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Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

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Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#51

Post by kuschku »

amandine wrote: post #45
kuschku wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also take a look at the network "protocol": JSON over HTTP longpolling, requiring usually a separate socket for each batch of messages sent or received (unless HTTP/2 is available, then it’s a bit less expensive, still has a massive overhead). Matrix has so much potential – someday, when it’s built on technologically more ideal foundations. Python2.7 you’ll barely notice, but the network overhead of the Matrix protoc…

The spec only states the use of JSON over HTTP as a baseline so anyone is welcome to implement more efficient transports like CBOR/COAP or MQTT or whatever :) But yes the goal of the reference implementations was to showcase the simplest transport: one PUT to send and one GET to retrieve it. Meanwhile we’re working on improving the performance of the servers with some rather nice breakthroughs on the horizon.

As I said, the potential is there, the current implementations just aren’t there yet. In a few years it might be entirely different.

And I’m not sure PUT and GET are the simplest solution, I’d think a simple socket over which messages are transmitted in both directions would be simpler than implementing an entire HTTP stack.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#52

Post by Jaepa »

youseecomrade wrote: post #47

I don't know much about licenses: is Matrix and/or the protocol safe from Facebook, Google and co to pull the same thing again? Feels like EEE is inevitable when these companies allocate resources to provide a better UI/UX and benefits in their own services.

I have no clue what you are trying to ask, sorry. Could you clarify?

Do you mean IP lawsuit's against Matrix itself?

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#53

Post by geoffpado »

akditer wrote: post #32
sys13 wrote: post #5

Does this make freedom of information requests less useful to the public?

Freedom of information....which amendment is that :P ?

This is France we're talking about, so it's not amendments, but rather Article XV of the "Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_t... ("The society has the right of requesting an account from any public agent of its administration."), which is used as the basis for actual legislation today: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/research/foi/countrie...

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#54

Post by doomrobo »

What protocol? If you look at spec on their website[0] you'll see 4/5 of the protocols are still marked unstable. Take room state resolution as an example. It has pretty important security implications and it's nontrivial in a distributed setting. The algorithm is not stabilized, and it comes with a warning in the specification:

    Warning:
    This section documents the state resolution algorithm as implemented by Synapse as of December 2017
    (and therefore the de-facto Matrix protocol). However, this algorithm is known to have some problems.
I really like the idea of Matrix, but it seems a little immature for a government to use as a standardized messaging protocol.

[0] https://matrix.org/docs/spec/

[1] https://matrix.org/docs/spec/server_server/unstable.html#roo...

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#55

Post by Cynddl »

solarkraft wrote: post #12
sys13 wrote: post #5

Does this make freedom of information requests less useful to the public?

No. The information being securely stored does not mean users wouldn't have to turn over the information. However usually FoI doesn't usually apply to instant messaging anyway, I think.

In France, there is also no general Freedom of Information law, except for some administrative documents.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#56

Post by pjc50 »

akditer wrote: post #32
sys13 wrote: post #5

Does this make freedom of information requests less useful to the public?

Freedom of information....which amendment is that :P ?

Article 34, apparently, although I can't really see how it's interpreted from the text.

http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/conseil-constitutionne...

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/research/foi/countrie...

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#57

Post by j4pe »

I had to roll my own chat system recently because the open source solutions out there were surprisingly insufficient - nothing seems to support websockets. Looking forward to the French contributions to the ecosystem!

For instance: at the moment Matrix server implementations expect clients like Riot to long-poll for JSON about each room/chat they're connected to. Alternatives like Prosody's XMPP server implementation dropped websocket support in favor of BOSH years ago.

I wonder why this is - maybe there's just less developer interest since chat has gone mobile, and mobile devices break ws connections so frequently? But it's obvious that chat clients like FB messenger, whatsapp, slack, etc are establishing ws connections.

Strange.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#58

Post by mindB »

subway wrote: post #46
amandine wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Signal is centralized. With Matrix they can deploy different servers across the gouvernement which interoperate. And potentially open it to the wider Matrix ecosystem

Signal, the service is centralized, but there's no reason that Signal, the protocol can't be. In fact before Moxie went on his silly "only I can do security right" rampage, Signal was federated with a server hosted by CyanogenMod.

The E2EE in matrix is actually based on the double ratchet from the Signal protocol. So you could think of the E2E in matrix as just a federated version of Signal. :)

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#59

Post by lpghatguy »

kuschku wrote: post #51
amandine wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spec only states the use of JSON over HTTP as a baseline so anyone is welcome to implement more efficient transports like CBOR/COAP or MQTT or whatever :) But yes the goal of the reference implementations was to showcase the simplest transport: one PUT to send and one GET to retrieve it. Meanwhile we’re working on improving the performance of the servers with some rather nice breakthroughs on the horizon.

As I said, the potential is there, the current implementations just aren’t there yet. In a few years it might be entirely different. And I’m not sure PUT and GET are the simplest solution, I’d think a simple socket over which messages are transmitted in both directions would be simpler than implementing an entire HTTP stack.

Being able to implement a client that runs in a browser (and can thus only deal in terms of HTTP) is very valuable, and one reason to claim that the simplest solution is HTTP PUT and GET.

Re: Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App

#60

Post by esaym »

subway wrote: post #46
amandine wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Signal is centralized. With Matrix they can deploy different servers across the gouvernement which interoperate. And potentially open it to the wider Matrix ecosystem

Signal, the service is centralized, but there's no reason that Signal, the protocol can't be. In fact before Moxie went on his silly "only I can do security right" rampage, Signal was federated with a server hosted by CyanogenMod.

>In fact before Moxie went on his silly "only I can do security right" rampage

Do you have link or source for that? (I'm always interested in listening or watching stuff from Moxie)

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