🔗AreWeReadyYet.com?

From Neil of the Synapse-team

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

🔗JeonServer and related project updates

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.

Chat more in #jeon:matrix.org or #jeon:ru-matrix.org.

🔗Construct updates

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

For more new Construct news watch the repo or join #zemos-test:matrix.org

🔗OpenSAPS: Open Slack API Server

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

tom reports from #matrix-puppet-bridge:matrix.org:

• matrix-puppet-slack 1.12.0 has been released. This version:
  • Fixes incorrect room alias reserved prefixes (thanks to jeffcasavant!)
  • Handles a new kind of Slack event (hence the minor version bump): channel renames (thanks to d3m3vilurr !)
• matrix-puppet-hangouts 1.0.1 has been released.
  • The patch fixes node 8 compatibility broken by a recent change.
• Work is ongoing to replace unwieldy Promise chains in matrix-puppet-bridge with async/await, to make the lives of maintainers & contributors easier.

🔗MiniVector update

bubu let us know about MiniVector 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.

Thanks to Lionstiger, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports Discord bridging via matrix-appservice-discord.
Those wishing to give it a try can refer to the Setting up Appservice Discord bridging documentation page.

Thanks to Sylvia van Os, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has the Ability to customize mxisd's email templates

🔗Quaternion 0.0.9.4 beta

kitsune:

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 bridge gatewaying

Half-Shot:

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 restart

Black Hat:

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.

🔗Fractal

Alexandre Franke reports on Fractal:

Since our last update about Fractal we landed typing notifications, found out we actually weren't logging anything, recovered the ability to log, and restored spellcheck support.
We are also now tagging uploaded audio files as such and adding thumbnails to image files, courtesy of our Outreachy intern, and we fixed a bunch of other things.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

tulir making crazy maubots this week:

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.

Check out instructions to get your own maubots setup here: https://github.com/maubot/maubot/wiki/Setup

🔗synapse-netcore-workers

Half-Shot:

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

Dandellion on matrix-wug:

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!

🔗weechat-matrix

Paul created a dockerfile to install weechat-matrix:

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

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.

🔗Still more!

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.

Celebrating the creation of a new homeserver instance at kde.org, Jonathan Riddell has written an article.

sortebill created #drums:matrix.org:

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

🔗They think it's all over...

It is now! If you'd like to have your project included in this post, come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org!

Hi all,

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.

As ever, you can get the new update here or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse. Note, Synapse is now available from PyPI, pick it up here. Also, check out our new Synapse installation guide page.

🔗Synapse 0.99.2 changelog

🔗Features

• Added an HAProxy example in the reverse proxy documentation. Contributed by Benoît S. (“Benpro”). (#4541)
• Add basic optional sentry integration. (#4632, #4694)
• Transfer bans on room upgrade. (#4642)
• Add configurable room list publishing rules. (#4647)
• Support .well-known delegation when issuing certificates through ACME. (#4652)
• Allow registration and login to be handled by a worker instance. (#4666, #4670, #4682)
• Reduce the overhead of creating outbound federation connections over TLS by caching the TLS client options. (#4674)
• Add prometheus metrics for number of outgoing EDUs, by type. (#4695)
• Return correct error code when inviting a remote user to a room whose homeserver does not support the room version. (#4721)
• Prevent showing rooms to other servers that were set to not federate. (#4746)

🔗Bugfixes

• Fix possible exception when paginating. (#4263)
• The dependency checker now correctly reports a version mismatch for optional dependencies, instead of reporting the dependency missing. (#4450)
• Set CORS headers on .well-known requests. (#4651)
• Fix kicking guest users on guest access revocation in worker mode. (#4667)
• Fix an issue in the database migration script where the e2e_room_keys.is_verified column wasn't considered as a boolean. (#4680)
• Fix TaskStopped exceptions in logs when outbound requests time out. (#4690)
• Fix ACME config for python 2. (#4717)
• Fix paginating over federation persisting incorrect state. (#4718)

