Hey all,
Another 9 MSCs have been released today in Matrix 1.13! It’s just over 2 months since Matrix 1.12 went out, and the last scheduled release for 2024 - the next release is planned for around FOSDEM 2025. Today’s release contains more T&S features and a number of clarifications and improvements. The full changelog is at the end of this post, per usual :)
Matthew reports
Last week US Senators Wyden (D) and Schmitt (R) wrote an open letter to the US Department of Defense encouraging them to adopt Matrix more widely, rather than wasting money on unencrypted, centralised or closed systems. The letter also reveals a whole bunch of info at the end about the US Navy's Matrix deployments. This feels like a huge step change forwards - not only is the FBI encouraging citizens to use end-to-end-encryption in the wake of realisations that the public telephone network is insecure, but US Senate is pushing for Matrix adoption (without any lobbying from us, I hasten to add). You can read more about it at the Element blog (Element provides the deployments for the US Navy).
P.S. it really is bleakly amusing that we've been constantly pointing out that legislation like EU's ChatControl and the UK's Online Safety Act are catastrophically flawed because the surveillance backdoors they propose will be exploited and abused by attackers. And here we are, with the lawful intercept backdoors in the US public phone system being compromised by attackers, causing the FBI to recommend non-backdoored E2EE instead. We live in a very strange timeline.
Josh Simmons (m.org) says
We'd like to welcome Ercom as the newest Silver Member of the Matrix.org Foundation and are excited to announce a couple other new members before the end of the year 🚀
The Matrix.org Foundation stewards the Matrix protocol specification, facilitates open governance, and convenes the ecosystem. While Matrix continues growing in adoption, the Foundation's funding is not keeping pace. If your organization builds on Matrix and is invested in its future, the time to become a funding member is now.
Josh Simmons (m.org) announces
From the department of no-the-other-Matrix: This week saw news of Europol shutting down an encrypted messaging service called MATRIX. All indications are that this has nothing to do with the Matrix protocol, and we are grateful to the agencies and publications that have made an effort to disambiguate. We are, of course, monitoring the situation as more information becomes available.
The Matrix.org Foundation has been made aware that an international investigative operation took down a service called MATRIX which was used by a cybercriminal network, which has no relationship with the Matrix.org Foundation or the Matrix protocol itself.
The takedown site has a Matrix-the-movie branding, which is a probable source of confusion. The app showcased doesn’t look like any of the Matrix clients we’re aware of.
In a statement to the Matrix.org Foundation, Europol confirmed that the MATRIX cybercriminal network and the Matrix protocol are entirely unrelated. Europol states:
The Matrix protocol (matrix.org) is by no means connected to the Matrix secured communication service that was targeted in OTF Continental.
A statement from the Dutch police confirms that this is unrelated: "Matrix is also the name of a company and communications protocol of the same name, which has nothing to do with the crypto communications service Matrix."
Thib (m.org) says
Don't forget that Matrix will be in full force @ FOSDEM:
- The CfP for the Matrix Devroom closes on Sunday, December 1
- We already have quite a few volunteers to help us with the booth, but we're always looking for more hands! People who sign up before December 15 are entitled to a limited edition t-shirt :)
- Two organizations have already shown their commitment to the community by offering to sponsor the Fringe Event right before FOSDEM. Pizzas and drinks will be covered, but if other organizations want to sponsor too we can work on more opportunities together!
Thib (m.org) announces
We want to know everything about the bugs you squashed, the features you developed, and the docs you wrote. And even better, not only do we want to know about it, we want you to tell the Matrix community about it during our FOSDEM Fringe event, or even to tell the world about it in our FOSDEM Devroom!
Our Call for Proposals is still open for the DevRoom until December 1, so don't miss your chance to advertise your project!
But we're not limiting our presence to a DevRoom, we will also organize a fringe event before FOSDEM and have a booth during the wole event. Want to grab a limited edition T-shirt? Now's your chance to sign-up and help us staff the booth. All details are in our blog post.
