Matrix Live 🎙

I chatted to Kilian from the new Nio project about his progress on a new iOS client.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Yesterday we announced the availability of zipped hoodies! The resulting avalanche of orders was a shock for our local Post Office, who watched with surprise as I burst in, laden with packages like a mule.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa offered:

Here's your news for what happened in spec-land last week!

Merged MSCs

• MSC2367: Add reason field to all membership events
• MSC2324: Facilitating early releases of software dependent on spec

MSCs in Final Comment Period

No MSCs are in FCP...

New MSCs

• MSC2380: Matrix Media Information API
  • This is a markdownification of MSC1310
• MSC2370: Resolve URL API
• MSC2375: Appservice Invite States
• MSC2376: Disable URL Previews

TravisR confirmed:

The spec core team is focused on implementing a bunch of MSCs so that we can make progress with the spec.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil told us:

This week we've mainly been tying up loose ends on the matrix.org data centre migration. Outside of that one interesting feature to land on develop is that of configurable message retention. It means that as an admin you can set a default period after which messages will be removed from the server (a year say), what’s more the default is configurable on a per room basis via state events. Note, this feature applies to messages only, not media (on its way!). Configurable message retention will be make it into the next versioned release.

matrix-synapse-ldap3

anoa said:

After 2 long years, matrix-synapse-ldap3 has finally gained another release: v0.1.4. If you want to allow users to sign in to Synapse using their LDAP accounts, then this is the module for you.

Get the release notes here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-synapse-ldap3/releases/tag/v0.1.4

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

4.2.2 got released! Get it now off Flathub.

New features:

• Translation strings have been updated

Bugfixes:

• Newlines now work when markdown is enabled
• Account settings can be accessed again
• Redaction is working again
• Compatibility with HTTP-only (non HTTPS) servers has been restored
• Some crashes fixed

Under the hood:

• Code refactor is still going

As if all that wasn't enough, how about this image of Fractal running on a Librem5, from Adrien Plazas:

nheko

Nico offered:

Nheko just merged support for encrypted files in e2ee chats. This allows you to send and receive encrypted files and even play videos and other media in the new timeline. Those changes are still on the development branch, but will be included in the next release, which should be 0.7.0. If you want to try it out, you can get development builds here.

koma

yuforia announced:

koma, the Kotlin library behind the desktop client Continuum:

• Rewrite all Moshi json adapters with kotlinx serializers, replace API interface declared using Retrofit with HTTP requests constructed using ktor. The majority of the changes needed to enable multiplatform support is now made.

RiotX 0.9.1

benoit reported:

Released v0.9.1 on Thursday! This version includes a new login flow and account creation flow. Read marker has been reworked, to simplify user experience on mobile. Also you can type and send user pills.

We are now working on room and user profiles, and matrix.to link handling. Verification in DM development is progressing well. Also we implemented a first version of breadcrumbs, to switch between recent rooms very quickly.

Riot-iOS

Manu announced:

Riot-iOS 0.10.3 is on its way to Apple review. The release note is: This release includes bug fixes and improvements, like:

• Ask permission before opening a widget and the integration manager.
• Display room name, user name and user avatar in the Jitsi conference screen.
• Support Welsh and Italian languages.

Messagerie

Manu reported:

let me share Messagerie: https://github.com/manuroe/messagerie, an iOS app and, maybe, in the future, a MacOS app.

Messagerie is a chat app written to test SwiftUI and Combine to make a real and, hopefully, useful app. Messagerie misses a lot of things but it has:

• Support of Matrix using SwiftMatrixSDK
• E2EE
• Multi-account (swipe the navigation bar to switch accounts)
• Dark mode and auto-sizing fonts (well, they come for free)
• 4 screens at the moment: a Matrix login screen, a room list, a room screen and a very early beginning of a SwiftUI text composer to post text message

This is a personal and a side project, but RiotX-iOS will probably take benefit from it.

Riot Web means Cross Signing!

Ryan announced:

Riot Web is largely focused on nudging cross-signing forward over the last week. Key verification and cross-signing setup continues to make progress. We've also fixed a few bugs and merged some accessibility improvements.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi reported:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has been made more flexible in terms of how its services can be exposed to the web. Reverse-proxying using another local (in-machine or on-the-network) webserver should be easier. SSL-termination using Traefik is now also a possibility, although we're yet to confirm it as a success and document exactly how to do it. Read more in the CHANGELOG.

riot-desktop-builder docker image

Mathijs announced:

I created a dockerfile and corresponding docker image that can build the develop branch of riot-desktop for both windows and linux.

Dept of Bots 🤖

msc-chatbot

anoa announced:

msc_resolver2 is back and now isn't annoying with all new features like:

• actually showing you the MSC title when it links it
• not posting the same links multiple times
• not posting a link when you've already linked the msc in the original message
• ignoring edits
• ignoring content of replies

rejoice! Code is https://github.com/anoadragon453/msc-chatbot

malobot - send or receive location messages

Cos said:

It would be cool to be able to share location in Matrix rooms. This bot by cos solves the egg part in chicken and egg problem of having no clients able to send or receive location messages. Next we need a mobile client that can send location updates. Which one will be the first? https://github.com/vranki/malobot/

Dept of Ping 🏓

Final Thoughts 💭

swedneck made a room for discussing how matrix could be used to implement forums: #matrix-forums:permaweb.io

Mathijs pointed out that there is a Matrix feature which enables spoilers.

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Matrix merch is some of the most sought-after apparel and adhesive labeling available in the world today. We supply discerning customers with t-shirts, hoodies and stickers which remind them which decentralised, federated, end-to-end encrypted communications protocol is the best choice.