🔗Internal Changes

• Run black to reformat user directory code. (#4635)
• Reduce number of exceptions we log. (#4643, #4668)
• Introduce upsert batching functionality in the database layer. (#4644)
• Fix various spelling mistakes. (#4657)
• Cleanup request exception logging. (#4669, #4737, #4738)
• Improve replication performance by reducing cache invalidation traffic. (#4671, #4715, #4748)
• Test against Postgres 9.5 as well as 9.4. (#4676)
• Run unit tests against python 3.7. (#4677)
• Attempt to clarify installation instructions/config. (#4681)
• Clean up gitignores. (#4688)
• Minor tweaks to acme docs. (#4689)
• Improve the logging in the pusher process. (#4691)
• Better checks on newsfragments. (#4698, #4750)
• Avoid some redundant work when processing read receipts. (#4706)
• Run push_receipts_to_remotes as background job. (#4707)
• Add prometheus metrics for number of badge update pushes. (#4709)
• Reduce pusher logging on startup (#4716)
• Don't log exceptions when failing to fetch remote server keys. (#4722)
• Correctly proxy exception in frontend_proxy worker. (#4723)
• Add database version to phonehome stats. (#4753)

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

kitsune:

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.

libQMatrixClient 0.5 is out - with members lazy-loading, room versions and upgrades and much more: https://github.com/QMatrixClient/libqmatrixclient/releases/tag/0.5.0

Which is, err, pretty amazing actually. As far as I know this is the only independent SDK supporting lazy loading and room upgrades. Congratulations.

🔗weechat-matrix

Poljar has been hard at work on weechat-matrix

Matthew reports:-

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!

🔗Synapse

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.

🔗matrix-puppet-bridge

tom:

matrix-puppet-bridge v1.17.0 has been released! This release:

• Handles m.notice messages sent from Matrix as text, instead of ignoring them (thanks go to https://matrix.to/#/@cdknight1:matrix.org !)
• 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.

🔗Riot iOS

• Support .well-known data from login response
• Create right permalinks for room v3
• Fix builder to Xcode 10.1 in order to still be able to release
• Update swift version. Add swiftLint

🔗matrix-media-repo

TravisR reports that:

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.

🔗Scylla

It's been a little while since we saw any news about Scylla, a web-based client written in Elm. VaNilLa said:

Scylla, the Elm-based Matrix client, has received a few improvements. Included in this update:

• Files that are uploaded now keep their original name (as opposed to being called File)
• Sent messages are displayed right away, instead of when they are delivered to the server
• Usernames are only shown once per several consecutive messages, to avoid clutter Some CSS changes have been made to keep the interface looking clean

Almost forgot! You can find Scylla's source code here and a live instance here!

🔗Riot Android

• 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).

🔗RiotX (Android)

• Timeline:
  • HTML formatting
  • Implementation of pills (need optimization)
• Many Github issues have been created to track parity with the Riot Android

🔗Riotic: new fork with updates

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.

You can download riotic from https://github.com/aaronraimist/riotic/releases/tag/v1.1.

 

🔗synapse-netcore-workers

Half-Shot has been working on synapse-netcore-workers:

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.

But wait, there's more! Half-Shot continues with

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

🔗Mautrix Whatsapp

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.

🔗Ruby SDK

Ananace reports that:

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.

🔗Koma

yuforia reports that:

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.

🔗TChap

Willem reports that:

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.

🔗Debian

andrewsh reports that:

Unless things get seriously on fire in the coming months, Debian buster will have Synapse 0.99.2 plus something newer in backports

🔗Matrix WUG

Dandellion's Wug 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

🔗New Rooms

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.

This guide will live with the documentation at https://matrix.org/docs/guides/whatsapp-bridging-mautrix-whatsapp, but you can find the text below.

---

Matrix is:

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.

Next, install mautrix-whatsapp by following the instructions at mautrix-whatsapp/wiki.

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:

matrix_mautrix_whatsapp_enabled: true

... and re-running the setup:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-all

Either way, you will soon have a functioning Matrix Synapse homeserver and mautrix-whatsapp installed with it. Next, we will set up an Android VM.

🔗Set up an Android VM

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.

🔗Install WhatsApp and sign-in

Launch the Virtual Device, the open the Play Store and sign in. Now use the Play Store to install WhatsApp on the Virtual Device.

You will be asked to verify your phone number, use your number on another device to complete this step.

🔗Setup mautrix-whatsapp bridge

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.

🔗Demo!

🔗Matrix Live S03E15 - Push To Talk and XMPP Gatewaying!

(sorry that the audio from Nad & Half-Shot went missing from the recording... :( )

🔗nheko_reborn roadmap

red_sky has continued to work on nheko, and shared a general roadmap in #nheko-reborn:matrix.org:

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.

