Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store • Hacker News Board

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#921

Post by codethief » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 12:45 PM UTC

lukeramsden wrote: post #582

Arathorn wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F-Droid publish their own builds; part of their mission is to independently build and package the upstream from source to avoid risk of the upstream doing anything unpleasant.

Can they not automate that? That would probably put them _ahead_ of the Play Store

It's not their goal. They want to be able to check the source code and verify it does what the developers claim it does.

The Matrix developers could, however, set up their own F-Droid repository and publish their own (automated) builds there.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#922

Post by meibo » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 12:46 PM UTC

ripdog wrote: post #917

idclip wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like CP ... cp is a real issue when it comes to crypto.

If it was encrypted, it wouldn't have been discovered in the first place. At least, not by google app reviewers.

You can take screenshots of encrypted content and the whole aspect of encryption is basically defeated if the channel itself is open to the public. This might not have been the case here, but there are people that infiltrate channels like this on purpose to report them to authorities and Google(?).

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#923

Post by davidinosauro » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

I wonder, would there be value in publishing a separate incarnation of Element that does not provide any default Matix servers? It would require you to type the server URL or follow a link from the browser

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#924

Post by ulzeraj » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #622

ulzeraj wrote: post #510

Ironically this move finally made me to consider Matrix. I'm thinking about spinning a server on a non FAANG provider like Vultr or Linode and setting IM services bridges from there. Nowadays I use lots of different communicators to talk to different people and most of these apps track me. If I setup a Matrix server somewhere that allows me to use those networks without having their software installed on my devices t…

Dendrite is okay for personal use (a few users), matrix-native, using the better-tested clients. IIRC some bridges work with it, but it doesn't implement the whole appservice API, which blocks you from using some of the better bridges. I do not recommend synapse if you don't have a lot of memory. I put an extra 8 GB stick in my server for it, bringing it to 14 GB. It routinely likes to take more than 4GB to itself, t…

Sadly 4GB is all I have.

On the other hand, I was expecting the bridges to me more like Bitlbee which maps personal accounts to IRC rooms. Matrix bridges seem to be more like syncing the content of a room to another.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#925

Post by kuschku » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

idclip wrote: post #891

Arathorn wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UPDATE: I just got a call from a VP at Google who apologised for the bad communication around this and explained the situation, which related to some extremely abusive content which was accessible on the default matrix.org homeserver. We don't want to go into specifics, but suffice it to say that it's not related to WallStreet Bets or anything like that, but instead is the sort of thing that causes you to get locked…

Sounds like CP ... cp is a real issue when it comes to crypto.

I’ve had to deal with a situation once where a user received spam containing links to CP via a major IRC network. Weeks of paperwork and trouble, caused by a few seconds of work for the spammer. Spammers abuse this imbalance of work to easily take down services, many of which won’t ever come back online (I certainly won’t ever host free IRC bouncers again, it’s definitely not worth it).

This is what truly destroyed the open, federated web: humans being disgusting animals.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#926

Post by ulzeraj » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

alfyboy wrote: post #590

ulzeraj wrote: post #510

Ironically this move finally made me to consider Matrix. I'm thinking about spinning a server on a non FAANG provider like Vultr or Linode and setting IM services bridges from there. Nowadays I use lots of different communicators to talk to different people and most of these apps track me. If I setup a Matrix server somewhere that allows me to use those networks without having their software installed on my devices t…

I'm in the process of setting up a Matrix homeserver myself. It seems like there are some missing features. From their github: > Is Dendrite stable? Mostly, although there are still bugs and missing features. If you are a confident power user and you are happy to spend some time debugging things when they go wrong, then please try out Dendrite. If you are a community, organisation or business that demands stability a…

I got it running relatively easy. Lots of client functionality from Element do not work and the shared secret request between devices timeouts.

I also find hard to debug because of all the errors related to broken federated servers. One thing that I recommend is to set "disable_federation: true" until you get some acceptable functionality before enabling it again.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#927

Post by badjeans » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

usr1106 wrote: post #898

tabbott wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really upset that this happened to you folks, and it's scary, because incident could just as easily have happened to us at Zulip (or any other OSS app that connects to self-hosted servers!). I expect we'll never get a useful explanation from Google for why this incident happened -- abuse teams, like fraud teams, are worried about the bad guys using the explanations to tune their tactics and so tend to never expla…

> There needs to be regulatory oversight of the Google/Apple app stores The regularity oversight needs to address a different aspect: google is world-wide de-facto monopoly for people not owning an iPhone. At least for the most part of the freer world, China is different story. Until Google is broken up or fair competition is not achieved, content regulation does not help. As a European I want to care about US regula…

> freer world

I guess that's sarcasm? I can't even eat a sandwich outside without fearing that it will be considered a picnic and get me arrested.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#928

Post by lucb1e » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #864

Arathorn wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UPDATE: I just got a call from a VP at Google who apologised for the bad communication around this and explained the situation, which related to some extremely abusive content which was accessible on the default matrix.org homeserver. We don't want to go into specifics, but suffice it to say that it's not related to WallStreet Bets or anything like that, but instead is the sort of thing that causes you to get locked…

But I can visit sites and do things in chrome that will get me locked up for life as well yet it's still on my phone.

But can you host content with chrome that will get you locked up for life? Because that's the issue here: the official default home server was serving that content. Now, yeah, decentralization but apparently the people handling abuse reports of stuff in the play store don't know what this means, hence GP saying they explained what decentralization is and the relation between Element (open source project) and Matrix.org (the 'offending' service).

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#929

Post by ttt0 » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

sitzkrieg wrote: post #906

Arathorn wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UPDATE: I just got a call from a VP at Google who apologised for the bad communication around this and explained the situation, which related to some extremely abusive content which was accessible on the default matrix.org homeserver. We don't want to go into specifics, but suffice it to say that it's not related to WallStreet Bets or anything like that, but instead is the sort of thing that causes you to get locked…

this is still a joke you have to post on hn and hope to get high enough up to nastygram someone over 'my app connectsto the internet like yours' level of shit

Exactly. I'm happy that the app was reinstated, but this solves nothing in the long run.

Re: Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store

#930

Post by Arathorn » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

jpetso wrote: post #896

shakna wrote: post #889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that tightly linked. Whilst the Element client does offer Matrix.org as a signup/login as the first page you see, you're also just one single click from signup/login to any of the other servers. Nothing about that page really feels locked or branded to matrix.org. I don't see how that makes Element responsible for matrix.org content. Thunderbird offers getting an email address via gandi.net in their new account p…

New Vector leadership holding key decision-making positions on both Element and Matrix.org could be seen as a distinguishing factor. It feels subjectively like more entanglement than the Mozilla/Gandi combo.

We’ve very consciously tried to separate The Matrix.org Foundation from Element (previously known as New Vector), despite both Matrix and Element being created by the same leadership (myself, my co-founder Amandine, and the rest of the core Matrix team). To be clear: we started Matrix in 2014 as a pure R&D project, and then created Element (then NV) in 2017 to keep the core team employed to work on it fulltime.

However, the non-profit Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation) was set up in 2018 with myself and Amandine deliberately in a minority control position (2 of 5 directors, called Guardians) specifically to address this concern - to protect Matrix from Element’s commercial activity, in case we ever went rogue.

As it happens, The Foundation farms out hosting and admin of the matrix.org homeserver to Element (which makes sense, given the Foundation doesn’t have employees and Element was already running the server), but if Element ever went evil, i am very confident that the Foundation Guardians would kick in and make a course correction.