Here at Matrix we’re frequently asked for official merch. While those who choose to sponsor Matrix development on Patreon have always been blessed with branded t-shirts, it was otherwise very difficult to obtain official merch.
Now available from shop.matrix.org, we’re offering packs of Stickers, T-Shirts, and Hoodies!
Stickers are provided in three types: hexagonal Matrix and Riot stickers, and rectangular transparent Matrix stickers.
T-Shirts are available in all sizes and in Unisex and Women's editions. We’re using Gildan SoftStyle t-shirts, which are popular amongst printed shirts for being both soft and durable.
Matrix-branded hoodies are something very special. Superbly embroidered, they are comfortable and stylish. On a recent trip to San Francisco, a passerby stopped a Matrix guardian in the street and asked where they could buy a Matrix hoodie without knowing what Matrix was.
You really need one of these.
All merchandise proceeds go to the Matrix.org Foundation, which helps fund Matrix development!
The Official Matrix Merch Store is open now: shop.matrix.org!
Yes, it's true: Official Matrix Merch is available now. There are stickers, t-shirts and hoodies all available now, go and claim yours from https://shop.matrix.org.
I will be doing a talk on Matrix this weekend (tomorrow) at the annual Free Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in Sankt Augustin (Germany).
If you are around - come by and get some awesome [matrix] stickers! =)
This week’s stats for Dendrite are in! 4 authors have pushed 11 commits to master and 11 commits to all branches. On master, 48 files have changed and there have been 676 additions and 146 deletions.
Very old PRs from CromFR have been updated and finally merged! These lay the groundwork for providing filters across various API endpoints (used in search, /sync, etc)
We also have a number of PRs that were moved forward but not merged. Add auth fallback endpoint (our oldest PR at the moment!) which we mentioned last week is so very close, but not quite there in time for this TWIM.
In terms of passing Sytests, Dendrite now passes 172 tests, up from 167 last week. This is out of 761 tests in total. So just a small bump (0.6%), but note that things that are crucial for Dendrite development at the moment, such as federating, only cover a small subset of tests, so each passing one can bring us much closer to getting Dendrite usable day-to-day.
Synapse
From Neil:
The big news this week we’ve landed some massive DB improvements (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5706) which should make message sending on matrix.org (and any other server) feel noticeably snappier. :) It'll be in the next release.
Work continues on our installer to make it easier to configure Synapse and we’ll be looking for some community feedback rsn. The room directory revamp is now very close and we hope to have something live on matrix.org in about a week.
Finally we’re working on improving the efficiency of smaller instances sending messages into large rooms, we’re still at the design stage, but it will make a huge difference for anyone self hosting.
matrix-room-directory-server ( #matrix-room-directory:t2bot.io ) is less experimental than the key server but is still very early days. Currently it only offers the ability to manipulate the federated public room directory for your server, but in future it is planned to be its own standalone directory server (room aliases without having to run a whole homeserver). Check it out by searching the t2bot.io room directory from your client.
Dept of Clients 📱
Continuum progressing!
I love getting updates from yuforia - they've been consistently working on Continuum for some time, and by increments are making a great client.
Reuse the ListView of messages across different rooms to reduce memory usage
(Experimental) Remember and refocus the last read message, making it easier to go through all unread messages while switching chat rooms freely.
Renaming of QMatrixClient to Quotient has been finally merged to the master branch; Quaternion master uses it from now, too. Packagers are welcome to make test builds and report bugs in #quotient:matrix.org. libQuotient 0.6 beta is coming close now!
Riot iOS
Test on iOS 13 Beta. Beta 6 fixed most bugs discovered on Beta 5
Released 0.9.2 (Waiting for Apple review at the time of writing)
mautrix-facebook, mautrix-telegram and the tulirverse
tulir has been making big updates to two of his bridges:
mautrix-facebook can now bridge formatting, mentions, replies and reactions in both directions.
There is also a logout command now.
mautrix-telegram's switch to mautrix-python is nearly finished (i.e. it didn't cause any errors for the past few days when testing in production). The main reason for the switch is using one Matrix library for all my python bridges. It also means the bridging code like double puppeting and command handling I shared between mautrix-facebook and mautrix-hangouts is now also used in mautrix-telegram.
Visible changes directly caused by using mautrix-python:
Logs are now colorful.