This is all very well, but we wondered whether it would be possible to have a warm, hooded garment which promotes the wearers preference of chat system, and also has a zip on the front.

Today, we’re proud to announce a breakthrough in this area: Matrix Zipped Hoodies are available now from shop.matrix.org!

Grab yours now from shop.matrix.org!

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa announced:

Here's what happened in spec land this week:

Merged MSCs:

• MSC 1756: cross-signing devices using a master identity key
• MSC 2313: Moderation policies as rooms (ban lists)

Final Comment Period:

• MSC 2324: Facilitating early releases of software dependent on spec
• MSC 2367: Add reason field to all membership events

New MSCs:

• MSC 2336: Key verification flow addition: m.key.verification.accept

The Spec Core Team have chosen the following three MSCs to focus on for next week: MSC 1270 (URL resolver in media), MSC 2366 (accept in verification), and MSC 1849 (aggregations/edits)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.6.1

Neil offered:

This week we put out Synapse 1.6.0, and 1.6.1 checkout all the juicy details in the blog post. Aside from that message retention and ephemeral message support continues and we expect the latter to merge early next week.

The next big thing we’ll be looking at is sharding out the Synapse master process so that instances running in worker mode can make full use of the CPU power available. This will make a big difference to matrix.org.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
  • Mathijs was also happy to remind everyone of Docker itself
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat

Additionally, from JCG:

Synapse 1.6.1 has been packaged for VoidLinux, FreeBSD and Alpine Linux, with NixOS waiting to have the PR updating it to 1.6.1 merged. Synapse 1.6.0 has been packaged for Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 20.04.

Docker for synapse-ldap

JCG announced:

The container image with the updated LDAP auth provider over at https://gitlab.com/famedly/container/synapse-ldap/container_registry has been updated to 1.6.0 too.

Matrix over Yggdrasil

Neil Alexander:

Timothée has been working on a university project to integrate the Yggdrasil library into the CoAP proxy, which allows Matrix homeservers to federate over a pure Yggdrasil connection instead of using IP. The Yggdrasil portion gives full reachability and traffic forwarding between nodes in the mesh even in complicated topologies, and end-to-end encryption as an additional benefit

As a reminder,

Yggdrasil is a proof-of-concept mesh network that is designed to avoid the scaling issues that we've seen in the past with existing mesh systems. It uses a spanning tree-based topology and aims to make all nodes in the mesh fully routable, even at massive scale

If you'd like to know more, come chat to the folk in #yggdrasil:matrix.org, and read https://yggdrasil-network.github.io

Department of Matrix jobs 👩‍💻

New Vector (the startup which the original Matrix team founded in order to hire folks to work on Matrix as their day job) are currently hiring people so if you ever wanted to work on Matrix full time get in touch.

Neil says:

You can read all about it here but we are particularly keen to speak to people who want to hack on Synapse or work in Operations.

We are remote friendly though find it easier to hire people in some territories than others, so if you have any questions just ask.

You can apply via the site, or alternatively reach out to @neilj:matrix.org (engineering) or @nadonomy:matrix.org (design).

On top of this, Neil Alexander, creator of Seaglass and maintainer of Yggdrasil, will be joining New Vector. He said:

I shall most likely be working with the backend team on Synapse/Dendrite and I think there's a couple of other things like the coap-proxy too

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mx-puppet-bridge

Tulir said:

I made two pull requests to Sorunome's mx-puppet-bridge projects:

• A relaybot mode in mx-puppet-bridge. Basically means any mx-puppet-bridge can be used as a relaybot bridge.
• OAuth login flow for mx-puppet-slack. Should be useful for those in slack workspaces that disallow legacy tokens.

Matrix-Appservice-IRC

Half-Shot offered:

My fellow comrades, today we have released 0.14.0-rc1 of the IRC bridge. The changes are massive and vast, and frankly it probably could have been done in 2 or 3 releases. At any rate, this release contains support for PostgreSQL Datastores and Sentry monitoring, amongst other small quality of life changes. The bridge has also had a total refactor using Typescript, and it's a little bit nicer to look at now.

Dept of Clients 📱

Redesign of Ditto is out!

Annie told us:

• Ditto is now redesigned with a fresh new look!
• Functionality:
  • Login, send / receive messages, logout
• On Deck:
  • Notifications, writing a new message (in that order)

Come chat about UX and things you'd like to see in Ditto!
Matrix room: #ditto:elequin.io

iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/9M0ERlKd
Website: https://dittochat.org
Feedback: https://plan.dittochat.org

swedneck asked if being purple in colour, the project used libpurple? The answer is no, it uses React Native, and he was widely rebuked for doing so.

nio, new client for iOS

kilian offered:

I spent the last few days building my Matrix client Nio 😄 Apple just approved a very early first alpha for TestFlight distribution. It really doesn't do a lot aside from account authentication and displaying recent chats and messages. It is able to handle e2e encryption, but unfortunately doesn't persist the encryption keys right now (meaning it loses them and re-requests them from other clients on being restarted). It's built on SwiftUI and runs on iOS (iPhone and iPad). The app will likely not run as-is on macOS in the future, but I'd love to also build a separate version of Nio for macOS once the iOS app is functional.

Website: https://nio.chat Repo: https://github.com/kiliankoe/nio TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/KlXr3kKz

Note that this is not connected to the existing Matrix project, matrix-nio.

