Hi all,

We're delighted to announce that our friends at Status have made a major strategic investment ($5M) in New Vector: the company which currently employs most of the Matrix.org core team.  This means that we now have the financial backing to let us focus entirely on improving the Matrix ecosystem and getting the protocol out of beta… and beyond!!

First up - massive, massive thanks to everyone who has supported us over the last 6 months since our funding situation changed: as of the end of 2017 we had enough Patreon / Liberapay / IBAN / BTC / ETH donations and sponsorship (for Matrix.org) and enough paid consulting work (for New Vector) that we've been able to keep almost the whole core team working on Matrix as their day job.  Simply: the core Matrix team could not have continued in its current form without the support of the community - so we will be forever indebted to everyone who has supported us: especially all our donating supporters on Patreon/Liberapay/etc, our customers at New Vector, and our big $ sponsors, including UpCloud.com (who provide incredible hosting for Matrix.org), PrivateInternetAccess.com, INBlockchain.com, OmiseGO and Tendermint.

The investment from Status that we're announcing today is a massive step change as it gives us the resources to grow the team and to focus fully on Matrix's key problem areas without distractions (whilst still supporting paid New Vector work). Please note that donations are still very appreciated however: we are in the process of setting up the Matrix.org Foundation (at last!) as the non-profit target for all future donations, such that Matrix itself has a financial means to support pure Matrix work independently of any other companies (including New Vector).

Many folks will be familiar with Status already as one of the leading projects in the Ethereum ecosystem: building a beautiful usability-focused browser for decentralised apps (DApps) which run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine - as well as providing cryptocurrency payments and chat functionality (via the Whisper protocol).  It effectively lets users access Ethereum as a usable meaningful operating system - a bit like how Riot attempts to be a flagship ‘browser' for the Matrix ecosystem.  The reason Status is investing in Matrix is primarily to accelerate decentralisation technology and open protocols in general - and also because there are some pretty obvious advantages to the collaboration, potentially including:

• Bridging between Matrix and Whisper (Ethereum's own real-time communication protocol) - exposing all of the Matrix ecosystem into Ethereum and vice versa
• Bundling up Status DApps as Matrix Widgets
• Exposing Matrix Widgets into Status
• Supporting Olm/Megolm such that it could be used for E2E encryption in Status
• Collaboration on the decentralised reputation systems needed to combat abuse in both Matrix & Ethereum
• Utilize the Status Network token within Riot.im by enabling crypto assets.
• ...and more!

We've spent a lot of time working with Status over the last few months whilst arranging this partnership, and we've been really impressed by Jarrad and Carl and the team (they even have their own golang Double Ratchet Implementation!).  It's fair to say that Status are very much aligned with Matrix's vision, and the projects and can help each other a lot.

It's also worth noting that Status and Matrix are really quite complementary: Whisper (as used by Status) is entirely p2p and focuses on protecting metadata and is tightly coupled to Ethereum, whereas Matrix is standalone and more feature rich but currently lacks metadata protection.  We both have fledgling app ecosystems; Matrix through Widgets and Status through Ethereum DApps. That said, Matrix and Status are going to continue on their own paths, and Matrix will of course remain controlled by Matrix.org - but we are looking forward to learning more about each other's tech and driving decentralisation forward in general!

Meanwhile, on the core Matrix side, the investment lets us focus immediately on the following priorities:

• Improving Riot's usability. As of today we are urgently hiring for a Lead Designer to join the team fulltime to revamp and address Riot's usability issues, as this is one of the single biggest things getting in the way of Matrix uptake today.  Hit up [email protected] if you're interested!
• At the same time, we're excited to ramp up our investment in Riot's performance and overall polish (as well as achieving feature parity with Slack/Discord and friends) - that means we're looking for React, Android & iOS folks to join the core team full-time asap to take the apps to the next level.  Again, [email protected] if this sounds like you!