Python 3.5 is no longer supported.
The bridge will refuse to start without access to the base config file.
Other changes that happened during the switch:
Telegram "Saved Messages" can now be bridged even when using double puppeting.
Mentions on Telegram are marked as read when using double puppeting (messages were already being marked as read, but mentions weren't).
Also, this actually happened last week and the week before that, but anyway: I've moved the CI and docker registry of my active projects to a self-hosted GitLab at mau.dev.
Specifically, the CI/docker registry for all four mautrix bridges and maubot and automatic builds for gomuks have been moved. My maubot plugins also have automatic .mbp builds in the CI. For the docker registry, prepending dock.mau.dev/ to the existing image names will work.
The old places (docker hub, dl.maunium.net) won't get new builds anymore. The repos on GitHub are still the "canonical" repos, but they're mirrored more or less instantly with maumirror.
He adds:
mautrix-telegram will probably get some sort of history filling in the near-ish future
Also,
I'm going to add some way to put bridged rooms into personal communities for filtering purposes. Not yet sure if it'll be fully built into the bridges or some kind of an external script
The configuration process (users, rooms, mappings) is quite manual, but it's simple and has worked well for me for the past year and a half.
I've only just polished it up a bit, released and integrated with the Ansible playbook, so others could benefit from it too.
I started a "matrix-xmpp-filter" project. It's like matrix-ircd, but with xmpp instead of irc. It can also filter messages by weekday, time and regular expressions. Target audience is Sailfish phone users, but it could be used with other xmpp clients too (no xmpp MUC support required). https://k2c42.dy.fi/matrix-xmpp-filter.git/#matrix-xmpp-filter:ellipsis.fi.
Currently working on a Puppet module to manage Matrix Synapse installs (both directly and through docker), not quite ready for prime-time yet but watch this spot.
I develop matrix Bot, which converting voice messages to text. It use Yandex Speech API and Yandex API cloud (some as aws) for temporary store voice-data before converting. https://github.com/progserega/voice2textMatrix
Bot have such logic:
user add bot to room (for example room with whatsapp bridge users - now bridge support adding bot to such rooms)
bot listen room, and when get voice-message - send it to Yandex-cloud for translate (now support only Russian language).
When translating is success - bot get result text and show it in room as notice, such: "Username said: text"
Bot also receive some command, which allow disable it in this room, or disable translating for user, which send command..
Seeing this, I wondered, "y tho?", luckily progserega was able to explain with a graphic! They say a picture paints a thousand words, and it's clear from the conversation below why he'd want to have speech-to-text capabilities.
This week we’ve been working on implementing identifier hashing in sydent, a brand new installer for Synapse, we’ve trialled some new db perf improvements which look very promising (more on this soon) and finally very close to an all new implementation of room search.
Next week we’ll push out the all new Sygnal, continue with the installer and room search and pick up some tasks under our privacy umbrella to ensure that Synapse is not holding onto any data that it does not strictly need to.
A PR for redactions opened by our GSoC student cnly
A PR for authentication fallback (for when clients don’t have a web browser built in and want to use recaptcha from trion129
This has been in the works for a while, and just has a couple small changes left to go!
TwoPRs for filtering database functionality from CromFr
A PR for fixing the scope of transaction IDs in Dendrite’s transaction cache from cnly
Cnly’s GSoC period ends on August 26th. He has been a massive boon to the project’s cadence so far and we hope he will continue even after GSoC ends when he has time :)
Provide automatic deduplication and rate-limiting when downloading media resources. This improves performance of GUI applications, where avatars of many users may appear on screen at once, and some of them may be identical.
libQuotient's master branch now supports sending and receiving reactions, and receiving message edits. We also have another PR in the works from aa13q that would add support for events decryption, as a part of his GSoC endeavour.
Nightlies of Fractal are currently stuck on a 2 weeks old build because of one of our dependencies… but the long awaited 4.2 stable release is out! You can get it out fresh from flathub as usual.
