161–170 of 178 posts
I think Riot should change their name. It's horribly insensitive to have a project named like that given the current situation. Please show some respect for the pain and loss of so many real-world communities.
There's nothing insensitive about the name.
Original comment below but I decided instead to go for the following: I am extremely proud of what work is being done online today to secure communications. While we have companies telemetrying our native stacks[1], web browsers[2], and messaging platforms[3], we also have people working on software that doesn't do those things and still tries to empower the user to get what they need done without being a double agen…
Please check out Firefox about:telemetry - that I believe is how it should be implemented so users don't freak out. There is nothing about me there. That is a simple way to help project. I like this idea so much that I've found and opted-in https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pkgstats
On my work notebook, I get "your organization has blocked access to this page."
/me freaks out
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What is Urbit for? I mean i never understood whats it's real use. From what i've read i imagine it as some new stack that replaces networking and servers but then i found out that you have to buy namespaces that are finite? Why?
I actually don't think it's that hard to grasp, but people often don't explain it very clearly. It's a from the ground up design for a serverless p2p 'overlay' operating system. Overlay just means that you run an Urbit VM on top of a mac/linux OS and people can write applications for your Urbit VM. Your Urbit VM communicates with other Urbit VMs in such a way that the application design is p2p by default so the compl…
1. Is feels pretty elite. Exactly what you mention - some new language that is pure and beautiful and not burdened by those dirty systems of the past (thats how i felt when they were discribing it).
2. The elitism i guess makes sense because it's core philosophy of the original author. The fact the original author is prick doesn't make the project bad but there is lot of ideology tied to it. It then makes sense then that part of the solution is buying finite namespaces. The richest have the most power because they are the most capable...
3. There is just huge contradiction in secure private p2p system funded primarily by Thiel. So it's Palantir money. Now I don't want to say that it's not secure. Quite the opposite i am pretty sure it is highly secure and verifyable.
But it feels like it's aiming to be the closed off gatekeeped part of the internet for rich and powerful that is secure and not spied by companies. While the rest of us gets the regular data mined, survailence network... regular internet.
The hard part of selling Matrix to family and friends who currently use WhatsApp is still the user experience. To be fair Riot has improved substantially since I first tried it but there's still some way to go before my Mum will be comfortable using it.
That said, I'm encouraged by the progress I'm seeing! My money's still on Matrix to supersede traditional centralized messaging systems.
I’m excited to try matrix with bridges to: - Facebook messenger - Instagram - Whatsapp - Slack - Discord - email (yes) If I can use a local client (iOS or Android), and not have to resort to a separate server, it’s awesome
Good announcement and look forward to test it as soon as possible.
Great work as always Martrix and Riot team. This is a long awaited feature, right now I am considering using Riot to replace most of my messaging, if it supports a SMS bridge. Given the anti-privacy climate in the US, it's great how Matrix is not US based.
There is an sms bridge that already exists, however, I'm not sure how well it works. https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix If you're on iOS, there is also an iMessage bridge that exists. https://github.com/matrix-hacks/matrix-puppet-imessage
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The contact social graph in signal is stored inside of SGX using a service called contact discovery. Signal is attempting to design the system such that Signal can never know whose contacts are in your phone as a service provider. They deal with side-channel leakage of lookups from the contact DB into the enclave using a technique called linear scan which is a constant-time bitwise XOR operation on every contact. Thi…
> If you still don't think what Signal is doing is enough, you can run your own signal (or matrix) server, but then you are running a very, very valuable server from a graph analysis perspective. ...which is precisely why we’re working on P2P matrix. No servers; nowhere for metadata to accumulate (other than the clients, of course).
If the network itself is controlled by adversary, you leak more metadata passing data directly. If data goes through honest server, attacker needs to do time correlation analysis.
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sounds perfect for state sponsored troll armies, who have way more money/btc/eth than any of us.
That's true for anything where difficulty is measured by a continuous function -- that is, everything is easiest for a state sponsored anything, good or bad, unless it can't be done at all. You're really just saying states have more resources than individuals... which is true almost by definition (they aggregate individuals within their realm)
ironically, facebook is in a position that is perfect for this, and they go out of their way to not see it. ...I guess because being able to block content based on dislikes by your immediate friends would make it too hard to expose you to all the sponsored posts.
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I actually don't think it's that hard to grasp, but people often don't explain it very clearly. It's a from the ground up design for a serverless p2p 'overlay' operating system. Overlay just means that you run an Urbit VM on top of a mac/linux OS and people can write applications for your Urbit VM. Your Urbit VM communicates with other Urbit VMs in such a way that the application design is p2p by default so the compl…
I mean i've always been a skeptical about it... 1. Is feels pretty elite. Exactly what you mention - some new language that is pure and beautiful and not burdened by those dirty systems of the past (thats how i felt when they were discribing it). 2. The elitism i guess makes sense because it's core philosophy of the original author. The fact the original author is prick doesn't make the project bad but there is lot o…
1. I don't think elite is the goal, it's more about first principles and being free to rethink things. Obviously high risk and in most outcomes would lead to failure, but they've made progress for years and have now proven they can actually ship. I don't think big complex goals are impossible, just hard.
2. I don't think the politics of the original author matter that much.
3. I don't agree with Thiel's politics. That said, Thiel has a pretty good track record for picking things that end up really successful because others pre-judge and misvalue them. I think he's good at taking the contrarian view and really thinking it through, looking for blind spots or generalized assumptions (that may be correct most of the time, but not all the time) that lead the community to undervalue things. I think his political views are both contrarian and wrong, but his VC success is often because he is contrarian and right.
As far as closed off and gatekeeped - the IDs are cheap (free to $10ish), and I believe their spam explanation for the existence of them. You can spin up a free 'comet' ID to play with things without needing to buy an ID at all. I'd argue the modern internet is what's closed off and feudal with large companies running our applications and requiring us to give them our data in order to interact with each other. Sure you don't technically need to do this (I created r/hnblogs and I want people to run their own websites), but the reality is most users won't do this, so how default applications work on the network matters. Right now they work almost entirely on a large company server/client model.
The 'galaxy' and 'star' urbit nodes are basically governance and infrastructure nodes, they allow a network consensus to determine changes that might have to happen to the network over time. They also incentivize people to operate portions of the network for other users (IDs can move between stars freely). A lot of this when compared to flaws in existing internet infrastructure comes out ahead to me - or at least not worse. (CAs, ISPs, etc.).