101–110 of 133 posts
Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there i…
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Such a comment is meaningless without context. How often do corporate IT projects fail? How often do government IT projects fail?
How is the corporate failure rate relevant?
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What would appear in a lightweight fork of Riot though? Do you just remove a lot of the fluff to make it a bit more accessible for the public/general consumer?
I like (and use) Riot.im but as an electron app that uses ~300 MB of RAM (I just checked) it is definitely not lightweight. I can't think of any way they could make it lightweight either. Maybe if they treated the JS as pseudocode and re-implemented as native clients.
Agreed that Riot itself uses way too much RAM though - but we have some massive improvements on the horizon there; by lazyloading user data on demand rather than preloading it up front, we can improve RAM usage by ~5x. This work is happening over the next month or two (modulo GDPR).
Meanwhile, you can always use a desktop client; Nheko, Fractal and Quaternion are all looking increasingly good :)
Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there i…
Such a comment is meaningless without context. How often do corporate IT projects fail? How often do government IT projects fail?
These folks tend to think big. Everything else stems from that. What they really need is a little app with simple messaging, end to end encryption, and a server that doesn't log anything they don't want it to log. What they are likely to get if they pay some big shot contractor big money to do it is a Swiss army knife the size of a kitchen sink. With bugs.
Edit: and I've learned a few other things (SAIP, Quaero)
What’s amusing is that foreign secret services are not the only ones snooping on French politicians. French secret services have a whole department (formally called RG) in charge of collecting files on every domestic public figure (own file is a interesting ritual read for a newly promoted minister of interior). The justice dept had also an interesting interpretation of attorney client privilege where it argued recen…
Wasn't PGP illegal in France in the 1990s? Do they expect people to trust them?
> Wasn't PGP illegal in France in the 1990s? Essentially yes (and not just PGP), strong cryptography fell under arms regulations and required, essentially, the equivalent of a firearms license (but was, by contrast, almost impossible to obtain). Import and export of cryptography technology are still regulated, though [1]. > Do they expect people to trust them? I’m not sure what you mean by that: This isn’t a trust is…
Same goes for Libsodium by the way, I doubt Franck Denis bothered to ask permission as well.
I don't quite get the need of messaging service for the government when there are already other secure/official means of communication. Would any corporate promote messaging app over official email communication channel for employees?
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Would you say it's a correct description of Matrix to call it "Jabber/XMP without the whole XML mess and over HTTP"?
Not really - the protocols are very different. Matrix is a way of replicating conversation history over a mesh of participating servers; a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another. XMPP is much lighter weight and builds on simpler message passing and pubsub primitives. You can use both to build comms systems, but they take opposite engineering and governance approaches…
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Not really - the protocols are very different. Matrix is a way of replicating conversation history over a mesh of participating servers; a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another. XMPP is much lighter weight and builds on simpler message passing and pubsub primitives. You can use both to build comms systems, but they take opposite engineering and governance approaches…
So, Matrix is a better IRC, while XMPP is a better IM.