Continuum and koma, client and library in Kotlin

yuforia reported:

koma, Kotlin library:

• Start replacing Retrofit with Ktor, which is JetBrain's HTTP library for building projects that can be compiled to Native, JVM, and JavaScript. Currently, coexistence of both libraries causes the package size of applications based on Koma to increase to some extent, this will no longer be the case after the transition is complete.

Continuum, desktop client based on koma, version 0.9.31:

• Implement minimal XML parsing without adding additional dependencies to extract user ID and name from formatted_body used by Riot
• Display mentioned users with highlight and avatar.

Riot Web

Ryan reported:

• Continued work on setting up cross-signing and secret storage keys in labs
• Device verification is moving to the user info panel and happening via DMs also in labs
• Fixes for system theme and read receipts
• Improved signing for Windows builds
• Converting tests towards native promises

Riot-iOS

From Manu:

We have a new bottom sheet that we are going to use a lot in the coming designs. We used it in the widget permission screen. Meanwhile we are working on user verification by DM

Riot-android

From Manu:

We made a release this week with all the work around privacy for the use of an Integration Manager and widgets.

RiotX

From Manu:

All flows for registration and login are now supported. Please test them on your specific homeserver configuration in case we miss something. We are also working on user verification by DM.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Docker

Mathijs reported:

mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.6.1 is now on docker-hub

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy riot-web image

Slavi announced:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has switched from the bubuntux/riot-web Docker image to the official vectorim/riot-web image. There should be no visible changes for users. We're just hoping for faster releases by keeping closer to upstream.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Synapse 1.6.0 has landed and is here to brighten your day!

1.6.0's most notable feature is that of label based filtering. It allows for messages to be tagged with a given label so that clients can filter on the label, this means that clients can subscribe to specific topics in a room, such as #lunch.

Completely separately, from here on in new rooms will be version 5 by default, all this means in practice is that servers will respect server signing key validity periods. This won't make a lot of difference in day to day operation, but it is an important security consideration and we now have sufficient penetration across the federation to make version 5 the default.

Aside from that there are a bunch of bug fixes and improvements, including fixing a bug that in some cases prevented messages being decrypted shortly after a restart (#6363) and generally improving the room upgrade experience (#6232, #6235).

As ever, you can get the new update here or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse. Also, check out our Synapse installation guide page

The changelog since 1.5.1 follows:

Synapse 1.6.0 (2019-11-26)

Bugfixes

• Fix phone home stats reporting. (#6418)

Synapse 1.6.0rc2 (2019-11-25)

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug which could cause the background database update handler for event labels to get stuck in a loop raising exceptions. (#6407)

Synapse 1.6.0rc1 (2019-11-20)

Features

• Add federation support for cross-signing. (#5727)
• Increase default room version from 4 to 5, thereby enforcing server key validity period checks. (#6220)
• Add support for outbound http proxying via http_proxy/HTTPS_PROXY env vars. (#6238)
• Implement label-based filtering on /sync and /messages (MSC2326). (#6301, #6310, #6340)

Bugfixes

• Fix LruCache callback deduplication for Python 3.8. Contributed by @V02460. (#6213)
• Remove a room from a server's public rooms list on room upgrade. (#6232, #6235)
• Delete keys from key backup when deleting backup versions. (#6253)
• Make notification of cross-signing signatures work with workers. (#6254)
• Fix exception when remote servers attempt to join a room that they're not allowed to join. (#6278)
• Prevent errors from appearing on Synapse startup if git is not installed. (#6284)
• Appservice requests will no longer contain a double slash prefix when the appservice url provided ends in a slash. (#6306)
• Fix /purge_room admin API. (#6307)
• Fix the hidden field in the devices table for SQLite versions prior to 3.23.0. (#6313)
• Fix bug which caused rejected events to be persisted with the wrong room state. (#6320)
• Fix bug where rc_login ratelimiting would prematurely kick in. (#6335)
• Prevent the server taking a long time to start up when guest registration is enabled. (#6338)
• Fix bug where upgrading a guest account to a full user would fail when account validity is enabled. (#6359)
• Fix to_device stream ID getting reset every time Synapse restarts, which had the potential to cause unable to decrypt errors. (#6363)
• Fix permission denied error when trying to generate a config file with the docker image. (#6389)

Improved Documentation

• Contributor documentation now mentions script to run linters. (#6164)
• Modify CAPTCHA_SETUP.md to update the terms private key and public key to secret key and site key respectively. Contributed by Yash Jipkate. (#6257)
• Update INSTALL.md Email section to talk about account_threepid_delegates. (#6272)
• Fix a small typo in account_threepid_delegates configuration option. (#6273)

Internal Changes

• Add a CI job to test the synapse_port_db script. (#6140, #6276)
• Convert EventContext to an attrs. (#6218)
• Move persist_events out from main data store. (#6240, #6300)
• Reduce verbosity of user/room stats. (#6250)
• Reduce impact of debug logging. (#6251)
• Expose some homeserver functionality to spam checkers. (#6259)
• Change cache descriptors to always return deferreds. (#6263, #6291)
• Fix incorrect comment regarding the functionality of an if statement. (#6269)
• Update CI to run isort over the scripts and scripts-dev directories. (#6270)
• Replace every instance of logger.warn method with logger.warning as the former is deprecated. (#6271, #6314)
• Port replication http server endpoints to async/await. (#6274)
• Port room rest handlers to async/await. (#6275)
• Remove redundant CLI parameters on CI's flake8 step. (#6277)
• Port federation_server.py to async/await. (#6279)
• Port receipt and read markers to async/wait. (#6280)
• Split out state storage into separate data store. (#6294, #6295)
• Refactor EventContext for clarity. (#6298)
• Update the version of black used to 19.10b0. (#6304)
• Add some documentation about worker replication. (#6305)
• Move admin endpoints into separate files. Contributed by Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH. (#6308)
• Document the use of lint.sh for code style enforcement & extend it to run on specified paths only. (#6312)
• Add optional python dependencies and dependant binary libraries to snapcraft packaging. (#6317)
• Remove the dependency on psutil and replace functionality with the stdlib resource module. (#6318, #6336)
• Improve documentation for EventContext fields. (#6319)
• Add some checks that we aren't using state from rejected events. (#6330)
• Add continuous integration for python 3.8. (#6341)
• Correct spacing/case of various instances of the word "homeserver". (#6357)
• Temporarily blacklist the failing unit test PurgeRoomTestCase.test_purge_room. (#6361)