• Getting End-to-end Encryption out of beta. We know what we need to do to push E2E out of beta (incremental key backup; cross-signing devices; improved device verification) - Status' investment means we can build the team to get it done! Decentralised end-to-end encryption is not for the faint-hearted, but if you're up for the challenge please get in touch at [email protected].

• Finishing Dendrite. Dendrite (our next-gen golang homeserver implementation) is a hugely ambitious project and right now the only folks working on it are Rich and Erik… who also happen to be supporting Synapse too.  The good news is that the community has been helping considerably with Dendrite, but it would be even better if we had more people supported to work on it full time.  If you love Go, and you love massively scalable decentralised systems, please hit up [email protected]!

• Supporting Synapse.There is massive scope for performance improvements to Synapse, and there are thousands of deployments out there today, so we really want to improve support for Synapse.  If you love Python and Twisted, and interesting performance/profiling and efficiency work, please hit up [email protected] too!

• Maintaining the Spec. If Matrix is anything it is the spec, and maintenance of the spec is key to the project's success. In 2018 we intend to invest heavily in its maintenance and address outstanding API proposals, documenting APIs, not to mention updating the general technical documentation (guides, FAQ etc) on Matrix.org in general.  If you are a developer who loves spec work, we need you over at [email protected] immediately! :)

Beyond these immediate priorities, we have a long feature roadmap lined up too (highest priority first): Reactions, Message Editing, improved Widgets (e.g. Sticker Packs), Threading, Decentralised Accounts, Decentralised Identity, Decentralised Reputation, Peer-to-peer Matrix and more.  However, right now our focus has to be on improving the quality and stability of what we have today and getting it out of beta before we open yet more battlefronts.  In other words: we're not adding more features (modulo emergencies) until the current features are polished!

So: exciting times ahead!  Never before has Matrix had the resources to fully realise its potential, and we'd like to say enormous thanks to Carl, Jarrad, Yessin and Nabil at Status for their patience and support while sorting out the investment.  We'd also like to say thanks to everyone else who offered us investment: in the end we had several viable offers on the table - and we owe sincere thanks to those who invested the time and faith to make an offer which we've ended up turning down.

For now, however, it's back to work: making Riot slicker than Slack; making Synapse go faster and use less RAM; making Dendrite federate; making E2E encryption transparent and indestructible; making sure that it's possible to implement Matrix purely by referring to the Spec.

2018 is going to be an interesting year indeed :)  Thank you all for supporting Matrix - and thanks, once again, to Status for helping to take us to the next level.

Matthew, Amandine & the whole team.

Update 1: VentureBeat is covering the news over at https://venturebeat.com/2018/01/29/status-invests-5-million-in-matrix-to-create-a-blockchain-messaging-superpower/

Update 2: IBTimes is also covering it at http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/matrix-status-ico-gains-support-non-blockchain-decentralisation-technology-1656183!

...and you can see Status's side of the story over at https://blog.status.im/status-invests-5m-in-riot-im-4e3026a8bd50!

Hi folks,

Synapse 0.26 is here (with no changes since RC1 which we released just before Christmas).  It's a general maintenance release, albeit with a few new features but mainly lots of bugfixes and general refinements.  Enjoy!

As always, you can get it from https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases/tag/v0.26.0.

Changes in synapse v0.26.0 (2018-01-05)

No changes since v0.26.0-rc1

Changes in synapse v0.26.0-rc1 (2017-12-13)

Features:

• Add ability for ASes to publicise groups for their users (PR #2686)
• Add all local users to the user_directory and optionally search them (PR #2723)
• Add support for custom login types for validating users (PR #2729)

Changes:

• Update example Prometheus config to new format (PR #2648) Thanks to @krombel!
• Rename redact_content option to include_content in Push API (PR #2650)
• Declare support for r0.3.0 (PR #2677)
• Improve upserts (PR #2684, #2688, #2689, #2713)
• Improve documentation of workers (PR #2700)
• Improve tracebacks on exceptions (PR #2705)
• Allow guest access to group APIs for reading (PR #2715)
• Support for posting content in federation_client script (PR #2716)
• Delete devices and pushers on logouts etc (PR #2722)

