Folks, as you know we are now very close to achieving Matrix 1.0 and finally being in a position to shed our ‘beta' tag. It has been a long time coming and speaks to the huge effort from hundreds of people over the past 5 years.
A critical step towards this goal is the release of Synapse 1.0. We want to ship Synapse 1.0 as soon as possible but can't do so without your help!
We'd like to introduce AreWeReadyYet.com - a quick and easy way for everyone to track the progress and check if their federation is ready for Matrix 1.0!!
Synapse 1.0 is good news for anyone running a Synapse installation - it contains critical bug fixes, security patches, a new room algorithm version and dramatically improved user and room search. However, as part of the security work it also
contains a breaking change from previous Synapse versions. From 1.0 onwards it will necessary to ensure a valid TLS certificate on the federation API. Self signed certificates will no longer be accepted. Why would we do such a thing?
In anticipation for this, everyone currently running a homeserver must ensure that they have checked their federation certificate (check yours here). Failure to do so will mean being unable to federate with any Matrix 1.0 compliant server. If your server fails the check, our FAQ has all the details on what you need to do.
This post is a call to arms to try and get as many admins to upgrade their certificates as possible. We are tracking adoption at https://arewereadyyet.com - currently this sits at about 55% - we need this figure to be higher before we can pull the lever.
So what are you waiting for? Check that your server has valid certs - then tell all your admin pals to do the same.
Friends don't let friends miss out on Synapse 1.0, send them to arewereadyyet.com (or tweet here to remind them!) We really need the community to help us here because at some point soon, we will need to pull the lever and release.
Once we make more progress on adoption, we will announce an official release date and finally get Synapse out of beta!
This week you're stuck with me, but I'm chatting to Ryan, who works on Riot web. Having previously worked at Mozilla, Ryan has a LOT of interesting things to say about Firefox, the browser market, the importance of decentralisation, Matrix being GREAT, and more.
It's all about 1.0 for the Synapse gang this week. This means performance improvements across the board in the form of read receipt batching, user directory (room directory coming soon!) and rate limiting on log in and registration APIs.
Brendan shipped the low bandwidth CoAP proxy we demo'd at FOSDEM
As well as a bunch of spec implementation projects to ensure that Synapse (and Sydent) are ready for Synapse 1.0.
Turn-of-phrase of the week from Half-Shot ("make it more performant and less crashy"):
synapse-netcore-workers is progressing as strongly as ever. This week has mainly been supporting a couple of users trying to use the fed sender, and also trying to make it more performant and less crashy. I've been using it solidly for two weeks now, and by and large it's been working nicely :)
Black Hat has been working on Cortex, a similar project in Rust:
Support for replication protocol in Cortex is mostly complete. A federation sender worker implementation is being worked on. If anyone is interested or wants to contribute, please go to #cortex:encom.eu.org
Wilko announced Pattle, a Matrix client for Android:
Hey all, I've been working on my Matrix Android app, Pattle! The goal of Pattle is to be an easy to use app for Matrix, with it's design inspired by popular apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Development happens here, and contributions are encouraged! The app is not currently suited for daily use, but some functionality is there, such as registering, logging in and viewing chats.
Currently it's an Android only app using the official Matrix Android SDK, but the plan is to support iOS and web too, in the future.
There's also a sort of design document available, stating how Pattle differs from standard Matrix apps and what it's goals are. The intent of the design document is to make development easier later on for other platforms
Quaternion 0.0.9.4 beta 2 (too many numbers? That too shall pass) is out, with bugfixes and translation updates. Notably, Quaternion won't crash on upgraded rooms in some cases, and won't cry in #gsoc:matrix.org and other v3 rooms. Translators are still strongly encouraged to push forward - due to all the features and fixes, there are many untranslated strings across the board! Also, some bugfixes are still in order before we can call the release RC, and some of them are really easy - so if you'd like to contribute, it's a great time to start!
iOS released 2 times. Last release was to fix an issue with invalid scalar token.
Review of one PR from the community for iOS10 notifications.
Started implementing device verification with emoji.
We've released v0.8.25 on Thursday, containing refresh of invalid scalar token, and some bugfixes. Links on m.notice messages are now clickable again. Started implementing device verification with emoji.
I just realized that I haven't had lazy loading activated by default in the Ruby SDK, despite having had lazy loading code in place since ages back, so now that's going to be the default value going forward.