Matrix Live 🎙

OpenPush is Marcus' project to remove the need for Google to be involved with push notifications on Android. We chat in some detail here about his work, the Prototype Fund, and other great topics.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

matrix.org server migration

Neil reported:

Those following closely will know that the matrix.org home server has been having some problems with our hosting provider. This really came down to I/O provision and stability therein. It turns out that running a homeserver is harder when it can’t talk to the db.

We have now fully migrated to our new provider (with improved hardware specs) and you should notice everything feeling much much snappier.

https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1197828358664589312?s=20

https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1197576886278393856?s=20

Public rooms upgraded

Neil reported:

We have also taking the time to upgrade all of our community rooms to modern room versions. This should mean an end to state resets and other unintuitive behaviour associated with large public rooms.

kitsune, international man of mystery

kitsune offered:

I have been dismantling my habitat in Japan and will spend a couple of weeks in Moscow, Russia before moving further west to the Netherlands. Due to this, expect very low activity on Quotient front in December; but I still intend to release the first beta of libQuotient 0.6 in the remaining week, breaking the half-year span without releases.

Good luck!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa told us:

Here's your weekly spec update on what happened last week in spec land.

New MSCs:

• MSC 2359: E2EE VoIP Conferencing [WIP]
• MSC 2356: Bulk /joined_members endpoint

Entered Final Comment Period:

• MSC 1756: cross-signing devices using a master identity key
• MSC 2313: Moderation policies as rooms (ban lists)

Merged:

• MSC 2284: Making the identity server optional during discovery

This week, the Spec Core Team is focusing on the following 3 MSCs: 2241 (DM key verification), 2324 (new spec process), and 2326 (label-based filtering).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.6.0rc1

Neil told us:

This week released Synapse v1.6.0rc1 and will release the real deal next week. 1.6.0 contains a lot of ground work for e2ee cross signing, supporting multiple databases (to aid db sharing) as well as a bunch of bug fixes and perf improvements.

Aside from that we’ve been working on room retention support and ephemeral messages which should be ready to merge rsn.

Finally we’ve been working on improving config granularity for caching, such that individual caches can be configured via homeserver.yaml. Experimenting with this approach to caching has proved to be very powerful in tuning performance, expect to see it on mainline shortly. Further down the line we'd like to make it more dynamic so that manual tuning is unnecessary.

This is also now available from Mathijs' docker hub repo.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-facebook

Tulir reported:

Facebook decided to break everything and switch from long polling to MQTT over websockets, but mautrix-facebook has already been updated with initial support for the new protocol. It's still a bit buggy though, e.g. reconnecting after a disconnection doesn't seem to work properly

Dept of Clients 📱

Brawl 0.0.12

Bruno offered:

I have started deploying Brawl, you can try it at https://bwindels.github.io/brawl/

Also few small new features and fixes since the last TWIM mention a while back:

• make initial sync faster: it uses the lazy load members feature to not load a lot of room state on initial sync as that isn't used yet anyways.
• more useful room list: room aliases and are now recognized for the room name, and DMs are named after the user id.
• some smaller bugs fixed

Continuum and koma progress

yuforia announced:

koma, Kotlin library:

• Update Kotlin to latest release 1.3.60
• Start making use of kotlinx.serialization, making the first step toward multi-platform support (which enables a Kotlin project to be compiled to native, JavaScript, or JVM)

Continuum, desktop client based on koma:

• Implement pop-up and sound, which will be used to show notifications

https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/TJlhyKntaXngkHJvdgPIhOsK

Riot iOS

Manu announced:

We are almost done in our privacy work around integrations and integrations manager. While we were working on widgets, we made some improvements on them. They now have a menu with some actions (refresh, open in Browser, remove). The jitsi widget now displays the room name, user avatar and name.

Seshat

@poljar:matrix.org told us:

The PR for matrix-react-sdk has finally landed, the PR for riot-web needed some documentation and is waiting for final review. Work on the UI for our indexer inside of riot has started and some more functionality to load events that are files has been added inside of Seshat as well.

Riot Android

@valere35:matrix.org reported:

Privacy work related to Integration Manager about to be released (SDK + App). Also a couple of bug fixed (including the infinite app restart after SSO token expiration)

riot-web

Bruno reported:

riot web just gained in-app notifications for verification requests on /develop. See PR at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3661 . All of this is behind the verification over DM labs flag!

matrix-notepad

Check out these docs, very nice!

@kb1rd:kb1rd.net said:

matrix-notepad It's been a slow two weeks for matrix-notepad since I've been a bit busy.

