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Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

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Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#141

Post by notyourday »

feanaro wrote: post #109
notyourday wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They revoked keys of users without giving users a choice, ability to save, backup user messages etc. It is a company with operations, engineering and business ran by amateurs that do not understand the foundation of any user facing business - when you have a choice between not destroying user data and devising a method to handle a situation even if it costs you and losing user data, you do the first. Every single per…

No keys were revoked (nor does Element have the power to do so). What happened was that existing user login sessions were destroyed and users had to log in again. If you had either backed up your keys locally or had an encrypted copy of your keys stored on the server-side as a backup, no access was lost.

If the keys were associated with a session, then it quite literally demonstrates how clueless the company and its engineers are:

1. Send a message to the users with the existing sessions telling them to create backups.

2. Have users confirm that the backups were created

3. Log users that created backups out.

There's no excuse at losing user's data. Ever.

Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#142

Post by gen3 »

kenmacd wrote: post #140
adidalal wrote: post #89

For those interested in self-hosting the home server, I would recommend https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy - the documentation is fantastic and it’s very well maintained.

My main issue with self-hosting has been federation bandwidth requirements. I joined the very quiet `#homeowners:matrix.org` announcement room, but because almost 600 other people are in there my server was inundated with presence messages (just in case I wanted to know which of those 600 were online right now). Oh, and there's no way to prevent receiving these messages. They arrive on the same endpoint as non-presen…

I’ve been hosting my own matrix server for just a few months now. I have a small handful of users. Bandwidth hasn’t been a problem for me, as I’ve only served 5GB in the last 30 days. It’s the sheer number of requests that the server handles that I find staggering. In the last 30 days, my server has handled 1.3mm requests!

It seems like everything polls for data, which I see as wasteful. I recently saw they were adding socket support in a recent MSC... hopefully that will help.

Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#143

Post by thedanbob »

crazypython wrote: post #94
thedanbob wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I host a Matrix server for my family and we regular make audio calls to Australia. I had to try a few services before I found a $5 VPS that worked well, but network was always the limiting factor rather than server specs. The unavoidable latency makes video calls unpleasant so I can’t speak to that.

Hmmmm, which service worked well for you? Interested in knowing.

I ended up at Genesis Hosting. Their web console is a little rough but the server specs and network performance are better than any other $5 VPS I’ve tried.

Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#144

Post by thedanbob »

LinuxBender wrote: post #100
thedanbob wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I host a Matrix server for my family and we regular make audio calls to Australia. I had to try a few services before I found a $5 VPS that worked well, but network was always the limiting factor rather than server specs. The unavoidable latency makes video calls unpleasant so I can’t speak to that.

Have you tried using Mumble [1] to chat with your family? I ask because I have chatted with gamers that are in AU and NZ from the US with almost no detectable latency. I can see their latency in the client, but I can't hear it. There are open servers you can test it out with to avoid setting up the server and save you some time setting up the server in the event it does not work better. [1] - https://www.mumble.info/

Interesting, I’ve heard of Mumble but never looked into it. Thanks!

Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#145

Post by daenney »

gorgonzolachz wrote: post #115
rkangel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For 5 bucks a month I run my own server with almost a dozen folks on it, which requires basically zero maintenance (I can count the number of times I've had to go in and restart it over the past two years on one hand). Yes, but how much work was it to get set up in the first place? There's a reason that people pay for Wordpress subscriptions, even though you and I can set up static hosting off Gitlab pages (for exa…

Anecdotally, it took me about an afternoon. I realize that I'm more technical than the average person, so setting up the certs and installing the python deps was a breeze because I've done it before; the documentation for the synapse homeserver was also quite good. I see where you're coming from, but is this offering geared towards people like that? Looks like there's a significant push to get people who've had their…

> Looks like there's a significant push to get people who've had their own servers running to adopt this new service

How do you mean? I run my own, and there’s zero push to move or migrate to Element Home.

I’d imagine this only targets folks with accounts on matrix.org.

Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#146

Post by dtx1 »

mariusor wrote: post #81
ucha wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pricing page says you can only share it with 5 users for the $10/month package. Am I missing something?

You are right, apologies. :) x24 more than WhatsApp for the benefit of being sure your data doesn't fall into third party hands, that's for you to decide if it's enough.

"your data" falls into at least elements and aws hands with this. Yeah the content is encrypted but there's lots of metadata to grab by malicous actors. The reality is 10$ for 25 Users would have been more reasonable. Enough to setup a server for your family and close friends.

Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#147

Post by adidalal »

kenmacd wrote: post #140
adidalal wrote: post #89

For those interested in self-hosting the home server, I would recommend https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy - the documentation is fantastic and it’s very well maintained.

My main issue with self-hosting has been federation bandwidth requirements. I joined the very quiet `#homeowners:matrix.org` announcement room, but because almost 600 other people are in there my server was inundated with presence messages (just in case I wanted to know which of those 600 were online right now). Oh, and there's no way to prevent receiving these messages. They arrive on the same endpoint as non-presen…

Unfortunately not a solution for federation with other servers, but you can disable presence on Matrix servers you control.