Changelog:
New features:
Adaptive window, mobile friendly
Window size and position are remembered
Redesigned login
Spellcheck
Network proxy support
Typing notifications
Badges are shown for operators and moderators
Keyboard shortcuts for easier navigation across rooms
Better uploads:
Audio and video files are now tagged correctly
Image files have a thumbnail
Various tweaks to the file chooser
Bugfixes:
Logs actually output something now
A few issues with invites and direct chats have been resolved
More reliable scrolling
Some crashes fixed
Under the hood:
Code refactor continues
We’re now using Rust 2018
Many improvements to the build system and CI
A lot of the internals have been refactored, so they should be more maintainable and reliable going forward. Also some future work planned on refactoring the state handling using Redux, which should make it much faster to fix issues and add new features in the future. There are even some ideas already for a future plugin API!
Display has been improved in a lot of places. Error messages are now more clearly formatted, images in reply-quotes are now shown as thumbnails rather than just a filename, and the reply-to popup now shows the full event that you're replying to properly. The chat window now correctly sticks to the bottom when you're scrolled to the end and receive new messages, even when an image or video loads - though per-room scroll position restoration isn't done yet.
There's now an experimental compact mode! It uses a more IRC-client-like layout for messages, and generally just fits more content onto the screen. It can be enabled with an experimental flag. A screenshot of the compact mode can be found here.
Hey folks, first an update from the bridges integrations side. We've brought back snoonet and oftc on the integrations menu so you can once again connect matrix rooms to these networks. Other networks should work as standard.
On the matrix-appservice-irc side we've made a few fixes to the handling of IRC modes (things that handle how users should behave) when bridged to IRC. This should hopefully make opping and voicing users more reliable. There are a few other fixes in the pipeline too, so a release isn't too far off.
I had an adventure this afternoon into the world of bridging again, and have made a Github to Matrix bridge. At the moment you can join aliases and saturate your homeserver with the entire history of a issue or PR. You can also chat to folks on issues in realtime.
Just pushed a debian-based K8s-optimized image as well, it's 150MB larger than the alpine one, but on the other hand it comes with jemalloc support so it's nicer on the RAM instead.
CLI federation tester
kai is someone with no fear of rapid iteration! Versions 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 of his script were made available this week:
jcgruenhage has been working on a bot in relation to the startup he's working with:
I made a bot for issuing Json Web Tokens to matrix users based on what homeserver they are on. It's implemented as a maubot plugin (best way to write bots right now) and licensed under the AGPLv3. You can find it over at https://gitlab.com/famedly/bots/jwt, and talk about it in #jwt-bot:famedly.de
As for the usecase, we want to give people from customer homeservers access to an API component, but don't want to maintain a separate account database. This way, they can request a token from the bot and then use that to interact with the API component
Today we release Synapse 1.2.1 as a critical security update. It contains patches relating to redactions and event federation. The patches address long standing bugs, and are not regressions specific to the previous version (1.2). All admins, regardless of current version, should upgrade asap.
This release includes four security fixes:
Prevent an attack where a federated server could send redactions for arbitrary events in v1 and v2 rooms. (#5767)
Prevent a denial-of-service attack where cycles of redaction events would make Synapse spin infinitely. Thanks to @lrizika:matrix.org for identifying and responsibly disclosing this issue. (0f2ecb961)
Prevent an attack where users could be joined or parted from public rooms without their consent. Thanks to Dylanger for identifying and responsibly disclosing this issue. (#5744)
Fix a vulnerability where a federated server could spoof read-receipts from
users on other servers. Thanks to Dylanger for identifying this issue too. (#5743)
Additionally, the following fix was in Synapse 1.2.0, but was not correctly
identified during the original release:
It was possible for a room moderator to send a redaction for an m.room.create event, which would downgrade the room to version 1. Thanks to @/dev/ponies:ponies.im for identifying and responsibly disclosing this issue! (#5701)
We had a great demo session this afternoon, unfortunately the recording quality for some of the items was not good enough to share - and it was interesting stuff too! I cut everything from the RiotX and Riot iOS sections - but we'll make it up to you by getting more news from those projects soon.
Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡
Opportunities available for paid Matrix-related work
Matthew informed the community:
We're getting more and more folks reaching out for paid help setting up smaller self-hosted Matrix deployments. The core team has its hands full currently with helping out with larger deployments; so if anyone reading this wants to offer paid support to those getting up and running on Matrix then please make us aware so we can potentially route inquiries to you.
This is a great step for Matrix, and a great opportunity for you the reader! There are already several people prepared to start work on Matrix-related endeavours, but the fact that there is more work coming in than we can currently route is amazing. If you'd like to be on an informal shortlist, contact support@, or come chat to me directly.