🔗libQMatrixClient project, Quaternion

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?

🔗Matrix Ruby SDK

Ananace has continued his work on Ruby Matrix SDK:

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

🔗synapse-netcore-workers

A project rarely seen has received a lot of attention this week!

Half-Shot has been working on federation workers:

I've been working on a federation worker for synapse written in .NET to improve outgoing federation performance. It's still pretty barebones, but progress can be followed at https://github.com/turt2live/synapse-netcore-workers/pull/5

TravisR too has been working on the project:

I'm also working on my own netcore workers project by setting up an appservice sender. It's also very barebones (doesn't even send a transaction), but is being tracked here: https://github.com/turt2live/synapse-netcore-workers/pull/6
Also, if you'd like to follow along with the project from the comfort of Matrix, head on over to #synapse-netcore-workers:t2bot.io

🔗koma project

yuforia is working on koma:

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

🔗mxisd v1.3.1 released

Max:

mxisd v1.3.1 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!

🔗Construct progresses toward Matrix 1.0 Spec

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!

🔗uMatriks planning

mariogrip announced his plans for going ahead with uMatriks:

• Clean up c++ code
• 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)
• Slowly start moving to QQC2
• Implement reply
• Implement sending of media

🔗Riot Android

• Finalising version and delivery of Riot 0.8.23 on the Play Store.
• RiotX: testing library to render events in the timeline.

🔗Debian packaging

andrewsh:

Since Debian has entered soft freeze, updates to Synapse have been slow lately, but nevertheless we've got 0.99.1.1 in

🔗matrix-archive-keyring

Linda is continuing to prepare matrix-archive-keyring:

matrix-archive-keyring (from last week's TWIM) is ready to be uploaded to Debian. Attempting to get it uploaded to unstable right now as I speak.

🔗Riot breadcrumbs

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.

🔗mautrix-whatsapp

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?

🔗Around the Web

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

joenas wrote an article on configuring Synapse with Traefik: Matrix homeserver (Synapse v0.99.1.1) with Traefik

🔗That's it

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!

Hi all,

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.

There's also a dedicated Riot/Web install up at https://webchat.kde.org, and instructions on connecting via other Matrix clients up at https://community.kde.org/Matrix.

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 :)

• the Matrix Core Team

🔗Matrix Live, Synapse roadmap and Synapse 0.99.1.1

As you may have seen, Matrix Live this week features Neil and Matthew discussing the newly announced backend roadmap.

We also have Synapse v0.99.1.1 available, as the race to Synapse v1.0 gets closer and closer and closer!

Brendan also said, regarding low-bandwidth:

Some of the week has been spent finalising the components used in the low-bandwidth demo we did at FOSDEM. This required polishing some internal developments, which are now almost ready to be published to the wide world! This should happen in the next few days so stay tuned :)

🔗Riot 1.0.0, and hotfix 1.0.1

If you're following Matrix much at all, you will surely have seen it by now: Riot, the most popular client, has announced the v1.0 milestone. I won't reiterate the features and improvements here, but do check out the blog post, or just head over to https://riot.im/app and see for yourself!

Particularly exciting is the new encryption verification process, involving sharing a list of emojis out-of-band:

thank you @matrixdotorg @RiotChat - with the new update the office is full of people yelling names of emoji at each other

— Russell Currey (@russelldotcc) February 15, 2019

🔗MSCs update provided by MSCBot

🔗In Progress MSCs

• MSC 1888: Proposal to send EDUs to appservices
• MSC 1884: Proposal to replace slashes in event IDs

Work has continued on trying to resolve MSC1194.

🔗Riot iOS

• Last iteration on key backup UX
• Finish reskin
• Support Room v3 events ids
• Key import (manual or backup restore) has been optimised. It is now 30x > quicker
• An RC candidate will be available over the weekend

Scheduling, holidaying and illness means no update from Riot Android this week.

🔗Artificial Intelligence Chat Bot tutorial

I like this short series on creating a Chat Bot using textgenrnn:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-wLKnB6JvU for getting started with the library,
• and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRVVn-8CzXE to see the Matrix integration!

🔗New(ish!) Python SDK: matrix-nio

Since we haven't featured their work here at all I wanted to give some space to poljar. They've been working on a Weechat-Matrix protocol script, but as part of this project they created a new Matrix client library, matrix-nio, "designed according to sans I/O principles".