Further:
I started hacking - just a couple of hours or so ago - on a notification sender for The Foreman, a server orchestration system. So it can forward notifications to Matrix. https://github.com/ananace/foreman_notification_send
If you're using, or considering using, The Foreman for orchestration this may be very useful.
matrix-appservice-bridge got a 1.8.0 release last night, featuring automatic handling of room upgrades for all your room upgrade needs. Providing your bridge uses the RoomStore as designed, it's literally a few lines to enable :). Changelog here
What is this? A matrix-appservice-irc release? No, it's a release candidate. Announcing that 0.12.0-rc1 is now out and about for folks to play with. More IRC updates to come in the future :)
I wrote a small bot that takes a kick/ban policy from room state from all rooms it's a member of and tries to enact that policy. In practice that means it applies a regex to all MXIDs and tries to kick/ban them based on that. It's been a request of TravisR , source code is available at https://gitlab.com/jcgruenhage/banhammer, documentation is still lacking but will hopefully soon be added
So that's all I have to say! I hope you enjoyed this edition of This Week in Matrix, and whether you did or you didn't, I'd love too hear from you in #twim:matrix.org. If you have Matrix news to share, that's the place to come and do so!
Last month at FOSDEM 2019 we gave a talk about a new experimental ultra-low-bandwidth transport for Matrix which swaps our baseline HTTPS+JSON transport for a custom one built on CoAP+CBOR+Noise+Flate+UDP. (CoAP is the RPC protocol; CBOR is the encoding; Noise powers the transport layer encryption; Flate compresses everything uses predefined compression maps).
The challenge here was to see if we could demonstrate Matrix working usably over networks running at around 100 bits per second of throughput (where it'd take 2 minutes to send a typical 1500 byte ethernet packet!!) and very high latencies. You can see the original FOSDEM talk below, or check out the slides here.
Now, it's taken us a little while to find time to tidy up the stuff we demo'd in the talk to be (relatively) suitable for public consumption, but we're happy to finally release the four projects which powered the demo:
https://github.com/matrix-org/meshsim - meshsim is the network simulator which provides an interactive web interface to draw a network topology and let you spin up dockerized homeservers on a simulated network with whatever preferred latency, jitter, packet loss etc.
https://github.com/matrix-org/coap-proxy - coap-proxy is the golang proxy which converts HTTPS+JSON into CoAP+CBOR+Noise+Flate and vice versa, letting you squish Matrix CS API and SS API traffic in & out of CoAP.
In order to get up and running, the meshsim README has all the details.
It's important to understand that this is very much a proof of concept, and shouldn't be used in production yet, and almost certainly has some glaring bugs. In fact, it currently assumes you are running on a trusted private network rather than the public Matrix network in order to get away with some of the bandwidth optimisations performed - see coap-proxy's Limitations section for details. Particularly, please note that the encryption is homemade and not audited or fully reviewed or tested yet. Also, we've released the code for the low-bandwidth transport, but we haven't released the "fan-out routing" implementation for Synapse as it needs a rethink to be applicable to the public Matrix network. You'll also want to run Riot/Web in low-bandwidth mode if you really wind down the bandwidth (suppressing avatars, read receipts, typing notifs and presence to avoid wasting precious bandwidth).
We also don't have an MSC for the CoAP-based transport yet, mainly due to lack of time whilst wanting to ensure the limitations are addressed first before we propose it as a formal alternative Matrix transport. (We also first need to define negotiation mechanisms for entirely alternative CS & SS transports!). However, the quick overview is:
JSON is converted directly into CBOR (with a few substitutions made to shrink common patterns down)
HTTP is converted directly into CoAP (mapping the verbose API endpoints down to single-byte endpoints)
TLS is swapped out for Noise Pipes (XX + IK noise handshakes). This gives us 1RTT setup (XX) for the first connection to a host, and 0RTT (IK) for all subsequent connections, and provides trust-on-first-use semantics when connecting to a server. You can see the Noise state machine we maintain in go-coap's noise.go.
The CoAP headers are hoisted up above the Noise payload, letting us use them for framing the noise pipes without having duplicated framing headers at the CoAP & Noise layers. We also frame the Noise handshake packets as CoAP with custom message types (250, 251 and 252). We might be better off using OSCORE for this, however, rather than hand-wrapping a custom encrypted transport...