We’ve also been having some success in improving database performance and hope to ship that rsn so everyone can benefit.
Next week
We’ll continue on db perf, improving logging verbosity (through recategorising some log lines) and generally looking to improve the experience for those admins running on smaller instances.
The GSoc project “Matrix Visualisations” has continued its progression during the second period:
A “multi-view” has been implemented for the frontend application. It means that it is now possible to independently view multiple DAGs at the same time in the same canvas. It can be useful for observing the same DAG but on different HS’s, at the same time. The only current limitation is that you have to use the same backend for every view (with CS API or with the backend talking to a Synapse PostgreSQL database). This change took a long time as it required to make a lot of changes in the code.
The implementation of the support of the Federation API within the backend is in progress. It is slowly progressing as it needed some discussion before starting the work on it and its implementation requires me to become familiar with a lot of new things, regarding the federation process and the authentication of requests between HS’s.
Hey, I'd like to put out a call to everyone out there. If there's any script people desire for interacting with matrix homeservers, the #matrix-shell-suite:matrix.org project is taking feature requests.
I had the code laying around for quite a while, but I just completed the Olm SAS interface for my fork of RubyOlm. It also includes interfaces for generating the emoji! 😀
Dept of Clients 📱
Pattle 0.10.0
I've been playing with Pattle 0.10 and have to say, it feels silky smooth to scroll with. It's really making me look again at Flutter development.
A new version has been pushed to F-droid and TestFlight!
Note that for TestFlight the new version will be available in a few days.
Improve scrolling through chat messages!
Messages are now paginated under the hood, before the whole message list was rebuild when loading more messages, causing a jittery scrolling experience.
Support typing notifications!
Typing notifications are shown and send while typing.
Add chat settings screen
Currently you can see the chat name, avatar, description and members. More will be added in the future.
You can go to the chat settings screen by clicking on the title of the chat. This'll probably change in the future (at least to be easier).
Reverse swipe direction of images (thanks Nathan!)
Fix ripple not showing on send button
Make UI refreshing more efficient
The App Store (iOS) name is now 'Pattle' instead of 'Pattle IM'
When a chat is open, the UI will only be rebuild if that chat has updates.
Lot's of code clean ups and improvements, mostly in the SDK
What's coming up?
A release on Google Play!
A release on the official F-droid repo!
Remove Cupertino specific styling on iOS
Will now use Material Design, but altered for iOS. Having the discrepancy between Cupertino and Material was also the reason why some things didn't show up in iOS or why some things would be blue instead of the Pattle red.
Pantalaimon got a new release. This release brings experimental support for search in E2E encrypted rooms, performance improvements in the database department, better support for true headless mode for all the bot lovers, and of course the usual bug fixes and small improvements.
SolarDrew and I have been working on re-writing our Picard Bot for a conference next week. Picard helps you bridge between a slack team and a matrix community.
This second version of Picard adds support for reacting to creation of new rooms on slack in real time as well as implementing a set of commands for creating new bridged rooms from either matrix or slack. In addition to this, Picard has matrix commands for inviting you to all the bridged rooms in the community and automatically inviting you to new rooms as they are created. Finally, we have added support for sending welcome messages to all new members of your slack team or matrix community in a DM with the bot, which we are using to explain the chat setup to users and giving them a private place to issue commands.
This is uses matrix-appservice-slack for actually sending events in bridged rooms, and PIcard itself is a skill for the opsdroid bot framework #opsdroid-general:matrix.org and uses the matrix-database plugin for opsdroid which uses matrix room state to back the opsdroid memory.
mx-puppet-bridge, new bridge: mx-puppet-instagram
The work on mx-puppet-bridge things continue! The core library and the implementation received some bugfixes, however, a new bridge is there: mx-puppet-instagram. Currently it supports
It's all coming together now. While all pieces of the puzzle were roughly there, now they are put into the big picture.
The bridge SDK PR has been merged to develop, now providing bridges the benefit of error reporting. The modifications to the SDK are non-breaking, but activation of the feature requires small changes to the bridge using it. But be warned, everything is still under an unstable prefix and rightly so – the implementation is still subject to change.