Bug fixes:

• Fix database port script (PR #2673)
• Fix internal server error on login with ldap_auth_provider (PR #2678) Thanks to @jkolo!
• Fix error on sqlite 3.7 (PR #2697)
• Fix OPTIONS on preview_url (PR #2707)
• Fix error handling on dns lookup (PR #2711)
• Fix wrong avatars when inviting multiple users when creating room (PR #2717)
• Fix 500 when joining matrix-dev (PR #2719)

Hi folks,

Since we began Matrix it's been a sort of tradition to do a huge update on Christmas Eve to reflect on the past year and tease the future - you can check out the 2016 edition or the 2015 edition and a sort of proto-update for 2014 too if you're feeling nostalgic.  This year I'm going to try to keep it short though, as I'm hoping to write a Very Big Update related to long-term-funding progress in the relatively near future.

2017 has been a weird year for us: progress in the core team has been relatively badly impacted by the mission to secure long-term funding, with myself (Matthew) & Amandine spending the vast majority of our time handling the meta-problem of keeping the core team secure rather than actually working on the project itself.  Meanwhile we've lost a few of the original team during the disruption, which has particularly impacted Spec, E2E and Dendrite progress (such are the risks of running a very lean team in the first place!).  However, against the odds, we have (hopefully) prevailed - and this is almost entirely due to the massive support we've seen through donations via Patreon, Liberapay, Ethereum, Bitcoin and PayPal, and some much-appreciated paid consulting work.

Simply put, without the donation support we would have not been able to pay the core team over the last 3 months, and we would not be able to pay for the legal costs of setting up the team as an independent company, and we would be completely screwed for securing large-scale long-term funding if we couldn't point to the community's support as evidence that Matrix is worthy of funding.  So: we sincerely owe our thanks to those who heeded the call to arms and are supporting us.  We've also been pretty lucky in benefiting from the skyrocketing value of Ethereum and Bitcoin donations.  And even if/when long-term funding is secured for New Vector (the company we formed in July to hire the core team), donations will continue to be vital to support the Matrix.org Foundation itself as an independent non-profit entity - as it's obviously not in Matrix.org's interests to be entirely financially dependent on New Vector.  Hopefully this whole episode will end up being a bit like a Save Star Trek scenario - where something fun and amazing almost gets almost wiped out when it's only a few years old due to corporate factors... only for the community to band together to save it, and then for it to go from strength to strength for the next 50 years or more! :D

That said, we've made some major progress this year anyway: the addition of Widgets to Matrix; the addition of Communities (aka Groups) and Flair; major improvements to E2E encryption (even though it's not out of beta yet); lots of progress on Dendrite (the minimum-viable phase 1 is now about 75% complete); switching everything over to Jitsi for group video conferencing; rewriting onboarding for Riot/Web; Antiscam/spam support for cryptocommunities; the whole VR proof-of-concept of Matrix+WebVR+WebRTC video and voip calling; Version 0.3 of the Matrix spec; and a whole lot more which I'm probably forgetting right now.  And meanwhile the community has been more active than ever, with major new clients like Nheko hitting the scene with a large and loyal community of open source contributors (over the last few weeks I've literally seen more nheko PRs fly past than Riot ones!) - and we've also been incredibly glad of community contributions towards Dendrite.  Dendrite is already way ahead of Synapse in terms of % community contributed code - we have hope that it will end up being a model FOSS project :)

So what lies ahead?  It's hard to predict the level of progress we're going to make in the core team, as it really depends on long-term funding.  Whatever happens, one of our top priorities is to improve our governance so that everyone can better contribute in places that have historically been more blocked on the core team (i.e. the spec; synapse)... whilst still maintaining coherency across the project.  Ideally we'll end up with more folks pushing Matrix forwards from both the wider world and the core team however, and right now the main priorities are:

• Phase 2 of Communities: letting users filter their current view of Matrix to rooms associated with a given subset of communities (if desired), for Slack/Discord-style semantics
• Fixing the remaining end-to-end encryption failures (although the majority of them have now been solved)
• Finalising proper UI/UX for end-to-end encryption (at last), including the option to transparently back up your room keys if desired.
• Dendrite Phase 1
• Performance in Riot (on all platforms)
• Editable messages
• Reactions
• Making widgets much more useful
• Paid integrations and hosting options to help avoid further funding nightmares.

Looking at the bigger picture, what we'd really love for 2018 would be to finally get to a 1.0 release of the Matrix Spec (i.e. catching up on our massive backlog of merging unstable spec drafts & proposals into the spec) - and for Dendrite to start to replace Synapse as the reference home server from Matrix.org and become really ubiquitous, and for E2E encryption be turned on by default in private rooms.  Beyond the above list, we don't really have any other features urgently planned (threading, for instance, is on hold until we have the rest of the above sorted) - but we believe that if we stabilise everything we have today (plus that list), then there is no reason for Matrix to not fulfil its full potential as a true global open decentralised communications standard.  And then it's on to threading, P2P matrix, decentralised reputation and all that good stuff!

It's going to be a crazy year ahead, either way: so thank you, once again, for supporting Matrix - whether that's financially, or by contributing code, or running a server, or just using the protocol as a user.  We literally wouldn't be here without you!! :)

Matthew, Amandine & the whole core team.

We'd like to share a guest post from Dmitriy Volkov (who's been using Matrix almost since day 1!) - announcing the Goto::Hack event at the Tor Onionspace in Berlin in January.  The Onionspace will be on fire as folks attack the New Year by tackling the critical problem of internet decentralisation. A week long brainstorm and hack feels like the right way to go after the Christmas break! GNUnet, Tor, Matrix, pick your topic, or mix them all, and join the gang!  Hopefully we'll have someone there from the Matrix core team too (although it depends on funding and timings).

-- Amandine

We'd like to invite you to discuss and hack all things decentralized internet: from conceptual issues like identity and foundational tech like network stack to most practical questions, e.g. "What do I advise people at Cryptoparty in lieu of WhatsApp?" or "How do I make a GNUnet app?".

Broadly, we'll do networks, distributed systems, infosec and telecom - with GNUnet / secushare and Matrix developers, find out more here.

Time : 02-09 Jan 2018 Space : Onionspace, Gottschedstraße 4, Aufgang 4, 13357 Berlin

It's well known Big Brother has been listening to our phone calls, reading texts and partnering with companies like Amazon or Google for a while now; more and more countries start censoring Internet - it's not just China. Most "secure" communications solutions like Threema or Telegram suffer conceptual issues, like being unsecure-by-default or controlled by single commercial entity. Decentralized systems - the proposed technical part of the solution - bring forth their own challenges: how do we conveniently identify an entity (considering revocation and squatting), and why do blockchains as innovative as Bitcoin and Ethereum churn through gigawatts of energy while handling miserable tens of transactions per second? What can serve as practical, scalable infrastructure for a decentralized network alternative to current Internet: on physical and channel levels, in terms of routing, etc.? How do we forge convenient XMPP, free Signal, a WhatsApp that can be both used universally and trusted?

How do we make the Internet less centralized and what can be done to make existing distributed technologies more popular? Why is Tor not enough and how long are we going to continue communicating in plaintext? How do we cook identity, and can we better consensus?

During the event we will discuss, hack, code, debug and develop - both systems (GNUnet, Tor, Matrix, etc.) and applications based on them, fix UX and write docs. The goal is to make a measurable contribution to solving some of the described problems through the course of the week, meet in person with the people tackling the issues you care about and return home with the desire to continue hacking.