The CoAP payload is compressed via Flate using preshared compression tables derived from compressing large chunks of representative Matrix traffic. This could be significantly improved in future with streaming compression and dynamic tables (albeit seeded from a common set of tables).
The end result is that you end up taking about 90 bytes (including ethernet headers!) to send a typical Matrix message (and about 70 bytes to receive the acknowledgement). This breaks down as as:
14 bytes of Ethernet headers
20 bytes of IP headers
8 bytes of UDP headers
16 bytes of Noise AEAD
6 bytes of CoAP headers
~26 bytes of compressed and encrypted CBOR
The Noise handshake on connection setup would take an additional 128 bytes (4x 32 byte Curve25519 DH values), either spread over 1RTT for initial setup or 0RTT for subsequent setups.
At 100bps, 90 bytes takes 90*8/100 = 7.2s to send... which is just about usable in an extreme life and death situation where you can only get 100bps of connectivity (e.g. someone at the bottom of a ravine trying to trickle data over one bar of GPRS to the emergency services). In practice, on a custom network, you could ditch the Ethernet and UDP/IP headers if on a point-to-point link for CS API, and ditch the encryption if the network physical layer was trusted - at which point we're talking ~32 bytes per request (2.5s to send at 100bps). Then, there's still a whole wave of additional work that could be investigated, including...
Smarter streaming compression (so that if a user says 'Hello?' three times in a row, the 2nd and 3rd messages are just references to the first pattern)
Hoisting Matrix transaction IDs up to the CoAP layer (reusing the CoAP msgId+token rather than passing around new Matrix transaction IDs, at the expense of requiring one Matrix txn per request)
Switching to CoAP OBSERVE for receiving data from the server (currently we long-poll /sync to receive data)
Switching access_tokens for PSKs or similar
...all of which could shrink the payload down even further. That said, even in its current state, it's a massive improvement - roughly ~65x better than the equivalent HTTPS+JSON traffic.
In practice, further work on low-bandwidth Matrix is dependent on finding a sponsor who's willing to fund the team to focus on this, as otherwise it's hard to justify spending time here in addition to all the less exotic business-as-usual Matrix work that we need to keep the core of Matrix evolving (finishing 1.0, finishing E2E encryption, speeding up Synapse, finishing Dendrite, rewriting Riot/Android etc). However, the benefits here should be pretty obvious: massively reduced bandwidth and battery-life; resilience to catastrophic network conditions; faster sync times; and even a protocol suitable for push notifications (Matrix as e2e encrypted, decentralised, push!). If you're interested in supporting this work, please contact support at matrix.org.
Folks, in the run up to Synapse 1.0, if you are running your own homeserver now would be an excellent time to check that your TLS certificates are up to date. Point your server name at https://matrix.org/federationtester/ and if there are errors check our handy FAQ on how to fix it. If you do not have valid TLS certificates Synapse 1.0 will refuse to federate with you.
benpa has put together a federation checker to quantify how many homeservers are 1.0 ready - https://www.arewereadyyet.com/ - It currently stands at 50.5% let's try and get that to 60% over the weekend.
Aside from all that, the team have been working on preparing for Synapse 1.0, you can track our progress here. We promise not to just land 1.0 out of the blue - we'll give everyone a 2 week warning to give stragglers a chance to get their certificates in order.
And this week we have Neil and Erik talking about this in more detail on Matrix Live
ma1uta has been working on Jeon - Java interfaces to the various Matrix APIs - and is now getting ready to start work on a homeserver. He was previously asking for a name for this project, but might now have settled on "JeonServer".
First Release Candidate of the Jeon Project with upcoming Client-Server API 0.5, Server-Server API 0.1.1, Application API 0.1, Identity API 0.2 and Push API 0.1.
Also the RC of the jmsdk has been prepared with Java Matrix Client for Client-Server API 0.5.
Changes in the C2S: Added the m.push_rules event, removed presence list methods and other minor fixes.
Added S2S API of the 0.1.1 version.
I prepared a very simple page https://ma1uta.github.io/ with links to the swagger schemas (json and yaml) for all Matrix API which generated from the Jeon code.