As if this wasn't enough! python-olm is a library providing Python bindings for Olm (enabling E2E encryption for Matrix.)

🔗FluffyChat v11 preview

FluffyChat is a pure QML Matrix client, designed to be used on smartphones running Ubuntu Touch. Krille, the author is working on:

boring refactoring stuff :-( at the moment to prepare everything for e2e encryption work

. . .which seems to me not boring at all - we can expect, in the next few months, another Matrix Client with E2EE support, and on mobile!

In my role as editor of this particular blog post, I enjoy certain luxuries that others might envy. For example, today, I tried a new preview build of FluffyChat. This I installed on my barely-repaired OnePlus One running Ubuntu Touch 16.04.

🔗Fractal

Chris from Fractal:

Over the past week, Fractal has adapted its main view and room settings views for mobile phones, and implemented long-press for right-clicks on messages for touch devices. It's also received some changes in the backend to use the serde_derive Rust crate instead of parsing JSON by hand.

🔗matrix-tag-manager

To celebrate tags being available again in riot-web, TravisR has created matrix-tag-manager:

If you're a power user which uses room tagging to organize your rooms, I've made a web UI for you: https://tags.t2bot.io/

🔗mxisd v1.3.0 released

Max:

mxisd v1.3.0 is out! This release brings the massive performance improvements, bug fixes and enhancements. This release also marks the two years anniversary of the project. Thank you to all our users for your undying support!

🔗EdimCoder new room

krixano reports that:

I made a room for my ed-inspired modern line editor called EdimCoder. Come check it out at #edimcoder:amorgan.xyz!

🔗avecho

yuforia reports that:

a new bot avecho is created using the koma-library. It's a simple bot that echos text messages prefixed with avecho, but renders it into an image and include the sender's avatar.

🔗Half-Shot's .NET SDK

Half-Shot reports that:

More improvements to the .NET sdk, to make it stable in this 0.4.0 world. To that end, I've written a room archiver app (for moving "old" rooms into a archive tag without removing them) and a simple caching project for bridges https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-cache. Progress as always can be followed in #dotnet:half-shot.uk

🔗mautrix-telegram now at 0.5.0rc2

tulir has been working on the venerable Matrix<->Telegram bridge, mautrix-telegram:

mautrix-telegram got a bunch of changes and a release candidate.\nMain changes this week:

• Added Matrix room upgrade handling
• Fixed bugs
• Added new admin commands and config options
• Added new bugs to fix later
• Stopped using the ORM part of SQLAlchemy

Get release notes for v0.5.0-rc1 and v0.5.0-rc2.

🔗QMatrixClient project: libQMatrixClient and Quaternion

kitsune finds time to work on QMatrixClient!

QMatrixClient project has been busy merging PRs from contributors (close to tray and middle-click in room list and user list, to mention a couple) and streamlining the translation process before the upcoming releases of libQMatrixClient 0.5 and Quaternion 0.0.9.4. At the same time the feature branch to support room versions and room upgrades is at an advanced stage; expect the features to land in master next week.

🔗matrix-archive-keyring

Linda has been working on new Debian package called matrix-archive-keyring:

I've paused porting Synapse to OpenBSD this week, while I attempt to both fix and revert some security issues caused by sudo apt-key add for Matrix.org and Riot.im packages for Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution users.
matrix-org/synapse PR #4609 was my first attempt to fix the problem, however I fell short this time in ease-of-use and my implementation had other issues. (Read: The repo-key.asc downloaded from Matrix.org Debian repository should go to /usr/share/keyrings, and must not be added by apt-key add or added to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d directly. I attempted the latter with my first PR; but that would've allowed the Matrix.org signing key to also be used to verify packages from Debian's main repositories. Yikes!)
As my second attempt, I'm now creating a new Debian package called matrix-archive-keyring. There's multiple things this package intends to do:

• A post-install script to remove any previously added Matrix.org package signing keys from /etc/apt/trusted.gpg. (This is the file apt-key add most commonly uses, and the most commonly found bad advice on the Internet.)
• Convert repo-key.asc to a de-armorized .gpg format, understood better by apt(8). (Essentially, gpg --dearmor.)
• Install the converted .gpg key to /usr/share/keyrings.
• Make sure apt(8) uses the newly added key for Matrix.org repository only?
• Deliver any updates to repo-key.asc directly to you via apt upgrade. Your operating system might then also do it automatically for you if unattended-upgrades(8) is installed on your system. ?
• Make sure everything goes away when this keyring package is uninstalled. No more sudo sh -c 'apt-key del C35EB17E1EAE708E6603A9B3AD0592FE47F0DF61; rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrix-org.list to get rid of the repository.

