Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 133 posts

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#71

Post by amelius »

Arathorn wrote: post #10

This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source a…

> This isn’t a case of NIH

Makes sense as the title says "due to surveillance risk".

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#74

Post by Aissen »

cm2187 wrote: post #65
Aissen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would need patching the OS at runtime, but yes, it's also possible.

What I mean is that perhaps they already have.

It's a possibility. It just wouldn't make any business sense, it's a pure self-destruct button. And there are hundreds of reverse engineers on both platforms that could have caught it by now.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#75

Post by grive »

nickik wrote: post #47
benevol wrote: post #15

When tax dollars go into open source, it's just an endless chain of win-win-win-win-... News like this is just great. :-)

Yeah its a total win for the french tax payer who will spend a bunch of money on a service that they neither need nor want.

It seems that the source have already been published and is using open protocols.

I'm actually greatly pleased that my taxes are spent on an app that is actually accessible from the public, and will benefit open source project. This should be the standard way for most government development projects.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#76

Post by briandear »

Davidbrcz wrote: post #2

Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there i…

SAIP has never sent an alert to me. But I get alerts from International SOS. So a third party emergency app does a better job than the official French app. Quelle surprise!

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#77

Post by amelius »

Arathorn wrote: post #37
spacenick88 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say it's a correct description of Matrix to call it "Jabber/XMP without the whole XML mess and over HTTP"?

Not really - the protocols are very different. Matrix is a way of replicating conversation history over a mesh of participating servers; a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another. XMPP is much lighter weight and builds on simpler message passing and pubsub primitives. You can use both to build comms systems, but they take opposite engineering and governance approaches…

> a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another.

Why would you need to do that? Why not just give every message a timestamp, make sure they get sent, and sort the messages on the receiver side? If you're really concerned about message order, you could give every message a unique id, and send out the id of the previous message with every message, and improve your sort function accordingly.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#79

Post by JepZ »

spacenick88 wrote: post #23
Arathorn wrote: post #10

This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source a…

Would you say it's a correct description of Matrix to call it "Jabber/XMP without the whole XML mess and over HTTP"?

Their architectures differ a lot and nowadays you can use XMPP with HTTP via BOSH. I think a fair comparison is the one in the Matrix FAQ:

https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-differen...

Disclaimer: I prefer XMPP.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#80

Post by hugg »

Arathorn wrote: post #36
tenryuu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would appear in a lightweight fork of Riot though? Do you just remove a lot of the fluff to make it a bit more accessible for the public/general consumer?

you simplify the ux (eg autodiscovering the right homeserver); hook it up to directory services and/or SSO; simplify the e2e crypto UX; change the logo and branding, and have a basis to build on for whatever future custom features they need.

were doing exactly that at the place i work at, riot has too many settings and can be quite hard for a "normal" user (someone who is used to slack for example).

would love some kind of integration with openid connect though, since that would enable us to easier integrate with our AD. of course we could make that ourselves but we dont have the manpower right now.

Post reply on HN