There's a lot of progress, a few endpoints and features have been implemented this week such as Room Tags and all of the spec features for /createRoom. Most of the progress has been with testing and bugfixes thanks to Yan Minari, and tulir and mujx.
We've fixed several interactions with synapse such as invite accept/deny and synapse's ability to join and leave construct created rooms without any issues.
Lastly and most important, we've generated an official issues list thanks again to our star tester Yan Minari available here https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct/issues
pztrn has created a new mechanism for relaying apps that use Slack webhooks into Matrix:
To everyone who wonders how to connect his application to Matrix (at least for notifications of some kind) - use OpenSAPS! It just reached v0.1.0. OpenSAPS stands for Open Slack API Server and able to retransmit messages from applications (like Gitlab or everything that can send data to Slack) to somewhere else. Right now these "somewhere else" is a Telegram (with HTTP proxy support) and Matrix! Written in Golang to ensure minimal memory footprint. Take a look at https://gitlab.com/pztrn/opensaps Tested with Gitlab and Gitea but should work with almost any service. Join #opensaps:pztrn.name to talk with developers or get help. BTW, there is OpenSAPS instance in our room that transmits everything from gitlab.com into room! (almost) immediately after 0.1.0 comes 0.1.1, with fixed URLs parsing and fixed inability to login into servers which use .well-known for delegation. It should work [with other webhooks]. If something strange happens there is also a possibility to write own parser to make everything work :)‚ Tested with Gitlab and Gitea ATM. Share application names that work, I'll start to make a list of them. :D
🔗matrix-puppet-bridge: matrix-puppet-slack and matrix-puppet-hangouts updates
Minivector, a minimalistic fork of riot-android had a new release last week, getting rid of a few more unused dependencies. This brings the final apk size down to 13mb vs riot android's 25mb. This work was done by @hrjet:matrix.org. The project room is here: #miniVectorAndroid:matrix.org
🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, now with Discord and email templates
The volume of discussion about installing/configuring Synapse and other Matrix-related components is like a subculture in itself. Standing tall within this is Slavi's matrix-docker-ansible-deploy collection of Ansible playbooks. They're a great way to quickly and reliably get a Synapse instance running.
between chasing bugs in Quaternion 0.0.9.4 beta (translators, your help is hugely needed to catch up with new and updated strings) there happens almost literal bikeshedding in #qmatrixclient:matrix.org, under an excuse of discussing The Universal Algorithm to Colour Usernames. Join the fun!
Bifrost is now starting to comfortably support gatewaying. For those that don't know, gateways allow a remote user to participate in the matrix network without prior bridging, it's very fancy. The latest changes are that XMPP clients can now ask for the public room list by querying the bridge component. There is a video on this using the Yaxim XMPP client on Android (Credit to Ge0rG). Come chat with us in #bifrost:half-shot.uk
You can check out the video of the bridge in operation here:
Spectral development now continues after a short break. The new "material design" has been merged into master, along with a few bug fixes. I plan to work on Kirigami port in the following two weeks.
I made a room for !pinging echo maubots: #ping:maunium.net. The room has a bunch of echo bots, currently on maunium.net, c.mau.dev and matrix.vgorcum.com. It also has a new maubot plugin called pingstat, which collects the pong data and makes a leaderboard website. The website is linked to the room as a widget.
Not much news to report on the netcore-workers other than it's maturing and we have nice things now like logging, metrics and a docker image you can run at home. I'm running the federation sender fulltime on half-shot.uk to dogfood it and will announce when I think it's good for general consumption :)
Related: Black Hat is investigating a similar project in Rust. Anyone interested in that please do go chat, and take a look at the repo they've created.
🔗matrix-wug, IPA rendering bot, gets support for cherokee
This is "script" or written language has a very interesting story behind it, where the creator of it actually couldn't read and write. Regardless, he wanted to write down his language, and developed his own writing system. The characters look a lot like latin characters because he tried to imitate the characters of a bible. Just a fun history lesson!
since weechat-matrix is a bit involved to install, I create a dockerfile that takes care of it: https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix/pull/60 . And people allergic to docker can look inside to check the steps (just reading the readme doesn't give a full picture)
Modular.im is a Matrix-as-a-SaaS offering. It's suitable for users who want the benefits of having their own Matrix homeserver, but don't want to host and run one.