• The core "Logootish" algorithm was documented
• "Logootish" was separated out into its own repo (logootish-js) and converted to TypeScript.
• TypeDoc was used to document the logootish-js algorithm
• Fixed some wonderful spelling errors in the algorithm code
• Nothing has changed for the main Matrix Notepad repo, so there's no user difference. It just makes the core algorithm a bit easier to read.

My plan in the future is basically to work out rich text and JSON object collaboration (clearly, this is far away!) and create some kind of "universal client" that can load up web apps to use the algorithm in a single Matrix room. The result would be that it's much easier to create collaboration apps.
Obviously, that's a far-off goal, but my point in documenting the algo is to get ahead of the game a bit

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-bot-sdk v0.4.0 release

TravisR announced:

v0.4.0 has been released of the matrix-bot-sdk. Last week was beta 15, and now it's out for real. There's quite a few changes from v0.3.9, but here's an overview:

• Support for encryption through Pantalaimon

• Support for metrics

• Finished support for appservices

• Better support for bridges (storage, mappings, and utility functions)

• Classes for events and other structures in Matrix

• Utility classes for permalinks, profile caching, Synapse admin APIs, and server ACLs (globs)

• Improved documentation

• A template repository for bots

• Improved logging support

• Various bug fixes and improvements

Give it a test, and report any issues in #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io ! The full diff is available here: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/compare/v0.3.9...v0.4.0

simplematrixlib, new Python library

@swedneck:permaweb.io said:

I made a really simple matrix library for python, and a couple of utility scripts that make use of it! https://gitlab.com/Swedneck/simplematrixlib, https://gitlab.com/Swedneck/py-matrix-utils

Dept of Bots 🤖

maubot

Tulir announced:

Maubot will now automatically follow room upgrades. In addition to that, plugins storing room IDs in the database have been updated to automatically update the database when the room is upgraded.

In other maubot news, the PR by lorico to rewrite my old GitLab bot as maubot plugin was finally merged.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Final Thoughts 💭

Impressive progress on the PinePhone, Martijn Braam has been showing off various apps running, particularly interesting is that they are showing Quaternion.

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Matrix Live 🎙

This week I spoke to Annie from the Ditto project.

Find out more:

#ditto:elequin.io
Testflight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/9M0ERlKd
Feedback: https://ditto.upvoty.com

Dept of Spec 📜

MSC2354: Device to device streaming file transfers

Mathijs offered:

I opened my first MSC, to use webrtc for streaming file transfers from device to device (rather than account to account)

Spec

anoa said:

** New MSCs **

• MSC2354: Device to device streaming file transfers
• MSC2356: Bulk /joined_members endpoint

** In Final Comment Period **

• MSC2284: Making the identity server optional during discovery

** Merged MSCs **

• MSC1946: Secure Secret Storage and Sharing
• MSC2244: Mass redactions

The Spec Core Team's focused MSC's continue to be MSC1756 (cross-signing), MSC2324 (new spec process), and MSC2313 (ban lists).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

anoa said:

This week saw work on implementing message retention policies, the continuation of migrating matrix.org to new hardware and some other little fixes.

The public rooms directory is also set to private by default now. Please read the accompanying blog post for the reasoning behind it.

Ruma updates

We missed it at the time, but the Ruma project has some updates to share, focused on the ruma-events projects.

https://ruma.dev/news/new-releases-2019-11-05/

Known Matrix Server Selector Websites

Over in #matrixservers:raim.ist, grin provided this list-of-lists of Matrix public home servers:

• https://www.hello-matrix.net/
• https://matrix.grin.hu/stat/
• https://the-federation.info/matrix%7Csynapse
• https://www.anchel.nl/matrix-publiclist/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir reported:

mautrix-whatsapp now has basic relaybot support. Since WhatsApp doesn't have usable bots, relaybot in this case means using a normal account as a relay. To enable the relaybot in your bridge instance, copy this config block into your config, update is as needed, and simply log in normally in the configured relaybot management room.

matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.2

Half-Shot announced:

Hey all, matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.2 has been released. This contains a small number of bug fixes and doc changes.

Dept of Clients 📱

Pattle: version 0.14.0

Wilko announced:

A new version has been made available and should soon be on Google Play!

Note that this version will not be on TestFlight (yet) because notifications are currently only implemented on Android (using Firebase, so same goes for F-Droid for the time being).

Changes

• Show notifications when receiving a new message!
• Username is not checked whether it's available anymore

This was done for a future feature (registration), however, a different approach will probably be taken.

Get Pattle

• Android
  • F-Droid
  • Google Play
• iOS (TestFlight)

Issues or suggestions

If you stumble upon any issues or would like to suggest features, please do so here! You can login via GitHub and Gitlab.com!

Follow development

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

Kotlin projects: koma and Continuum

yuforia told us:

koma, Kotlin library:

• Implement timeout in coroutines instead of waiting for timeout errors from HTTP library, which makes it easier to change the timeout on demand and may improve performance to some degree
• Make use of experimental feature contracts in Kotlin 1.3 to avoid cast errors when inline class is used in non-local returns
• Add API for getting thumbnails

Continuum, desktop client based on koma, version 0.9.28:

• Use thumbnails of images and avatars to reduce data usage

https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/GMyoaOATXbdcgKnGXCgpDnEA

Riot web

Bruno said:

Riot web should gain a new design for the member panel, with a UX more suited for a world where cross-signing is a thing. Will land today or early next week behind a feature flag on /develop.

There are some screenshots on the PR: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3620

Riot-Android

benoit offered:

Riot-Android: we are working on widget permission: new widget permission UX and use integration manager defined on the homeserver by default.