For this playbook, use these variables:

  matrix_synapse_use_presence: false
  matrix_client_element_enable_presence_by_hs_url: {"https://matrix.yourserver.com": false}

Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#148

Post by crazypython »

HolidayHuckle wrote: post #132
crazypython wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently we're using AWS (but we're hoping to become more cloud agnostic in the future). If you're not using Lightsail, you're overpaying. Look at this comparison: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/ec2_vs_vultr AWS bandwidth through anything but Lightsail is 1000 times more expensive. AWS servers are 3-5x more expensive. AWS isn't successful because it's good, it's successful because it has good marketing. Loo…

Thanks for the info on Lightsail. We'll look in to it as one of the options for the future. As for AWS, yep, they're certainly not cheap, but they do have good points in quite a few areas and give you a great number of tools to build with. Hopefully the trick is not to get too dependent upon their infrastructure, and we'll definitely be looking to other cloud platforms to help bring the costs down in future. > Is Ele…

> As for AWS, yep, they're certainly not cheap, but they do have good points in quite a few areas and give you a great number of tools to build with. Hopefully the trick is not to get too dependent upon their infrastructure, and we'll definitely be looking to other cloud platforms to help bring the costs down in future.

AWS wins because it has a fun user interface and good marketing.

> they're certainly not cheap

The cheapest component (compute) of an on-demand EC2 instance is five times more expensive than Linode, Vultr, and OVH. Bandwidth is, I'm not exaggerating at all, 1000 times more expensive. If you use reserved instance discounts and Spot Instances, it's still two times more expensive than hourly-billed Linode and Vultr.

If you're willing to bear with its worse GUI and monthly billing, OVH is a good choice. They've been in business for longer than AWS and operate more servers. Their prices are so low that they're in shortage. If you need instances that aren't in shortage, try Azure.

"AWS Cost Optimization Guru" is a mistake. The best way to optimize your AWS costs is to migrate off of AWS.

> give you a great number of tools to build with

Yes, although you could host your compute at one of the third-parties I mentioned, and still call into AWS services. It adds a little bit of latency for great cost savings. Linode and Vultr gives you DNS, Kubernetes, block storage, load balancers, and private network in addition to compute.

> Yes, we are hiring

Let me know where I could be most useful at Element, or if there's a need for a general fixer role.

Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#149

Post by crazypython »

crazypython wrote: post #93
vbezhenar wrote: post #19

"Dedicated server" mentioned 4 times in that article. In hosting world, dedicated server means real physical server. I wonder if that's just marketing speak and in reality it's virtual server or they really install a separate server for every customer.

A dedicated server seems like overkill. A shared VPS works fine for many realtime applications, even fast-paced games that host 50 players concurrently that send out updates every 32 milliseconds, like agar.io, diep.io, or vnav.io. If I wanted lower latency, I would add WebRTC-based P2P chat for those who support it, to connect directly between servers.

I wanted to add: "Dedicated server" in the cloud business refers to a 1-to-1 mapping between server and physical computer. A "virtual server" is one that maps onto a physical computer when it actually needs the CPU. There are generally two types of virtual servers: A very low-end one running ARM or Intel ARM slower than your typical 1.3GhZ laptop, and a very high-end one typically used for CPU-bound applications.

The cheapest dedicated host on AWS costs $370/month: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/

So Matrix is misusing cloud terminology when it says "dedicated server."

Re: Element Matrix Services Announces Element Home

#150

Post by Arathorn »

notyourday wrote: post #141
feanaro wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No keys were revoked (nor does Element have the power to do so). What happened was that existing user login sessions were destroyed and users had to log in again. If you had either backed up your keys locally or had an encrypted copy of your keys stored on the server-side as a backup, no access was lost.

If the keys were associated with a session, then it quite literally demonstrates how clueless the company and its engineers are: 1. Send a message to the users with the existing sessions telling them to create backups. 2. Have users confirm that the backups were created 3. Log users that created backups out. There's no excuse at losing user's data. Ever.

I ran the response for the Apr 2019 incident that you're digging up, and fwiw:

* The breach impacted the free best-effort matrix.org server & infrastructure, not Element Matrix Services (the subject of this HN thread).

* We didn't "revoke user keys", we logged users out on matrix.org whose password hashes & login access tokens had been exposed.

* At the time we were in beta, and there was only one mechanism to logout users: a 'hard logout' used to evict client sessions which would cause them to clean up their local data; the common case where as a user you want to kick off old sessions and don't want to leave your keys littered around. Before exiting beta in June 2019, we implemented 'soft logout' as a mechanism to expire access_tokens without clients cleaning up data: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4280. Given the urgency to protect user data immediately after the breach, we couldn't release new clients to expedite soft logout, so had to go with hard logout.

* However, any user who backs up their E2EE keys, either online (the default configuration), or offline was unaffected. To repeat: the default configuration was to nag the user into backing up their keys, encrypted, on the server, for precisely this sort of situation. And to the best of my knowledge I don't recall anyone who reported having lost data to us.

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