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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

#101

Post by tacoman »

Arathorn wrote: post #74
alexkavon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Their docs inspire little hope that the protocol will be little more than niche. How to build on top of this protocol without requiring someone with domain specific knowledge is beyond what's offered. Cue XKCD protocols comic.

Right now there are 4.5M registered users on the matrix.org HS alone, so I’m not sure niche is right ;)

An interesting number would be how many GCM/APN devices are registered in the matrix.org sygnal server.

All of the Matrix/Riot users I know use private, non-federated home servers, but still rely on the project's Sygnal server(s) for push notifications.

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

#102

Post by jraph »

forty wrote: post #85
majewsky wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess grandparent means how Google (and later Slack) initially supported XMPP in their chat products, then disabled the XMPP gateway once their userbase was significantly large that most conversations were inside their own bubble. There's not much that Matrix can do to defend against that, except for strategic marketing with the purpose of achieving a large distributed userbase. If Gmail had existed in 1990, we wou…

Isn't that what is slowly happening? My understanding is that it's becoming harder and harder to send email to a Gmail address of you are not yourself using Gmail (without being tagged as spam/junk I mean)

I host my mails and to my surprise, gmail has been one provider which hasn't caused me any trouble so far in 2 years, with Yahoo. I have proper configuration for dkim, SPF and dmarc. Even when my mails were somewhat misconfigured it worked with gmail. When a recipient has a gmail or a Yahoo address, I am quite confident that my mails will make it into their inbox correctly.

Not that I'm glad that most people I email with use gmail, since I'm precisely hosting my mails to escape Google (well, this is one of the reasons).

I cannot say that for Microsoft. After a long discussion with them, I think I'm not systematically landing in my recipients' spam folder anymore, but I'm still not very confident. Microsoft, please fix your filters! If I already exchanged with somebody in a two-way direction several times, my mails should not land in their spam folder anymore, especially if they explicitly marked me as not spam (even more if they added me to their contact list), and if you observed only legitimate mails for months or even years from my IP/domain, my mails should not be treated as spam by default even for new recipients, right? Good and reasonable filters are important for internet neutrality, where small providers can exist.

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

#103

Post by noahster11 »

jrq wrote: post #100

Why is the world so desperate to pretend that irc doesn't exist? Why can't we just get a new irc spec with e2e in mind? Matrix is an extremely immature project and the French gov is making an irresponsible move here to prop it up as a solution in any capacity. It's beta software! Where are the audits? Where are the formal verifications? Not that irc has those, I don't mean to juxtapose one not-good-enough product wit…

I think the problem with Signal is that it requires a phone number to sign up: which some people may not feel comfortable doing. On the other hand irc is nice, but it doesn't exactly have the media sharing tools that have become standard in chat clients (Discord, Slack, etc.). Although it is a little early for France to choose Matrix, at least e2e is becoming more standard, and countries are endorsing it.

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

#104

Post by zeratax »

majewsky wrote: post #69
ericfrederich wrote: post #34

Never heard of Matrix... looked it up; gross... python2.7

Work is underway to rewrite Synapse (the Python server implementation) in Go: https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite

there was also work being done to port to python3 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/2539

but it looks like this hasn't been worked on since october last year.

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

#105

Post by noahster11 »

rb808 wrote: post #21

I tried matrix/riot out, looks perfect for me and app is slick. Sending messages though from a server to a room was more difficult than I expected. Java SDK didn't build and many of the other languages were alpha too. Go seemed favored but I dont really want to install. Is there a recommended simple command line app or script to send messages?

There's work currently being done by Gnome to make a GTK client written in Rust at https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal/.

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

#106

Post by hokkos »

kuwze wrote: post #70

It's sort of ironic considering France's history with Minitel[0] and encryption[1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel [1]: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/1201/6012058a.html#75b6a6... Specifically from [1] is the line: "Its illegal in France to encrypt any communication in any way unless you have permission from the government. How is electronic commerce going to get off the ground in such a society? Good…

It has nothing to do with Minitel as it is a private government only slack-like tool. And the encryption restriction is long gone like in the US. Why there is alway francophobes in threads like that ?

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

kuwze wrote: post #70

It's sort of ironic considering France's history with Minitel[0] and encryption[1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel [1]: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/1201/6012058a.html#75b6a6... Specifically from [1] is the line: "Its illegal in France to encrypt any communication in any way unless you have permission from the government. How is electronic commerce going to get off the ground in such a society? Good…

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by subway »

mindB wrote: post #58
subway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

A point in moxie's favor is that the e2ee ux in matrix is currently extremely painful. I'm willing to use it on a couple rooms that consist entirely of geeks, but don't want to subject non-geeks to the whole verification process.

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

#109

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

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.

And that is precisely why it is an idiotic design decision. HTTP is extremely complex (well, and Matrix doesn't actually use HTTP, they just claim they do, but as usual noone reads the specs, everyone just builds crap based on what they think the spec says, because the spec is too complicated), and as such is an absolute dead end if your goal supposedly is to build something secure.

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

#110

Post by bitmapbrother »

It will guarantee secure, end-to-end encrypted conversations without degradation of the user experience. It will be compatible with any mobile device or desktop, state or personal.

Is the application they're creating also going to be open source and available for auditing?

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