.1 cm) sides, slightly tilted on a plastic base and weighing around 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg), which contains an oDroid C1+ SBC and a custom PCB with an RNG and microSD-based storage.

"On the storage you will find the software which makes the Spreedbox a useful tool for both individuals and small companies–ownCloud with Spreed, an integrated web conferencing tool," ownCloud developers have explained. "I’m sure many ownCloud users will be experimenting with this soon."

Spreedbox and ownCloud give users secure video calls

Those of you who are afraid that their local government agency, or any other government in the world for that matter, can spy their video calls made using Skype or any other popular teleconferencing system, should find Spreedbox and ownCloud of much use.

Spreed is not limited to a web-based interface, and it comes with all the software you need for your favorite operating systems, be it either mobile or desktop. Best of all, Spreedbox ships with a very secure web browser software named Iridium.

The ownCloud team spoke with Niels Mache, CEO at Struktur AG, about the social and technical goals behind the Spreedbox, so we recommend reading the full interview for more details. In the coming days we will publish another article about a new cool feature that will be implemented in ownCloud 9.0.