There are some new announcements this week:
Today we are pleased to announce that you can now customise your Modular hosted Riot at the touch of a button, through the Modular host admin interface. Better yet, this is available to all Modular customers at no additional cost. Today we are also launching a proof of concept for purchasing additional content via the Modular integration manager. For the initial experiment we're offering a set of "snazzy", limited edition Matrix stickers for the princely sum of $0.50. These are digital versions of the Matrix and Riot hexagons that some of you may have seen in real life.
decred.org are an organisation concerned with blockchain technology, and they also use Matrix for their communications! They now have a stickerpack available in Riot, so if you'd like to use their stickers you can add the pack and get going with blockchain-related memes.
If you have a stickerpack you'd like to see included, please let me know.
I've made a room for anyone interested in drums and percussion. Acoustic, Electronic, Played or Programmed, anything goes as long as it's rhytm related. The room is focused on both playing/programming drums and equipment.
There was a somewhat longstanding bug that affected a number of users: often manifesting as unexpected and frustrating "Unable to decrypt" messages - this has now been fixed, take a look at https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6838
Heads up that Modular.im (the paid hosting Matrix service provided by New Vector, the company who employs much of the Matrix core team) launched a pilot today for paid Matrix integrations in the form of paid sticker packs. Yes kids, it's true - for only $0.50 you can slap Matrix and Riot hex stickers all over your chatrooms. It's a toy example to test the payments infrastructure and demonstrate the concept - the proceeds go towards funding development work on Matrix.org :)
You can read more about over on Modular's blog.
We wanted to elaborate on this a bit from the Matrix.org perspective, specifically:
We are categorically not baking payments or financial incentives as a first class citizen into Matrix, and we're not going to start moving stuff behind paywalls or similar.
This demo is a proof-of-concept to illustrate how folks could do this sort of thing in general in Matrix - it's not a serious product in and of itself.
What it shows is that an Integration Manager like Modular can be used as a way to charge for services in Matrix - whether that's digital content within an integration, or bots/bridges/etc.
While Modular today gathers payments via credit-card (Stripe), it could certainly support other mechanisms (e.g. cryptocurrencies) in future.
The idea in future is for Modular to provide this as a mechanism that anyone can use to charge for content on Matrix - e.g. if you have your own sticker pack and want to sell it to people, you'll be able to upload it and charge people for it.
Meanwhile, there's a lot of interesting stuff on the horizon with integration managers in general - see MSC1236 and an upcoming MSC from TravisR (based around https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/1286) proposing new integration capabilities. We're also hoping to implement inline widgets soon (e.g. chatbot buttons for voting and other semantic behaviour) which should make widgets even more interesting!
So, feel free to go stick some hex stickers on your rooms if you like and help test this out. In future there should be more useful things available :)
Well now, what have we here? Synapse 0.99.2 is the latest in the 0.99.x series as we step ever closer to 1.0.
0.99.2 is an incremental release including a bunch of performance improvements, enhancements to room upgrades and generally a plethora of bug fixes.
The most important thing that admins should know is that prior to 1.0 landing later this month, it is essential that the federation API has a valid TLS certificate - self signed certificates will no longer be accepted. For more details see our handy guide. Failure to do this will result in being unable to federate with other 1.0 servers.
No Ben this week, apparently he is allowed to go on holiday from time to time. Also no Matrix Live because we are terrible people - bring back Ben, that's what I say.
Quaternion (master branch, and upcoming v0.0.9.4) can now open rooms by their aliases or ids upon pressing Ctrl+O, as long as those rooms are already in your room list (opening arbitrary public rooms will come in later versions). You can even paste matrix.to URIs for users (will open direct chat) and rooms in the same dialog. Navigation to known rooms inside Quaternion also works.
weechat-matrix's e2e support is really impressive (via matrix-nio and python-olm). It can only read rather than send right now, but otherwise looks to be massively on the right track. It even does fingerprint-based verification!
We shipped 0.99.2 this week, it's a point release containing all the usual bug fixes and perf improvements. We have also been taking a look at our docs and trying to improve where we can.
Hawkowl has spent some time improving CI so that we don't get queued up for hours waiting for builds (woo).
Admins - your weekly reminder that if you've not already done so, you must ensure the TLS certificate on your federation endpoints is no longer self signed - see our handy guide for all the details.