Riot iOS

Manu offered:

Riot iOS: We have fixed the display of terms for integrations. Riot iOS 0.10.2 is on his way to the App Store

RiotX

benoit offered:

RiotX: We are working on registration and login flow. Also spoiler are rendered and can even be sent using /spoiler command. It's also possible to block (ignore) and unblock users. Performance have been improved, and we are now using the new FragmentFactory. We are working on room detail screen, sticker rendering, and lots of other fun features. We schedule a release at the beginning of next week.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-bot-sdk v0.4.0-beta.15

TravisR reported:

v0.4.0-beta.15 of the matrix-bot-sdk has been released. v0.4.0 final is a themed release for lightweight bridges, and so far much of the common functionality is there. Some of the more niche and large features have yet to land, but the final release is still on the horizon (see what's left here). Please give it a test (npm install [email protected]) and report any issues to #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io.

BETA FIFTEEN

Seshat new release

@poljar:matrix.org offered:

Seshat got a new release 🎉. Seshat now supports transparent index encryption. The PRs for Riot-desktop have been updated and encryption has been enabled for the index. The PRs are currently awaiting review, encrypted search will come to a place near you really soon™.

Dept of Ops 🛠

New guide about installing Synapse using only free resources

@ptman:feneas.org offered:

I (and hopefully others) feel that matrix needs more home servers. That's why I wrote a guide for setting one up using free resources and @benpa was kind enough to include it on matrix.org: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/free-small-matrix-server/

Room Directory defaults in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Regarding the recent discussions about room security, Slavi has been thinking about default settings for his ansible playbooks:

I wasn't entirely convinced what we should do about it. For my own personal (family & friends) homeserver, I have a few rooms published (this room being one of them), which are all public and OK to be published publicly. I was okay with the old defaults. Still, I can see how people may expect stricter defaults though. I've leaned on following this advice and making it not publish by default. I've made that change here.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix-Alertmanager v0.1.0

@jaywink:federator.dev reported:

Matrix-Alertmanager, a bot that relays Prometheus Alertmanager alerts to Matrix rooms, gets a new release v0.1.0. Thanks to "daniego" the messages are now HTML formatted. Also dependencies have been bumped, Matrix JS SDK by "Lyr" and all the other deps by me. For more info: https://git.feneas.org/jaywink/matrix-alertmanager

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣

aa13q offered:

I've made a presentation about Matrix at the local 2600 meetup at Saint Petersburg, Russia recently. And now translated the text retelling into English too. It's an introduction presentation in general but (thanks to kitsune! :) it also contains good comments about the parts I've missed :) Would be happy to get feedback about the typos/etc. I hope it could be helpful to somebody who is willing to tell about Matrix in other local places :) https://aa13q.ru/#!posts/2019-11-01-matrix-2600/meta.md

@jaywink:federator.dev reported:

Not a part of the organizers, but syncing here for wider reach. There is a "FediConf 2020" conference being planned to happen in Barcelona sometime between May and September next year. It will be a conference for a wide audience of federated folk, so Matrix people might be interested in joining up. There is a poll for dates, a forum and also a Matrix room: #fediconf:matrix.libertalia.world

kitsune said:

in a complete coincidence with aa13q, I also talked about Matrix at Tokyo LUG. Plenty of good discussion. TLUG folks are extremely interested in decentralised identities and data retention as next most important frontiers in Matrix evolution.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Hi all,

Over the course of today we've been made aware of folks port-scanning the general internet to discover private Matrix servers, looking for publicly visible room directories, and then trying to join rooms listed in them.

If you are running a Matrix server that is intended to be private, you must correctly configure your server to not expose its public room list to the general public - and also ensure that any sensitive rooms are invite-only (especially if the server is federated with the public Matrix network).

In Synapse, this means ensuring that the following options are set correctly in your homeserver.yaml:

# If set to 'false', requires authentication to access the server's public rooms
# directory through the client API. Defaults to 'true'.
#
#allow_public_rooms_without_auth: false

# If set to 'false', forbids any other homeserver to fetch the server's public
# rooms directory via federation. Defaults to 'true'.
#
#allow_public_rooms_over_federation: false

For private servers, you will almost certainly want to explicitly set these to false, meaning that the server's "public" room directory is hidden from the general internet and wider Matrix network.

You can test whether your room directory is visible to arbitrary Matrix clients on the general internet by viewing a URL like https://sandbox.modular.im/_matrix/client/r0/publicRooms (but for your server). If it gives a "Missing access token" error, you are okay.

You can test whether your room directory is visible to arbitrary Matrix servers on the general internet by loading Riot (or similar) on another server, and entering the target server's domain name into the room directory's server selection box. If you can't see any rooms, then are okay.

Relatedly, please ensure that any sensitive rooms are set to be "invite only" and room history is not world visible - particularly if your server is federated, or if it has public registration enabled. This stops random members of the public peeking into them (let alone joining them).

Relying on security-by-obscurity is a very bad idea: all it takes is for someone to scan the whole internet for Matrix servers, and then trying to join (say) #finance on each discovered domain (either by signing up on that server or by trying to join over federation) to cause problems.

Finally, if you don't want the general public reading your room directory, please also remember to turn off public registration on your homeserver. Otherwise even with the changes above, if randoms can sign up on your server to view & join rooms then all bets are off.

We'll be rethinking the security model of room directories in future (e.g. whether to default them to being only visible to registered users on the local server, or whether to replace per-server directories with per-community directories with finer grained access control, etc) - but until this is sorted, please heed this advice.

If you have concerns about randoms having managed to discover or join rooms which should have been private, please contact [email protected].