I have one more interesting enhancement to disclose.
We can ask you with debconf if you want to install deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian $(lsb_release -cs) main to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrix-org.list while you're installing the new keyring with apt install matrix-archive-keyring.
You'll most likely notice the difference in install instructions, as a result of this package. Before and after:

# Before
sudo apt install -y lsb-release curl apt-transport-https
echo "deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian `lsb_release -cs` main" |
    sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrix-org.list
curl "https://matrix.org/packages/debian/repo-key.asc" |
    sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt update
sudo apt install matrix-synapse-py3

# After
sudo apt install matrix-archive-keyring
sudo sh -c 'apt update && apt install matrix-synapse-py3

If you are a Debian or Ubuntu user and Synapse homeserver operator using Matrix.org repositories, I'll be towncrying when this package becomes available as much as I can. All you should need to do then is apt install matrix-archive-keyring and it should patch the security holes in your operating system if you've formerly installed packages from Matrix.org or Riot.im! (The command may change a bit, because next Debian operating system release "Buster" has entered soft-freeze just today (2019-02-12) and not accepting new packages into that release.)
PS: I'm at #debian-matrix:matrix.org, please come talk to us if Debian packaging interests you!

For the eager early testers not afraid of building from source, matrix-archive-keyring version 2015.12.09+debian0.10 is available for early testing (attached).

# Something like this!
sudo apt install devscripts
tar -xfvJ matrix-archive-keyring_2015.12.09+debian0.10.tar.xz
cd matrix-archive-keyring_2015.12.09+debian0.10
debuild -us -uc
sudo dpkg -i dpkg -i ../matrix-archive-keyring_2015.12.09+debian0.10_all

Please follow Debian Bug#922155 for updates. Debian binary packages will be available later sometime this/next week from Debian's unstable distribution (contrib), if all goes well and there are no remaining Debian policy violations or serious bugs.

See also:

• vector-im/riot-web issue #6470: [website] change instructions for adding .deb repository key
• DebianRepository/UseThirdParty at Debian Wiki",

🔗Gridepo

Max again:

Gridepo, as a Matrix Homeserver, is gaining basic support for Matrix Client API. We have basic login, room creation, message sending and sync working! A little screen recording of the progress can be viewed here for live action with Riot. As a reminder, Gridepo is a clean rewrite of mxhsd.

This is not usable yet outside of a dev environment but we should have a first usable version with federation in a couple of weeks!

🔗Mention Bots page

We have a new location for listing bots: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bots, message benpa with any you think should be included!

🔗That's all I know

That's all we have for now, but come join us in #twim:matrix.org to share your project and share the fun, and I'll see you back here next week.

Good people,

2019 is a big year for Matrix, in the next month we will have shipped:

• Matrix spec 1.0 (including the first stable release of the Server to Server Spec)
• Synapse 1.0
• Riot 1.0

This is huge in itself, but is really only the beginning, and now we want to grow the ecosystem as quickly as possible. This means landing a mix of new features, enhancing existing ones, some big performance improvements as well as generally making life easier for our regular users, homeserver admins and community developers.

Today we are sharing the Matrix core team's backend roadmap. The idea is that this will make it easier for anyone to understand where the project is going, what we consider to be important, and why.

To see the roadmap in its full glory, take a look here.

🔗What is a roadmap and why is it valuable?

A roadmap is a set of high level projects that the team intend to work on and a rough sense of the relative priority. It is essential to focus on specific goals, which inevitably means consciously not working on other initiatives.

Our roadmap is not a delivery plan - there are explicitly no dates. The reason for this is that we know that other projects will emerge, developers will be needed to support other urgent initiatives, matrix.org use continues to grow exponentially and will require performance tweaking.

So simply, based on what we know now, this is the order we will work on our projects.

🔗Why are we sharing it?

We already share our day to day todo list, and of course our commit history, but it can be difficult for a casual observer to see the bigger picture from such granular data. The purpose of sharing is that we want anyone from the community to understand where our priorities lie.