Sets rooms invite-only when they're touched, instead of relying on others not knowing the room ID (thanks to https://matrix.to/#/@AndrewJDR:matrix.org , from all of us who federate on the homeservers we use to bridge!)
Matrix rooms representing remote rooms being joinable by anyone who knows the room ID (which is generated, at least in part, from the remote room ID in all the matrix-puppet-bridge applications) was a big deficiency, and it's finally resolved. It wasn't known whether or not we could do this, and have our ghost users still be able to join the rooms (they need to be invited instead of just joining themselves), until it was attempted and tested in a few of the bridge applications. Because it is a big deal, new minor versions of matrix-puppet-slack, matrix-puppet-facebook, matrix-puppet-hangouts, matrix-puppet-signal, matrix-puppet-imessage and matrix-puppet-groupme, bumping the matrix-puppet-bridge version to 1.17.0, have been released.
matrix-media-repo has alpha-quality support for s3 (and s3-like services) on the travis/s3 branch. Intrepid testers are encouraged to give it a shot, and report bugs. Caution: may upload your cat.
Implementation of .well-known support (SDK and Riot)
Minor change on some colors of the themes (link, home badges)
Many issue will be fixed regarding linkification
KeysBackup: improvement on recovery process: importing keys step is 8 times faster, and user get more feedback during the process which can take several seconds
We will prepare a new release for the beginning of next week.
PlayStore new descriptions have been updated for the following languages: Bulgarian, German, English (US), French, Hungarian, Russian and Chinese (Taiwan).
Aaron Raimist has made some updates to Riotic, which was a good chance for me to revisit it. It works nicely and is a great alternative to the Electron version of Riot. I also like being able to use https://riot.im/develop as an app.
I've slightly tweaked Joakim Ahlen's Riot wrapper for macOS, riotic, which uses the native WKWebView instead of Electron. I updated the app to be sandboxed so it has very limited access to your system. I also updated the interface to follow macOS conventions and updated it to use the latest version of Swift.
riotic does have some limitations though. Riot doesn't support VoIP on Safari so riotic can't support VoIP either and WKWebView doesn't support notifications as far as I can tell. Right now it uses a really old Riot icon, maybe I'll ask about using one of these community made icons https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/pull/4474.
It does have some advantages over the official Riot Electron app though. The app is only ~12 MB compared to Riot which is ~180 MB, it also uses significantly less RAM. riotic also allows you to pick what Riot URL to use so you can run /develop as a desktop app.
The synapse-netcore-worker project has continued to evolve. You can now federate with other servers using the federation sender implementation. It supports everything except device lists at the moment, so it supports PDUs/EDUs and can just be connected up to one of your existing synapse instances. It's not been battletested enough yet to be put in production (hence no dockerfile), but it's very fast. Oh and for those of you who don't know, "synapse-netcore-worker" is Travis's .NET implementation of synapse workers, the room can be found at #synapse-netcore-workers:t2bot.io.
If you're as uninitiated as I was three days ago, this project is a replaceable worker component for Synapse, which just happens to be written in .NET.
To give an update to the earlier exploits of synapse-netcore-worker's federation sender, we've still got a few more things to iron out before we can suggest people use it actively. The hit list of remaining things to fix is in https://github.com/turt2live/synapse-netcore-workers/pull/5
That Ben guy eh? When he's not swanning off on holiday and having fun, he's writing super groovy guides to getting whatsapp bridging up and running. You don't even need a real device. Check it out.
Just merged the protocol split branch I've been working on for the Ruby SDK, including a first PoC for an application service base. Not tested in any actual use as of yet, but expect Things TM in the next release.
in project koma, a new bot picsay is created. It like the classic easter-egg program cowsay, but it uses actual photos instead of ASCII art. It configured to use any image just by editing a json file. So you can run your own version for fun.
I took some time to hack on Tchap again. This time I disabled virus scanning of thumbnails and downloads in Tchap to be able to see avatars. I also wrote a non-scanning virus scanner API implementation to be able to see files, pictures and videos that are sent. The updated Tchap can be found at https://github.com/14mRh4X0r/tchap-android, the virus scanner API implementation at https://git.snt.utwente.nl/14mRh4X0r/tchap-media-scanner.
Dandellion'sWug now supports Inuktitut Syllabics and Iñupiatun Orthography. In the bot's own words.