Matrix Live 🎙

Sorry folks, no matrix live this week, your regular programming will continue next week.

Dept of Spec

A big week in spec land.

Client-server r0.6.0 and Identity r0.3.0 spec releases

TravisR offered:

If you've been waiting all this time to start implementing some of the privacy improvements the team has been making over the last few months, now's the best time to do it. Clients interacting with identity servers or 3rd party identifiers (3PIDs) have some changes to make, and identity servers themselves have a whole new authed API so they can expose terms of service requirements to users.

Check out the specs at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.6.0 and https://matrix.org/docs/spec/identity_service/r0.3.0

You can read all about it here

anoa announced:

Approved MSCs

• MSC2334 - Change default room version to v5
  • Our fastest FCP ever - less than 24hrs!

Final Comment Period

• MSC2244: Mass redactions
• MSC1946: Secure Secret Storage and Sharing

New MSCs

• [WIP] MSC2346: Bridge information state event

The Spec Core Team have chosen MSC1756 (cross-signing), MSC2324 (new spec process), and MSC2313 (ban lists) to focus on this week :)

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot-iOS

Manu offered:

• 0.10.1 has been released on the app store. It includes minor improvements and bug fixes like the call issue. Full release descriptions can be found on respective repos: Riot, matrix-ios-kit and matrix-ios-sdk.
• This release includes better logging to track app kills in background but it seems that iOS13.2.2 released by Apple yesterday fixes the issue. We are looking for more feedbacks on that topic.
• On develop, the app can now use the integrations manager advertised by the homeserver.

RiotX

benoit reported:

We have finished implementing long click on a Room item, to configure notification settings of the room and to be able to leave the room. We can now ignore user (after a report of content only for the moment). The list of ignored users is displayed in the setting. Users can be un-ignored. We are also working on improving performance and improving code structure. As usual, we have also fixed some bugs. A release will be done at the beginning of next week, then we will try to work on the login flow and account creation flow.

Riot Android

benoit offered:

We are working on the Integration Manager management.

Riot Web

Neil had this to say:

The Riot gang landed 1.5.1 which contained the emoji picker (thanks Tulir!).

Additionally they have been working furiously to make some progress against e2ee device cross signing and have just merged the ability to authenticate via DMs. It's behind a labs flag and will only work if both parties are enabled, but this is big step towards our cross signing dreams. Watch this space for more cross signing features over the coming weeks.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

We did a couple bugfixes including one for a long standing crasher and another more recent crasher.

Seshat

@poljar:matrix.org said:

Seshat gained the ability to encrypt the event database and index. A PR has landed and is awaiting review. Now your Matrix client can securely store and index your E2EE messages.

Quarternion

kitsune said:

I took time to port Quaternion from Qt Quick Controls 1 (deprecated upstream) to Qt Quick Controls 2, the lighter UI widgets kit that Spectral also uses. Most of regressions are fixed and the result is likely to land in the master branch sometime next week. The overall looks will remain the same, just a minor refresh of visuals. Aside from improving performance the porting should help to solve widget scaling issues on multi-monitor configurations.

Matrix Notepad

@kb1rd:kb1rd.net reported:

• Released version 0.1.4, which fixes a number of bugs and cleans up a lot of the code
• I'm considering converting the algorithm code only to TypeScript (it's a mess rn)
• I said this last week, but I think I finally got all the bugs out of the internal algorithm 🤞
• I'm also working on a proper explanation of how the algorithm works (An explanation of just the events is here)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil said:

This week we shipped 1.5.1 which contains a small bug fix to prevent a potential DoS vector.

Separately we merged support for label based filtering into develop and are now working on allowing admins to configure message retention policies.

Aside from that we’ve continued to work on sharding out the database which we’ll put live once we have migrated matrix.org onto new hardware (woo!) and finally we’ve been fixing some bugs affecting event auth rules.

Coming up on the horizon are ephemeral messages (the ability to send messages with a specific ttl), more io perf work and a bit further down the line we’ll dust off our attempts to shard out room processing from the master process, meaning Synapses running in worker mode will have much more CPU headroom.

Rust Workers

Black Hat told us:

I'm working on writing Synapse workers in Rust. Only a few things are working, but the performance seems good.

Department of Ops

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Just pushed the K8s-optimized Synapse 1.5.1 image

Docker - improved LDAP

JCG reported:

another Synapse container image, but this one is new: If you had problems with LDAP in the official Synapse image, try this image: https://gitlab.com/famedly/container/synapse-ldap/container_registry. It's based on the official images, but updates the LDAP auth provider to the latest commit of the master branch. The official image comes with the latest version released to pypi.org, which is a bit older. Aside of that change, it's exactly the same, so you can use it as a drop in replacement.

Docker - multi-arch

Black Hat told us:

my multi-arch synapse docker image is updated to synapse 1.5.1

Docker

Mathijs said:

The images for synapse v1.5.1 were pushed to docker hub for avhost and my personal repo.

Server Tombola

@mj:nltrix.net offered:

It gets a tombola of versions at the list of Public Synapse Homeservers https://www.anchel.nl/matrix-publiclist/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Half-Shot announced:

Hey folks, I've released matrix-appservice-irc 0.13.1 which fixes a critical bug in 0.13.0 where messages from matrix would crash the bridge. Users brave enough to be running develop do not need to do anything. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.13.1. This would only have affected you if you tried to install or update the 0.13 bridge in the last two weeks.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Hey all,

For the last several months the team has been working on tightening up privacy in Matrix, and with the 1.4 release of Synapse and Riot quite a lot has been done in the area. One of the remaining pieces was to release all the specification changes to help other client/server implementations achieve the same goals, and now we've done that.