>
The MSC didn't get much love in public, but the concepts required to evolve it are taking shape. It was contemplated to piggyback on MSC 1410: Rich Bridging and to add a retry mechanism. So heads up for more to come on this front.
The display of bridge errors in Riot Web is now a PR and in the state of getting its last few kinks removed. It will start to be available under a lab flag soon.
With everything getting to play together nicely, there will be the first rooms enabling bridge errors to test the code in the wild. Stabilizing the code for everyday use and getting the MSC into a respectable form are the next goals for the project. Those will help in fostering broader adoption among bridges and clients.
Feel free to ask me questions about ma1sd in #ma1sd:ru-matrix.org
Final thoughts 💭
kitsune: "the latest versions of libQMatrixClient (0.5.2 - still under the old name) and Quaternion (0.0.9.4) are now available in Debian unstable, thanks to uhoreg"
That's all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
Hey hey, Synapse 1.2.0 is here. It contains aggregations support, better error handling for deactivated accounts and some important bug fixes for redacting messages. Special thanks to community members skalarproduktraum and Lrizika for submissions to improve our documentation.
Remove support for the invite_3pid_guest configuration setting. (#5625)
Internal Changes
Move logging code out of synapse.util and into synapse.logging. (#5606, #5617)
Add a blacklist file to the repo to blacklist certain sytests from failing CI. (#5611)
Make runtime errors surrounding password reset emails much clearer. (#5616)
Remove dead code for persiting outgoing federation transactions. (#5622)
Add lint.sh to the scripts-dev folder which will run all linting steps required by CI. (#5627)
Move RegistrationHandler.get_or_create_user to test code. (#5628)
Add some more common python virtual-environment paths to the black exclusion list. (#5630)
Some counter metrics exposed over Prometheus have been renamed, with the old names preserved for backwards compatibility and deprecated. See docs/metrics-howto.rst for details. (#5636)
It was drawn to our attention this afternoon that there is a bug in our GDPR data portability tooling that resulted in the data dump including some events that should not have been included.
This tooling has recently been updated (here is the new code), and the bug only affects reports generated with the updated tool. So far we have generated one report using the updated tooling.
The bug affects events which:
were sent in rooms in which, at the point at which the message was sent, the message visibility was set to 'shared' or 'world readable', and
were pulled in over federation from another server after the data subject left the room
As a reminder, 'shared' message visibility means anyone in the room can view the message, from the point in time at which visibility was set to 'shared' and 'world readable' means anyone can read the messages without joining the room, from the point in time at which visibility was set to 'world readable'.
Events are pulled onto a homeserver over federation when a user on that homeserver tries to access events which, for whatever reason, their homeserver does not already have a local copy. This most often happens when their homeserver is offline for any period of time, but can also happen when a user is the first user from their homeserver to join a room with active participants on other homeservers.
We're still analysing the data but so far it looks like the bug resulted in only a small number of events that were not publicly-accessible being shared (there were also publicly-accessible events mistakenly included). At this stage we have identified 19 events from 4 users across 2 rooms (the dump contained ~3.5 million events). This is not to diminish the severity of the bug - just to reassure that the scale of its impact appears to be extremely limited.
It is also worth noting that any encrypted events erroneously included in the dump will not have been decryptable (since the data subject would not have had access to the keys).
Update (2019-08-06)
In our original analysis we stated that 19 events were shared erroneously. On closer analysis we missed 5 other timeline events - the correct figure is 24 timeline events originating from 4 users over 2 rooms. However, this figure focused on timeline data and does not take into account all state events (such as user joins, parts, topic changes etc). When considering these too, a further 56 state events were erroneously shared, referencing 64 users across these 2 rooms (mainly detailing when users had joined/left the room after the requesting user themselves had left). These membership events contained avatar & display name details which may not have been public (but in practice, the vast majority appear to be public data).
Aside from the events referenced above, the full dump contained ~20,000 events that also ought not to have been included; however these events were already publicly accessible due to being part of publicly accessible rooms (eg Matrix HQ) and so we do not consider them a breach of data.
What caused the bug?
Events that are pulled in over federation are assigned a negative 'stream ordering' ID. This is designed to avoid their being sent down the sync (where they would likely be out of sequence). In normal operation (accessing your homeserver via a Matrix client) these events would be appropriately filtered, but a bug in the data dump tooling caused them to be included.