Hi I can help you translate X-SAMPA, Z-SAMPA to IPA, and transcribe into proto-indo european notation! Use (x/z/p) together with either / or [] as delimiters x/"hEloU/ z[or` 5aIk DIz] p/mreghnom/
I also can transcribe to Inuktitut Syllabics like this: i[tusaumaqattautijjutinik aulattijiit]. Find my source at https://github.com/Dali99/matrix-wug
Aaron Raimist has created a new room for Formula 1 fans:
Now that the Formula 1 season is getting underway it's probably a good time to announce @CIA:matrix.org's new(ish) room: #f1:matrix.org When this blog post is released there will be 16 days left before the first race of the 2019 season There was previously a Formula 1 room but it was merged with Snoonet's IRC channel which tends to be extremely busy. This is a matrix only room.
That's it folks, your normal Ben orientated programming will continue next week. Bring back Ben, bring back Ben.
an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication.
In this article we'll benefit from all three of these attributes:
interoperable: we'll see how Matrix can be made to interact with WhatsApp
decentralised: you can perform this on your own server while still enjoying the benefits of being connected to the rest of the Matrix federation
real-time communication: we'll see how to send and receive messages in real-time
🔗Install your homeserver and install mautrix-whatsapp, the WhatsApp bridge
Firstly, you need to have a Matrix homeserver installed. If you don't currently have one, take a look at the instructions at Installing Synapse, and also in the Synapse README.
If you are starting from scratch, I suggest you take a look at matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, as this project will enable you to deploy Synapse, mautrix-whatsapp and other components easily.
For example, if you have an existing deployment using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, you can add mautrix-whatsapp simply by adding the following line to your configuration file:
The best way to run an Android Virtual Machine is to use the Android Studio tools from Google. First, install Android Studio, making sure to follow the post-install steps, as they will install additional tools we need, including AVD Manager.
Once installed, run AVD manager by choosing Tools -> AVD Manager from the menu.
Follow the steps to create a new virtual machine, in this example I have a Nexus 5X running Android 9, but almost any configuration is fine here. Make sure that you give the device access to the Play Store.
Now that you have WhatsApp working in a VM, and Matrix working on your server, it's time to bridge them together!
Per the instructions at mautrix-whatsapp/wiki, you must start a new chat with @whatsappbot:<yourdomain>. Type login to begin the authentication process.
mautrix-whatsapp operates by using the WhatsApp Web feature of WhatsApp - which means it uses a QR code that you must now scan on the device running WhatsApp - which in your case is the AVD. In order to scan the presented QR code, set your AVD camera to passthrough the camera device on your host machine - see the images below.
Once this is complete, you can type sync, to start bridging contacts, and sync --create to automatically create room invites.
And that's it! You may need to take a little time to watch the sync happen, particularly if you have a very large number of chats on the WhatsApp side, but there is no further configuration needed.
The remainder of 0.6.x is expected to be bug fixes. This includes bug fixes in mtxclient as well as nheko. 0.7.0 will be the next feature release. The end goal here is to add some of the capabilities that people have been requesting, and other things that people haven't been requesting. AFTER 0.7.0 releases, I will then focus on updating the encryption to include more than just text messages.
kitsune has been writing the codes this week, Quaternion now supports room upgrades and more:
Master branch of Quaternion can now store access token in your secure storage/keychain, better integrating into frameworks of GNOME and KDE, as well as macOS and Windows. Also, you can see the room version and upgrade rooms in Quaternion (just like Matthew said on FOSDEM ;) ) - this feature is enabled by libQMatrixClient, so other clients are welcome to support room versions/upgrades too!
All this is within the work on the upcoming release of libQMatrixClient 0.5 and Quaternion 0.0.9.4 - stay tuned!
Oh we will. Spectral support for these new features when?
Just tagged and pushed a new version (0.0.4) of the Ruby SDK, since I've completely forgotten to do that for a while now.
What's new?
A whole bunch of small stuff I did, mostly just additional exposed methods and parameters, and some fixed issues as well. I did add support for HS URL discovery using both SRV and .well-known though, which I think is probably the largest new feature.
As if all this wasn't enough, a room on Matrix!