Please register at our website if you'd like to come - also, if you're not local, we are doing a group booking at a hostel and will be having some Berlin hacker community tours! (Use this if the first link didn't work for you - that's an IPNS issue and one thing in scope for the event.)

-- Dmitriy

Hi all,

Today is a crazy release day here - not only do we have Synapse 0.25, but we've also made a formal release of the Matrix Specification (CS API) for the first time in 16 months!

Matrix CS API 0.3

Talking first about the spec update: the workflow of the Matrix spec is that new experimental features get added to an /unstable API prefix, and then whenever we release the Matrix spec, these get moved over to being part of the /r0 prefix (or whatever version we happen to be on).  We've been very constrained on manpower to work on the spec over the last ~18 months, but we've been keeping it up-to-date on a best effort basis, with a bit of help from the wider community.   As such, this latest release does not contain all the latest APIs (and certainly not experimental ones like Groups/Communities which are still evolving), but it does release all of the unstable ones which we've managed to document and which are considered stable enough to become part of the 'r0' prefix.  Going forwards, we're hoping that the wider community will help us fill in the remaining gaps (i.e. propose PRs against the matrix-org/matrix-doc repository to formalise the various spec drafts flying around the place) - and we're also hoping (if/when funding crisis is abated) to locate full-time folk to work on the spec.

The full changelog for 0.3 of the spec is:

• Breaking changes:
  • Change the rule kind of .m.rule.contains_display_name from underride to override. This works with all known clients which support push rules, but any other clients implementing the push rules API should be aware of this change. This makes it simple to mute rooms correctly in the API (#373).
  • Remove /tokenrefresh from the API (#395).
  • Remove requirement that tokens used in token-based login be macaroons (#395).
• Changes to the API which will be backwards-compatible for clients:
  • Add filename parameter to POST /_matrix/media/r0/upload (#364).
  • Document CAS-based client login and the use of m.login.token in /login (#367).
  • Make origin_server_ts a mandatory field of room events (#379).
  • Add top-level account_data key to the responses to GET /sync and GET /initialSync (#380).
  • Add is_direct flag to POST /createRoom and invite member event. Add 'Direct Messaging' module (#389).
  • Add contains_url option to RoomEventFilter (#390).
  • Add filter optional query param to /messages (#390).
  • Add 'Send-to-Device messaging' module (#386).
  • Add 'Device management' module (#402).
  • Require that User-Interactive auth fallback pages call window.postMessage to notify apps of completion (#398).
  • Add pagination and filter support to /publicRooms. Change response to omit fields rather than return null. Add estimate of total number of rooms in list. (#388).
  • Allow guest accounts to use a number of endpoints which are required for end-to-end encryption. (#751).
  • Add key distribution APIs, for use with end-to-end encryption. (#894).
  • Add m.room.pinned_events state event for rooms. (#1007).
  • Add mention of ability to send Access Token via an Authorization Header.
  • New endpoints:
    • GET /joined_rooms (#999).
    • GET /rooms/{'{'}roomId{'}'}/joined_members  (#999).
    • GET /account/whoami (#1063).
    • GET /media/{'{'}version{'}'}/preview_url  (#1064).
• Spec clarifications:
  • Add endpoints and logic for invites and third-party invites to the federation spec and update the JSON of the request sent by the identity server upon 3PID binding (#997)
  • Fix "membership" property on third-party invite upgrade example (#995)
  • Fix response format and 404 example for room alias lookup (#960)
  • Fix examples of m.room.member event and room state change, and added a clarification on the membership event sent upon profile update (#950).
  • Spell out the way that state is handled by POST /createRoom (#362).
  • Clarify the fields which are applicable to different types of push rule (#365).
  • A number of clarifications to authentication (#371).
  • Correct references to user_id which should have been sender (#376).
  • Correct inconsistent specification of redacted_because fields and their values (#378).
  • Mark required fields in response objects as such (#394).
  • Make m.notice description a bit harder in its phrasing to try to dissuade the same issues that occurred with IRC (#750).
  • GET /user/{'{'}userId{'}'}/filter/{'{'}filterId{'}'}  requires authentication (#1003).
  • Add some clarifying notes on the behaviour of rooms with no m.room.power_levels event (#1026).
  • Clarify the relationship between username and user_id in the /register API (#1032).
  • Clarify rate limiting and security for content repository. (#1064).

