Run a local Bitlbee server with Hexchat or Quassel if you like GUI's and stop using middleware services.
Yes, there are public Bitlbee servers out there, but these are for an emergency.
Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
181–190 of 422 posts
Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Element CEO here). Honestly, it depends on your threat profile. Any kind of bridge has to inevitably MITM your conversations in order to work, and we’ve tried to spell that out in all the product info about Element One. If you want to avoid your E2EE conversations on Signal or WhatsApp being relayed via a service like Element One (because you’re an activist or whatever), then your options are to not bridge at all, o…
> (because you’re an activist or whatever) How about because I'm a regular person, and I don't want everything I say analyzed by the federal government and stored in perpetuity? I'm increasingly repulsed by this notion that unless I'm doing something illegal or in opposition the the ruling party, encryption is just a luxury. Encryption is for anyone with any desire to express themselves honestly without modifying the…
> People flock to Signal for a reason
Why would you go to a walled garden if you want more freedom/control? You should just go to Matrix and host it yourself (and keep all the metadata to yourself, too!).
Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
#183> It’s also worth noting that end-to-end encryption is necessarily broken as messages to (and from) WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram pass across the bridge(s). The bridge(s) operates in Element’s trusted EMS environment, with no content scanning or datamining, but currently bridged conversations are not stored end-to-end encrypted in Matrix (they will be in the future). As a Signal user, I kind of don't want this to tak…
(Element CEO here). Honestly, it depends on your threat profile. Any kind of bridge has to inevitably MITM your conversations in order to work, and we’ve tried to spell that out in all the product info about Element One. If you want to avoid your E2EE conversations on Signal or WhatsApp being relayed via a service like Element One (because you’re an activist or whatever), then your options are to not bridge at all, o…
Your cavilier tone here about casually introducing a MiTM threat that many people won't understand to the e2e encrypted messaging ecosystem is pretty disgusting. As others have noted, the issue is that I can't opt out of other people using this which breaks the security guarantees of the chat system.
Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
#184One thing I didn't spot, does this tier allow you to use a custom domain name on Matrix, or will you be :matrix.org still? $5/mo is an interesting price point for me if it can do that, I don't need the bridges but I could support the project this way.
Element's regular matrix services are bring-your-own-domain, and I use them for our family's hosting. Unfortunately it seems they've decided that bring-your-own-domain is a feature for companies, and also given it "contact sales" pricing.
The plan I'm on pre-dates "Element Home" and sits at the same price-point.
Unfortunately a side-effect of the split is that I can't use the new bridging product without moving back to a shared domain, and the billing model for bridges on custom domains really doesn't work for consumers, at $0.50 per month per person who talks to you.
The newer products are good upgrades for someone on the regular matrix.org server, but not so good for people who already upgraded :P.
Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
#185Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/
No, it wasn't a "service" - it was a program. Unlike this thing. The main difference between this and Pidgin seems to be that you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications.
It's worth remembering again why we don't do this. Even if you fully trust whoever is running the MITM server, being that it's MITMing all of your comms, and it's on a server so it's actually a lot of people's comms, it's a massively tempting target for all sorts of bad actors. Plenty of governments and criminal gangs would just love to compromise that for all sorts of reasons. Odds are one of them will eventually.
For all you know, someone else on the server is a high-value target for somebody, and if they compromise the server to get their comms, they may not be very picky about what happens to the private communications of everyone else on that server.
Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
#186> It’s also worth noting that end-to-end encryption is necessarily broken as messages to (and from) WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram pass across the bridge(s). The bridge(s) operates in Element’s trusted EMS environment, with no content scanning or datamining, but currently bridged conversations are not stored end-to-end encrypted in Matrix (they will be in the future). As a Signal user, I kind of don't want this to tak…
I won't use it for signal indeed, for whatsapp though... can't wait to throw it of my phone!! I didn't dive into it, but can you also self-host this? Looking forward to some docker-compose snippets in that case :)
All the bridges (and the matrix server itself of course) are self-hostable.
Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t run my own service for the same reason I don’t build my own car or I don’t do accounting for my company, I don’t have the time to learn how to do it nor doing it.
That is the kind of comment that freaks me out on HACKER news.
If you know a problem is hard and the consequences for doing it wrong are potentially serious, it would be irrational to not consider selecting a well-managed third party solution. Being a hacker doesn't mean being all-knowing and the best hacks are done with the knowledge of human limits (both of the hacker and of the maker of the system being hacked).
Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah ideally they should sell e.g. raspberry pi devices which allow you to self host it at home.
They don't even need to sell this package, it's free and a lot of people do it: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/ The benefit to hosting by a company is it should be more reliable.
While the software support is there to run bridges to many other communications services, the actual bridges are direct agreements worked out between the various comporations and non-profits. You would have to be important enough to start such a dialog and relationship if you wanted to run the bridging features locally. So, don't expect to bridge to Libera IRC just because there's a software option.
You can always run bots, but that's not a real bridge like what is being described here.
Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
#189> It’s also worth noting that end-to-end encryption is necessarily broken as messages to (and from) WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram pass across the bridge(s). The bridge(s) operates in Element’s trusted EMS environment, with no content scanning or datamining, but currently bridged conversations are not stored end-to-end encrypted in Matrix (they will be in the future). As a Signal user, I kind of don't want this to tak…
I want this to take off. I'm tired of having to follow trends because people suddenly think there's a new shinyshinytrendy thing around: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal. Pidgin is good (I also miss the ancient Trillian, even though it was closed source), but limited to a local device. There are XMPP Transports as well for these (see https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmp…
> for encryption fans, I've been wondering for a long time now: why would you trust ANY 3rd party with your so sensitive data instead of running your own service? Are you not aware of OMEMO for XMPP?
we ran our own XMPP server for over 10 years using the "off the record" plugin for end to end encryption. Development seem to basically stop on open chat clients a few years ago and everything started getting crufty. (I see Pidgin dev has apparently picked back up again to some extent, as has Adium, to a much lesser extent).
"off the record" mostly worked ok, between Pidgin users, but failed with other clients.
A couple of OMEMO plugins came along but making them work (and keeping them working) was a continual drain - and we're only a small team with only 2 operating systems (Linux and OSX)!
My hunch is that enough people just moved to things like Whatsapp and Slack etc that developers were no longer using chat clients they could hack on. People stopped being able to scratch their itches.
Not to mention lack of any/decent XMPP client support for syncing histories between multiple clients, or handling inline images and things. All that modern stuff people expect.
Things like Mattersmost tried to fit in here but we just didn't get along with them.
Eventually Element/Matrix matured enough and while it was far from perfect, it worked and we sadly finally gave up on XMPP.
Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Element CEO here). Honestly, it depends on your threat profile. Any kind of bridge has to inevitably MITM your conversations in order to work, and we’ve tried to spell that out in all the product info about Element One. If you want to avoid your E2EE conversations on Signal or WhatsApp being relayed via a service like Element One (because you’re an activist or whatever), then your options are to not bridge at all, o…
Your cavilier tone here about casually introducing a MiTM threat that many people won't understand to the e2e encrypted messaging ecosystem is pretty disgusting. As others have noted, the issue is that I can't opt out of other people using this which breaks the security guarantees of the chat system.
That's not part of the security guarantee; The message was encrypted from user-controlled end to user-controlled end. It's neither Signal nor Element's fault that your conversation partner has decided to move conversations un-encrypted afterward. That was always allowed.