Created a discussion room for the Ruby SDK - since it seems like there are now people who have actually used it apart from me; #ruby-matrix-sdk:kittenface.studio
Fix txnId generation that made sending messages unreliable. Work around a bug in OkHttp that crashed the dispatcher thread when the server certificate was not received in time.
Good thing to fix! Here's a screenshot of Continuum-desktop, the client from koma:
>
yuforia continues:
Fix text processing in the bot avecho, feel free to try it out in #koma-im:matrix.org
mxisdv1.3.1 is out. It is a maintenance release that fixes a set of regressions following the changes in v1.3.0 to massively improve performance. If you haven't updated to the v1.3 branch, now is the time!
Over the past three weeks Construct has made rapid progress with covering the Matrix 1.0 specification! Last week we implemented room version 1 and room version 2 authentication rules. This week we implemented device support and management, and have nearly wrapped up successful End-To-End Encryption testing. The Construct is a community-driven server implementation written in C++ for maximum performance. To all experienced C++ developers out there: we need your contributions to accelerate and test the 1.0 release! Please check out https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and stop by #test:zemos.net / #zemos-test:matrix.org today!
Make the c++ code less heavy, we should focus on speed
Offload js code to direct qml binding, with this i mean instead of having ablock if-else code that modifies qml object that runs on component load, we do this directly in qml: see 0a800fc and https://github.com/uMatriks/uMatriksblob/0a800fcdc0af4fa2e08526dbff88e06bcb591779/uMatriks/componentsChatItem.qml as an example for a cleaner code
Make all ui depended calls async, we should NEVER block ui
Offload heavy js logic to c++
Cleaner UI, with less crust
Async everything
Merge our WIP call support
Finish impl of call support (maybe move to a standalone webrtc module)
We linked to the announcement last week, and have been using it for even longer, but somehow I missed a great labs feature that shipped with Riot 1.0: "room breadcrumbs", which you can enable from the Labs page of Riot settings. This gives you a series of quick links with the history of rooms you were most recently in. So if you're like me, clicking between rooms all day, you can get where you're going a little faster.
There is no big news about mautrix-whatsapp this week, other than that I installed it on my own server and found that it works really really well. I'd love to switch to this as a main interface for my less-decentralised friends, but like others, I've been stung by this issue in an upstream project. If there are go-fans reading (and I know there are), I wonder if it's an issue which can be fixed?
A tidy little article on "non-centralised" applications. Article by Jontheniceguy helps pin down some of the terminology around decentralisation and the like. https://jon.sprig.gs/blog/post/1041
All good things must come to an end - and here we are!
Matrix is getting a lot of attention recently (has it been on the front page of HN every day this week? I remember that I used to be excited seeing that happen), and seeing a lot of growth as well.
If you have something to say here, something to add, come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org - I love that this is a supportive and engaged project ecosystem, so come share what you have!
We're very excited to officially welcome the KDE Community on to Matrix as they announce that KDE Community is officially adopting Matrix as a chat platform, and kde.org now has an official Matrix homeserver!
You can see the full announcement and explanation over at https://dot.kde.org/2019/02/20/kde-adding-matrix-its-im-framework. It is fantastic to see one of the largest Free Software communities out there proactively adopting Matrix as an open protocol, open network and FOSS project, rather than drifting into a proprietary centralised chat system. It's also really fun to see Riot 1.0 finally holding its own as a chat app against the proprietary alternatives!
This doesn't change the KDE rooms which exist in Matrix today or indeed the KDE Freenode IRC channels - so many of the KDE community were already using Matrix, all the rooms already exist and are already bridged to the right places. All it means is that there's now a shiny new homeserver (powered by Modular.im) on which KDE folk are welcome to grab an account if they want, rather than sharing the rather overloaded public matrix.org homeserver. The rooms have been set up on the server to match their equivalent IRC channels - for instance, #kde:kde.org is the same as #kde on Freenode; #kde-devel:kde.org is the same as #kde-devel etc. The rooms continue to retain their other aliases (#kde:matrix.org, #freenode_#kde:matrix.org etc) as before.
This is great news for the Matrix ecosystem in general - and should be particularly welcome for Qt client projects like Quaternion, Spectral and Nheko-Reborn, who may feel a certain affinity to KDE!
So: welcome, KDE! Hope you have a great time, and please let us know how you get on, so we can make sure Matrix kicks ass for you :)
Ananace
yuforia
Willem
andrewsh