The bug was introduced as a result of two factors:
The event filtering code assumes that the user is currently in the room - this was not intuitive, and was not called out in the documentation
When we fetched the events from the database, we tried to limit to events sent before the user left the room. On reflection, we used the wrong ordering mechanism (stream ordering instead of topological ordering), resulting in the inclusion of events that were fetched from a remote server after the data subject had left
We are working to fix the bug, and we'll update here when it is resolved. As a reminder, please do report security bugs responsibly as per the Security Disclosure Policy so we can validate the issue and mitigate abuse.
As is standard practice for any data breach, we have notified the ICO.
As a step towards implementing Terms of Service for Sydent Identity Servers (MSC2140), we're rolling out a couple of changes to the two Identity Servers run by New Vector (running at vector.im and matrix.org):
We have erased all of the data where there is any chance that the data subject didn't understand how, why or with whom their data was being shared.
We've made a change to Sydent so that it no longer persists new associations relating to users on homeservers not run by New Vector.
The impact of these changes is that users on homeservers not run by New Vector will no longer be discoverable by their email or telephone number via the Identity Servers running at vector.im and matrix.org. As we roll out the rest of the changes for Terms of Service for Identity Servers, this functionality will again be made available for users who make an informed choice to opt in.
Registration with Email and Password Reset
In the short term, the New Vector Identity Servers will continue to support registration with email (signing up with an email address as well as a matrix username) and password reset. However, as we continue to improve Identity Server data hygiene practices, we will phase out their use in registration with email and password reset entirely. We have already made the change to Synapse to support password reset without relying on an Identity Server (though this can optionally be re-enabled).
Once Synapse can support registration with email without relying on an Identity Server we will announce a schedule for disabling registration with email and password reset in our Identity Servers entirely. After this point, homeserver administrators will have to make sure their homeservers are configured to send email to keep registration with email and password reset working. More details on this to follow - please watch this space.
<community-hat>
I'm working on a specification for exporting metadata and usage metrics out of federated servers. The aim is that the same specification could be re-used cross-protocol for example with not only Matrix servers but also ActivityPub, Diaspora and XMPP servers, as an example. Looking for comments here: https://talk.feneas.org/t/serverinfo-specification-for-server-metadata/99 </community-hat>
A couple TWIMs ago we teased that Dendrite had a plan in the works. Well one meeting later and here is the proposal:
It will take a while for Dendrite to become feature complete with Synapse, but we’d like people to be able to actually use Dendrite before then. Instead of waiting for feature-completeness, we propose a set of milestones for Dendrite development to reach and prioritize development for.
These milestones are currently listed on Dendrite’s github. The first is “Bot Hosting”, which means, once complete, Dendrite would be suitable as a “bot hub”, allowing server admins to run massive bridges on top of Dendrite while taking advantage of its horizontal-scaling capabilities. As written in the description, this goal includes basic CS API support, as well as federation with other homeservers. At this stage Dendrite should already be usable in rooms with other Synapse servers, which should make it a lot more interesting.
After that is several more milestones, each representing another use case that Dendrite can fill.
Don’t be alarmed at the currently quite small percentage of completeness, as these milestones have just been built from the open issue list. We’re actually quite far along to #1 already :)
We also want to mention that the milestones aren’t completely built yet - there’s still a few more issues to comb through. It’s taken a few days as anoa can’t help himself to fix things as he goes along. A few open issues have also been closed as they had already been fixed earlier.
This is all mentioned in this week’s Matrix Live above by the way, so be sure to catch for some extra details if you’re interested.
We look forward to shipping you a working Dendrite soon™. And as always feel free to join us in #dendrite-dev:matrix.org for discussion.
Synapse
Neil, who oversees the Synapse factory:
This week we’ve been working on improving database performance, shipping the new small hosted homeserver instances - expect a lot of improvements to come that will benefit the whole community and merged our recent OpenTracing support. We’ve also made some changes to how Sydent processes and stores email - more details here https://matrix.org/blog/2019/07/19/privacy-changes-to-new-vector-identity-servers
Next week, expect a new release, more database performance improvements and general Synapse performance work.
Listen to Matrix Live to hear Erik talking about his DB perf work ☝️
...