We are often asked ‘Why are you not working on X, it is really important' where the answer is often ‘We agree that X is really important, but A, B and C are more important and must come first'.

The point of sharing the roadmap is to make that priority trade off more transparent and consumable.

🔗How did we build it?

The core contributors to Synapse and Dendrite are 6 people, of 5 nationalities spread across 3 locations. After shipping the r0 release of the Server to Server spec last month we took some time to step back and have a think about what to do after Synapse 1.0 lands. This meant getting everyone in one place to talk it through.

We also had Ben (benpa) contribute from a community perspective and took input from speaking to so many of you at FOSDEM.

In the end we filled a wall with post-its, each post-it representing a sizeable project. The position of the post-it was significant in that the vertical axis being a sense of how valuable we thought the task would be, and the horizontal axis being a rough guess on how complex we considered it to be.

We found this sort of grid approach to be really helpful in determining relative priority.

After many hours and plenty of blood, sweat and tears we ended up with something we could live with and wrote it up in the shared board.

🔗And this is written in blood right?

Not at all (it's written in board marker). This is simply a way to express our plan of action and we are likely to make changes to it dynamically. However, this means that at any given moment, if someone wants to know what we are working on then the roadmap is the place to go.

🔗But wait I want to know more!

Here is a video of myself and Matthew to talk you through the projects

🔗Interesting, but I have questions ...

Any feedback gratefully received, come and ask questions in #synapse or #dendrite or feel free to ping me direct at @neilj:matrix.org

Hey, everyone, today is the day we release Synapse 0.99.1.1

This release contains improved ACME support to make it even easier to get going with TLS certs on your federation end points, plus some tweaks to make the room version upgrade path easier.

Just as a reminder that the 0.99.x series is precursor for our 1.0 release (which will land in early March, exact date to be confirmed) - it is really important that all server admins are aware that self signed certificates on the Server to Server API will no longer be accepted by >= Synapse 1.0. If you have not already done so, now is the time to configure your certificate. For more info see our FAQ and if you get stuck come and join us in #Synapse.

As ever, you can get the new update here or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse. Note, Synapse is now available from PyPI, pick it up here. Also, check out our new Synapse installation guide page.

🔗Synapse 0.99.1.1 Changelog

🔗Bugfixes

• Fix "TypeError: '>' not supported" when starting without an existing certificate. Fix a bug where an existing certificate would be reprovisoned every day. (#4648)

🔗Synapse 0.99.1 Changelog

🔗Features

• Include m.room.encryption on invites by default (#3902)
• Federation OpenID listener resource can now be activated even if federation is disabled (#4420)
• Synapse's ACME support will now correctly reprovision a certificate that approaches its expiry while Synapse is running. (#4522)
• Add ability to update backup versions (#4580)
• Allow the "unavailable" presence status for /sync. This change makes Synapse compliant with r0.4.0 of the Client-Server specification. (#4592)
• There is no longer any need to specify no_tls: it is inferred from the absence of TLS listeners (#4613, #4615, #4617, #4636)
• The default configuration no longer requires TLS certificates. (#4614)

🔗Bugfixes

• Copy over room federation ability on room upgrade. (#4530)
• Fix noisy "twisted.internet.task.TaskStopped" errors in logs (#4546)
• Synapse is now tolerant of the tls_fingerprints option being None or not specified. (#4589)
• Fix 'no unique or exclusion constraint' error (#4591)
• Transfer Server ACLs on room upgrade. (#4608)
• Fix failure to start when not TLS certificate was given even if TLS was disabled. (#4618)
• Fix self-signed cert notice from generate-config. (#4625)
• Fix performance of user_ips table deduplication background update (#4626, #4627)

🔗Internal Changes

• Change the user directory state query to use a filtered call to the db instead of a generic one. (#4462)
• Reject federation transactions if they include more than 50 PDUs or 100 EDUs. (#4513)
• Reduce duplication of synapse.app code. (#4567)
• Fix docker upload job to push -py2 images. (#4576)
• Add port configuration information to ACME instructions. (#4578)
• Update MSC1711 FAQ to clarify .well-known usage (#4584)
• Clean up default listener configuration (#4586)
• Clarifications for reverse proxy docs (#4607)
• Move ClientTLSOptionsFactory init out of refresh_certificates (#4611)
• Fail cleanly if listener config lacks a 'port' (#4616)
• Remove redundant entries from docker config (#4619)
• README updates (#4621)