The Matrix.org Foundation and community are very happy to announce that this year, they will be in full force at FOSDEM, with a community event right before the conference, a booth to welcome everyone during the conference, and a dev room to explore topics in depth!
Will L announces
Work on Sliding Sync – which provides a significantly faster and more scalable sync experience in Matrix clients – has moved to focus on native support, and away from the proxy.
The Sliding Sync Proxy on the Matrix.org homeserver will be decommissioned on November 21st, and client support in Element X will be removed on January 17th.
More details for users as well as server and client developers in Matrix.org's latest blog post
HarHarLinks says
It is
FridayTWIMday the 15th of November, and the Governing Board just came out of their first official meeting after the informal one at the Matrix Conference back in September. The focus of this meeting was to define the structure of the Governing Board, so we expect the results will not have an immediate tangible effect outside the Governing Board, but it gives the Governing Board the basic process to enable taking more perceptible decisions.This includes discussion about how we want to communicate with each other, but we also defined how we vote on actual decisions and some other basic rules for the Governing Board. As a part of that we elected a chair and vice chair for the Governing Board, who are going to help the Governing Board with facilitation tasks. Greg "Gwmngilfen" (chair) and Kim "HarHarLinks" (vice) were elected and are happy to share this post as one of our first actions in this role today. 😁 We also started some subcommittees of the Governing Board, to enable us to work efficiently in smaller groups focussed on specific topics. The rough topics for the initial four committees are Governance, Trust & Safety, Community, and Finances. What their exact scopes are going to be is left as a first task to the respective committees to define along with other bootstrapping, such as electing committee chairs and vice chairs. The set of initial committees is intentionally kept small to remain flexible and open the door for refining them later when we have more experience with how our day to day operations look like. We also discussed defining initial working groups, which would be structured as groups below the committees to fulfil more specific roles and would be the primary way for the Governing Board to include the community. However, we decided to defer that to the committees for now. We got through all the big parts on our agenda but ran out of time before having a formal vote on what communication tools we want to use. We have a great proposal which we are going to vote on asynchronously.
In general we had quite a productive meeting and reached agreements on many topics with clear next steps in other areas. The Governing Board might not have tackled yet the topics you would have prioritised, but it now has an asynchronous voting process and should be able to progress in other areas using the committees.
See you soon with more news from the Governing Board!
We will be decommissioning the sliding sync proxy next week (21/11/2024) and Element are removing client support in mid-January (17/01/2025).
Sliding Sync is designed to provide a significantly faster and more scalable sync experience in our clients. The initial implementation was first prototyped in Element Web backed by an entirely experimental server proxy. The implementation had half an eye on low bandwidth use cases, and the prototype led to MSC3575. We then realised that a simpler approach would be beneficial, and reused the same (experimental) proxy concept to facilitate beta testing with Element X, this time making it available on matrix.org. In doing so, we learned valuable lessons, leading to a refined and simplified API design in MSC4186. The proxy itself was only ever considered as a temporary arrangement to aid speed of development, rather than being a long term solution.
Simplified Sliding Sync MSC4186 (also known as native sliding sync), has since been implemented in Synapse, with encouraging results. Now that we don’t expect the API shape to change significantly, we recommend homeserver developers to implement MSC4186 natively.
The Matrix.org Foundation does not have the resources to keep up maintenance of the proxy service or its codebase, and plans to decommission the proxy from Mid-November and archive the sliding-sync repo.
Recognising that the community needs time to adopt sliding sync natively, Element will keep client support for the old API (MSC3575) until the 17th of January, 2025.
Thib (m.org) says
We're happy to announce that this year again we will have a DevRoom at FOSDEM!
We have half a day to talk about all the great projects we have been working on as a community. Our devroom should be on Sunday afternoon, even if it's not completely set in stone for now.
You can submit a talk following one of the two formats:
- 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for topics that can be covered briefly
- 50 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for more complex subjects which need more focus
Be quick, the Call for Proposals ends on December 1st and we can't extend it. FOSDEM organizers will close all DevRooms CfPs, and we can't bypass it!
Find all the dates & details on our Call for Proposals