While I was working on ruma-signatures, I decided to fill in the missing functionality—signing and verifying events. In the process of doing that, I ended up with a significantly revised API for the crate, which has now been released as version 0.5.0.
...
New matrix-nio release bringing you documentation improvements across the board, while the documentation is still not fully complete yet it should be much easier to get started with nio.
Another highlight of this release is couroutine support for the event callbacks for the AsyncClient.
I just cut a 1.3.0 release of the Ruby SDK, mainly focusing on solving an issue due to Ruby extensions polluting the global scope. It also adds a very slightly extended response handling, which recursively adds getters for the keys of the resulting objects.
Many thanks to the people reporting issues to me so I can keep improving the SDK.
Today we've released 0.3.0 of the slack bridge since the last rc has proved to be stable. I hope you all enjoy the new features we've packed into this release. And as a reminder, there is another release right around the corner :)
Dept of Clients 📱
RiotX (Android)
From the team (see Matrix Live from last week for more from them):
RiotX 0.2.0 has been released on Thursday. Main new features: room filtering, message editing in e2e rooms, view editing history. Also many small new features and bugfixes.
Known limitation: crash on device running Android KitKat (4.4). We are considering supporting only device running Android Lollipop (5.0) and up (see/approve/comment https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/issues/405)
The team is still working on the main missing features: creation of direct chat, read receipt, along with UI/UX polishing.
Riot v1.3.0 was released with support for reactions and message editing enabled. Check out the Riot blog post for more details. No changes are needed to enable these features for self-hosted installs anymore (which is change from what was stated in last week’s TWIM update).
We’re continuing to work on several privacy improvements to related to integration managers and identity servers to give users more control over these.
Riot Android
From the team:
Riot 0.9.2 has been released on Friday. It contains some bug fixes and new translations for many strings especially for the device verification feature.
Riot iOS
From the team:
We released v0.9.1 with message editing, reactions and file upload.
We are continuing to work on reactions (emoji picker).
In the newest update FluffyChat now supports avatars in Push Notifications. Also translations have been updated and some minor design tweaks have been made.
I know that E2EE for FluffyChat is continuing to be worked on, just not quite ready yet.
Several bugs were fixed in the past three weeks. We are also sending typing notifications now. With 4.1.1 out, we’re at the second beta on the way to 4.2.
Also:
some people might be interested in a tweak in our build config that makes it so that crashes are aborts now (i.e. you get a trace and they are not silent anymore)
Spectral
Black Hat is changing Spectral's buildsystem from QMake to CMake.
Dept of Ops 🛠
sendtomatrix script
Madic has created a shell script to send messages to a room:
I've written a linux shell script with which you can send (multiline) messages to a matrix room. It only needs a username / password or access token, server fqdn and roomid as argument or provided by a configuration file. Arguments can overwrite settings from the file, for e.g. using same credentials but different channel. If no access token is provided, a new one will be requested and used to send the message. You can use the script for e.g. cronjobs, nagios notifications or ci pipelines. An example for a cronjob and a nagios notification script is also provided.
I have ended up with an similar file of my own containing a bunch of commented-out curl lines, but this is a lot cleaner!
and then, tulirblatantly ripped him off was inspired to create a maubot providing the LaTeX to SVG rendering: https://github.com/maubot/tex
Dept of Services 🚀
New room for t2bot.io
TravisR, who arranges and hosts the various bots and bridges on t2bot.io:
#news:t2bot.io is now a room for people who want to follow along with news about t2bot.io which might be missed in #help:t2bot.io. Stuff like when bridges are updated and new services will be announced in there. #status:t2bot.io is where service stability is addressed during major problems with the service.
That's all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
If you’ve been looking for a way to have you own Matrix homeserver without having to run it yourself, you may be interested to hear that Modular (the Matrix hosting provider run by New Vector, the startup which hires many of the Matrix core team) is now offering a personal-sized small homeserver hosting service, supporting a minimum size of 5 user servers.
A lot of recent performance work on Synapse has been driven by the need to make smaller dedicated servers more efficient to run - and so if you run your own homeserver you’ll be benefiting from all this work too :) Meanwhile, if you choose to outsource your server hosting to Modular, you’ll be indirectly supporting core Matrix and Synapse development, given most of the core Matrix team work for New Vector - it’s through buying services like this which lets us keep folks able to hack on Matrix as their day job.