The Client-Server r0.6.0 and Identity Service r0.3.0 spec releases both cover the privacy improvements added through a number of MSCs in the last few months. Of particular note is that identity servers are now expected to support terms of service endpoints, which requires authentication that clients might need to worry about - check the spec changelogs for details.

The full changelog for the Client-Server r0.6.0 release is:

• Breaking Changes

  • Add id_access_token as a required request parameter to a few endpoints which require an id_server parameter as part of MSC2140. (#2255)

• New Endpoints

  • Add POST /account/3pid/unbind for removing a 3PID from an identity server. (#2282)

• Backwards Compatible Changes

  • Add M_USER_DEACTIVATED error code. (#2234)
  • Remove bind_msisdn and bind_email from /register now that the identity server's bind endpoint requires authentication. (#2279)
  • Add m.identity_server account data for tracking the user's preferred identity server. (#2281)
  • Deprecate id_server and make it optional in several places. (#2310)

• Spec Clarifications

  • Add missing format fields to m.room.message$m.notice schema. (#2125)
  • Remove "required" designation from the url field of certain m.room.message msgtypes. (#2129)
  • Fix various typos throughout the specification. (#2131, #2136, #2148, #2215)
  • Clarify the distinction between m.key.verification.start and its m.sas.v1 variant. (#2132)
  • Fix link to Olm signing specification. (#2133)
  • Clarify the conditions for the .m.rule.room_one_to_one push rule. (#2152)
  • Clarify the encryption algorithms supported by the device of the device keys example. (#2157)
  • Clarify that /rooms/:roomId/event/:eventId returns a Matrix error. (#2204)
  • Add a missing state_key check on .m.rule.tombstone. (#2223)
  • Fix the m.room_key_request action value, setting it from cancel_request to request_cancellation. (#2247)
  • Clarify that the submit_url field is without authentication. (#2341)
  • Clarify the expected phone number format. (#2342)
  • Clarify that clients should consider not requesting URL previews in encrypted rooms. (#2343)
  • Add missing information on how filters are meant to work with /context. (#2344)
  • Clarify what the keys are for rooms in /sync. (#2345)

The full changelog for the Identity Service r0.3.0 release is:

• New Endpoints

  • Add /account, /account/register, and /account/logout to authenticate with the identity server. (#2255)
  • Add endpoints for accepting and handling terms of service. (#2258)
  • Add /hash_details and a new /lookup endpoint for performing hashed association lookups. (#2287)

• Backwards Compatible Changes

  • Deprecate the v1 API in favour of an authenticated v2 API. (#2254)

Hi all,

This morning (06:11 UTC) it became apparent through mails to [email protected] that a security researcher was working through the TLS Certificate Transparency logs for *.matrix.org,*.riot.im and *.modular.im to identify and try to access non-public services run by New Vector (the company formed by the original Matrix team, which hosts *.matrix.org on behalf of the Matrix.org Foundation, and develops Riot and runs the https://modular.im hosting service).

Certificate Transparency (CT) is a feature of the TLS ecosystem which lets you see which public certificates have been created and signed by given authorities - intended to help identify and mitigate against malicious certificates. This means that the DNS name of any host with a dedicated public TLS certificate (i.e. not using a wildcard certificate) is visible to the general public.

In practice, this revealed a handful of internal-facing services using dedicated public TLS certificates which were accessible to the general internet - some of which should have been locked to be accessible only from our internal network.

Specifically:

• kibana.ap-southeast-1.k8s.i.modular.im - a Kibana deployment for a new experimental Modular cluster which is being set up in SE Asia. The Kibana is in the middle of being deployed, and was exposed without authentication during deployment due to a firewall & config error. However, it is not a production system and carries no production traffic or user data (it was just being used for experimentation for hypothetical geography-specific Modular deployments). We firewalled this off at 07:53 UTC, and are doing analysis to confirm there was no further compromise, and will then rebuild the cluster (having fixed the firewall config error from repeating).
• AWX deployments used by our internal Modular platform, which were behind authentication but should not be exposed to the public net.
• Various semi-internal dev and testing services which should be IP-locked to our internal network (but are all locked behind authentication too).

Additionally, certain historical Modular homeservers & Riots (from before we switched to using wildcard certs, or where we’ve created a custom LetsEncrypt certificate for the server) are named in the CT logs - thus leaking the server’s name (which is typically public anyway in that server’s matrix IDs if the server is federated).

We’re working through the services whose names were exposed checking for any other issues, but other than the non-production SE Asia Kibana instance we are not aware of problems resulting from this activity.

Meanwhile, we’ll be ensuring that semi-internal services are only exposed on our internal network in future, and that Modular server names are not exposed by CT logs where possible.

TL;DR: You can list all the public non-wildcard TLS certs for a given domain by looking somewhere like https://crt.sh/?q=%25.matrix.org. This lets you find internal-sounding services to try to attack. In practice no production services were compromised, and most of our internal services are correctly firewalled from the public internet. However, we’re reviewing the IP locking for ones in the grey zone (and preventing the bug which caused an experimental Kibana to be exposed without auth).

We’d like to thank Linda Lapinlampi for notifying us about this. We’d also like to remind everyone that we operate a Security Disclosure Policy (SDP) and Hall of Fame at https://matrix.org/security-disclosure-policy/ which is designed to protect innocent users from being hurt by security issues - everyone: please consider disclosing issues responsibly to us as per the SDP.