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Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

element.io

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Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#411

Post by knocte »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #342
fsflover wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any kind of bridge has to inevitably MITM your conversations in order to work Can't you just pass the encrypted message further without decrypting it? Of course, there needs to be the same decryption mechanism on both sides, but it doesn't make it impossible.

It's possible but a lot harder. If the keys/tokens for fetching messages are similar/interlinked to those used to decrypt the messages then you can't separate the two. In this case you would have to do the message 'fetching' and decryption on the client side which would be very difficult for any JS based clients. Then there's the issue of syncing those messages between Element One clients which means the client now h…

> A brute force approach would be to provide an open source, self-hostable server

The server/bridge is not opensource? I see their github account has lots of code.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#412

Post by broodbucket »

teekert wrote: post #371
broodbucket wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/whatsapp/setup/docker.html Element One uses a modified mautrix-whatsapp, which means that your phone needs to be connected to the internet for the bridge to work - so you can't quite throw it off your phone. I don't have to regularly open the app or anything, though.

Hmm, ok, but I could keep it on a spare, empty, old phone at home then perhaps. Still, would have been nice to get rid of it entirely, but I see how that is impossible indeed.

Spare phone method should work, I've barely used whatsapp so I'm not sure if it needs a SIM after setup.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#413

Post by ev1 »

spurgu wrote: post #407
ev1 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kind of curious how Beeper will handle some of these - they claim to soon support WeChat, and emulating WeChat is a bit insane, because it collects so much data that it's a walking GDPR violation, there's no way to stop it, and we are talking things like "please repeat the numbers in chinese, then english, while looking straight into your phone" at login.

Uff, that sounds insane. I suppose they released those "features" gradually and people just went along.

It's a Chinese chat app (that is also used for payments, thus linked to bank accounts). Getting an account more or less requires ID or similar. They go to extraordinary lengths, similar to Tiktok, to block automation, bot accounts, etc.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#414

Post by knocte »

niutech wrote: post #404
personjerry wrote: post #35

Back 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/

Now there is another open source alternative: Matterbridge ( https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge ) connecting: Mattermost, IRC, Gitter, XMPP, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Rocketchat, Twitch, SSH-chat, Zulip, WhatsApp, Keybase, Matrix, Microsoft Teams, NextCloud, Mumble, VK and more. The use case is simple: instead of using plethora of IM apps, have all your conversations in one place.

Wow, this seems better than ElementOne?

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#415

Post by feanaro »

juliansark wrote: post #395
feanaro wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> jazzed about the democratization of technology that, in terms of message _security_, is a step backwards. Well, you can always switch to Matrix and have democratized and secure native messaging which uses a cryptographic protocol comparable to Signal. ;)

Many of us have, and painfully if I might add, finally convinced people to abandon insecure messengers and move to something like Signal. Now the solution is to tell them to abandon Signal in favor of Matrix? I'll pass. Also, obligatory xkcd: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

The problem is Signal is not a standard unless they open up their ecosystem, so we're not actually increasing the number of standards here.

I've been through the pain of convincing people to Signal due to lack of better alternatives at the time. And I've done it yet again for Matrix. In this case, each move brought us closer to a global optimum so I'm not sorry for it.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#416

Post by comice »

topdancing wrote: post #193
comice wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

For the past two years; I've been using Conversations (Android), Dino (Linux), and friends of mine have been using Gajim (Windows), Monal/Siskin (iOS). All of these work fine with OMEMO (the iOS ones gained better OMEMO and push support in the past few months) and message history retrieval between clients. Gajim doesn't do inline images, but the rest do. I occasionally use profanity as a console client and that recen…

I didn't say developers "gave up", but even as of 2019 it didn't seem like things were moving forward in any meaningful way.

Even just for OMEMO support, we all had to compile a plugin for libpurple/Pidgin, and it didn't even have full UI support so was very difficult to use when things didn't work automatically.

We used a gajim but iirc, to get OMEMO support we had to compile that too.

But I'm truly glad to hear the ecosystem has improved - I would have much preferred to have stuck with XMPP. But in 2019/2020, Matrix offered all this and more and worked very well. It was impossible to make the case for us to stay on XMPP.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#417

Post by hypertele-Xii »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #376
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless those official clients have features not available in the all-in-one client. Like encryption, which this one apparently lacks.

The benefit of an all-in-one client is that they can port/shim/polyfill[0] missing features between the backing platforms. -- [0] - Whatever is the most appropriate webdev word of the day.

And the downside of an all-in-one client is that they are going to have to port/shim/polyfill features from a hostile, proprietary, changing API.

Once again, the problem is not technical, it's political. Until interoperability is enforced by government, I expect companies to keep building their siloes. Network effect and tragic commons and all that.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#418

Post by tetrisgm »

pmlnr wrote: post #111
personjerry wrote: post #35

Back 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/

There, it's still good: https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins

I’d use the f out of this… if this was easy to setup. I’d like that but with one click and some settings things to sign.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#419

Post by yosito »

tao_oat wrote: post #97

> 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…

> this service starts fragmenting some of the privacy guarantees

There is no guarantee of privacy with communication between two consumer smartphones. Encrypted Signal-to-Signal messages have always been susceptible to capture on either end, by something like this bridge or a rogue (or non-rogue) app on either end with access to read device notifications.

I'm not saying that this service doesn't expose your messages to some additional risk, and should be used cautiously. But it is an illusion that just because the messaging protocol is using end-to-end encryption that the messages can't be intercepted.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#420

Post by temptemptemp111 »

jakecopp wrote: post #23
krageon wrote: post #7

Does anyone know what this product is based on? Is it just a ready-made image with all the bridges preconfigured (and prerequisites such as a small android vm for a viable whatsapp bridge), or has there been some evolution on the existing package? Is there documentation on what was done to achieve this? Purely on the content of the article: Given that the messages are not stored encrypted locally and that this servic…

> Purely on the content of the article: Given that the messages are not stored encrypted locally and that this service is connected to the US, I do not see how it can be viable for the privacy-conscious. Matrix chats (direct and group) are E2E by default. There is no bridge that will let you keep E2E encryption between Signal/WhatsApp and another service - it has to be broken somewhere. I believe Element is a UK comp…

What's the point of storing "locally encrypted" when every decent security setup has filesystem encryption these days?
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