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Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

matrix.org

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Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#81

Post by reitanqild »

tptacek wrote: post #40
dane-pgp wrote: post #25

While I'm very excited about the prospects for Matrix in 2019, the reality of client choice for end-to-end encrypted Matrix chat is currently disappointing compared to the potential it has. Someone on reddit gathered some data [1] about E2EE support a few months ago, and Debian maintain a wiki page [2] about their progress packaging Matrix-implementing applications. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/9avye…

I bear no ill-will towards the Matrix project, but this fact pattern (I knew about it in the abstract but hadn't seen it laid out like this) makes me actually angry about the people who have recommended Matrix as a replacement for the Signal Protocol messengers like Signal, WhatsApp, and Wire. Telling people to switch to Matrix from those is simply malpractice.

> makes me actually angry about the people who have recommended Matrix as a replacement for the Signal Protocol messengers like Signal, WhatsApp, and Wire.

On the other hand a number of us are puzzled by a leading cryptographer and security expert actively recommending WhatsApp after all the tricks Facebook has been trying to play since they bought it, e.g default opt in to new amd wildly different terms.

Signal? Sure. Feels reasonable. Bjt as long as you keep recommending WhatsApp while lashing out against everyone else I really don't see why I should trust you.

There's more to security than bullet proof e2e delivery of tbe content, you see.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#82

Post by trumped »

yoz-y wrote: post #53
shakna wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meaning better security, more features If I'm understanding you correctly, are you suggesting that iMessages has a superior security protocol than Matrix?

iMessage + Matrix definitely has a larger attack surface than just iMessage

But using Matrix, cant you more easily have multiple users posting from the same account?

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#83

Post by juliangoldsmith »

Arathorn wrote: post #15
priansh wrote: post #13

When rewriting Synapse in Python 3, did you use new language level features and optimizations? And what was your experience in doing so? I've heard a lot on both sides of the fence as far as adopting python 3 exclusive language features for optimizations as well as using Cython everywhere but I'm not really sure where consensus lands. Kudos to you however, this is one of my favorite projects and will continue to be!

Synapse currently runs on both Python 2 and 3, so we're not using any of the Python 3 specific language level features yet. We're considering dropping Python 2 support around April however to open up all the Py3 specific stuff. We've seen significant perf improvements anyway however - both due to switching to UTF8 for string encoding and some dict operations getting much faster. https://matrix.org/blog/2018/12/21/por…

Has performance been looked at on the database side at all?

While picking apart the Synapse database, I noticed some design choices that would cause very significant performance hits, particularly the use of string keys everywhere.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#84

Post by fartcannon »

JHSheridan wrote: post #50

I found Matrix and Riot a while back while I was searching for an encrypted, open-source alternative to Rocket Chat for my team. While there are still some things that need improving, they're mostly just rough edges. All of my coworkers are at least semi-technical, so that makes things a little easier for us. At times, the key verification can be frustrating, but I think this is just a hard problem to solve in genera…

It's also ridiculously easy to use. When his friend left their matrix riot chatroom for lent, this guy made a textgenrnn chatbot out of his friends chat history on Matrix. For the people looking for a demo, it's a pretty good start.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hRVVn-8CzXE

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#85

Post by Arathorn »

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #83
Arathorn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Synapse currently runs on both Python 2 and 3, so we're not using any of the Python 3 specific language level features yet. We're considering dropping Python 2 support around April however to open up all the Py3 specific stuff. We've seen significant perf improvements anyway however - both due to switching to UTF8 for string encoding and some dict operations getting much faster. https://matrix.org/blog/2018/12/21/por…

Has performance been looked at on the database side at all? While picking apart the Synapse database, I noticed some design choices that would cause very significant performance hits, particularly the use of string keys everywhere.

not yet, frankly. with 1.0 we've focused exclusively on the correctness of the protocol and the implementation. next up is making it fast (at last).

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#86

Post by colordrops »

runyor wrote: post #64
colordrops wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using for "one click deployment" of Mastodon and Matrix?

Have you ever heard about docker, cr-io (not sure if this one can be used standalone), buildah, podman? It probably won't be docker itself, but if you start deploy your stuff as docker containers now there will probably be a migration path to whatever it will be.

I was only aware of docker. Thanks for the list.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#87

Post by rakoo »

JHSheridan wrote: post #50

I found Matrix and Riot a while back while I was searching for an encrypted, open-source alternative to Rocket Chat for my team. While there are still some things that need improving, they're mostly just rough edges. All of my coworkers are at least semi-technical, so that makes things a little easier for us. At times, the key verification can be frustrating, but I think this is just a hard problem to solve in genera…

> This is the best and broadest attempt I've seen at this so far

The old chaps around here had exactly the same hope for XMPP that you're having right now. It had it all, except, crucially, marketing.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#88

Post by tedunangst »

Arathorn wrote: post #55
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bear no ill-will towards the Matrix project, but this fact pattern (I knew about it in the abstract but hadn't seen it laid out like this) makes me actually angry about the people who have recommended Matrix as a replacement for the Signal Protocol messengers like Signal, WhatsApp, and Wire. Telling people to switch to Matrix from those is simply malpractice.

tptacek: the reddit article there is a bit flawed (as uhoreg tries to gently point out in the response). the reality is that we provide decent E2EE stacks on web, iOS and Android which get used in the flagship client (Riot) that most people use. These are pretty solid and getting better, as per the SAS verif and cross-signing work. Other clients like Seaglass which build on the same SDKs obviously get the same experi…

How does an encrypted client interoperate with a non encrypted client?

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#89

Post by gonehome »

Arathorn wrote: post #8
gonehome wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an idea how this compares to Keybase.io and their team based chat? What's the main difference with matrix? Is Keybase something you were aware of and decided against for some reason?

Matrix is an open standard protocol ( https://matrix.org/docs/spec ) and an open network like the Web, but for realtime comms. Anyone can spin up a server and start participating in the network, and in Matrix the conversations are replicated over all the servers whose users participate in that conversation, so there is no single point of failure or control: the conversations are owned by the users. All the implementa…

Thanks for the detailed explanation - I know Keybase recently implemented PFS, but I don’t know the implementation details.

Re: Matrix at FOSDEM 2019

#90

Post by Arathorn »

tedunangst wrote: post #88
Arathorn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tptacek: the reddit article there is a bit flawed (as uhoreg tries to gently point out in the response). the reality is that we provide decent E2EE stacks on web, iOS and Android which get used in the flagship client (Riot) that most people use. These are pretty solid and getting better, as per the SAS verif and cross-signing work. Other clients like Seaglass which build on the same SDKs obviously get the same experi…

How does an encrypted client interoperate with a non encrypted client?

encryption is configured per conversation. if you try to participate in an encrypted conversation on a client which doesn't support encryption, you simply won't see the messages.
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