...and you can read the spec itself of course over at https://matrix.org/docs/spec.  It's worth noting that we have slightly bent the rules by including three very minor 'breaking changes' in 0.3, but all for features which to our knowledge nobody is depending on in the wild.  Technically this should mean bumping the major version prefix (i.e. moving to r1), but given how minor and nonimpacting these are we're turning a blind eye this time.

Meanwhile, Synapse 0.25 is out!

This is a medium-sized release; the main thing being to support configurable room visibility within groups (so that whenever you add a room to a group, you're not forced into sharing their existence with the general public, but can choose to just tell group members about them).  There's also a bunch of useful bug fixes and some performance improvements, including lots of contributions from the community this release (thank you!).  Full release notes are:

Changes in synapse v0.25.0 (2017-11-15)

Bug fixes:

• Fix port script (PR #2673)

Changes in synapse v0.25.0-rc1 (2017-11-14)

Features:

• Add is_public to groups table to allow for private groups (PR #2582)
• Add a route for determining who you are (PR #2668) Thanks to @turt2live!
• Add more features to the password providers (PR #2608, #2610, #2620, #2622, #2623, #2624, #2626, #2628, #2629)
• Add a hook for custom rest endpoints (PR #2627)
• Add API to update group room visibility (PR #2651)

Changes:

• Ignore tags when generating URL preview descriptions (PR #2576) Thanks to @maximevaillancourt!
• Register some /unstable endpoints in /r0 as well (PR #2579) Thanks to @krombel!
• Support /keys/upload on /r0 as well as /unstable (PR #2585)
• Front-end proxy: pass through auth header (PR #2586)
• Allow ASes to deactivate their own users (PR #2589)
• Remove refresh tokens (PR #2613)
• Automatically set default displayname on register (PR #2617)
• Log login requests (PR #2618)
• Always return is_public in the /groups/:group_id/rooms API (PR #2630)
• Avoid no-op media deletes (PR #2637) Thanks to @spantaleev!
• Fix various embarrassing typos around user_directory and add some doc. (PR #2643)
• Return whether a user is an admin within a group (PR #2647)
• Namespace visibility options for groups (PR #2657)
• Downcase UserIDs on registration (PR #2662)
• Cache failures when fetching URL previews (PR #2669)

Bug fixes:

• Fix port script (PR #2577)
• Fix error when running synapse with no logfile (PR #2581)
• Fix UI auth when deleting devices (PR #2591)
• Fix typo when checking if user is invited to group (PR #2599)
• Fix the port script to drop NUL values in all tables (PR #2611)
• Fix appservices being backlogged and not receiving new events due to a bug in notify_interested_services (PR #2631) Thanks to @xyzz!
• Fix updating rooms avatar/display name when modified by admin (PR #2636) Thanks to @farialima!
• Fix bug in state group storage (PR #2649)
• Fix 500 on invalid utf-8 in request (PR #2663)

Finally...

If you haven't noticed already, Riot/Web 0.13 is out today, as is Riot/iOS 0.6.2 and Riot/Android 0.7.4.  These contain massive improvements across the board - particularly mainstream Communities support at last on Riot/Web; CallKit/PushKit on Riot/iOS thanks to Denis Morozov (GSoC 2017 student for Matrix) and Share Extension on iOS thanks to Aram Sargsyan (also GSoC 2017 student!); and End-to-end Key Sharing on Riot/Android and a full rewrite of the VoIP calling subsystem on Android.

Rather than going on about it here, though, there's a full write-up over on the Riot Blog.

And so there you go - new releases for eeeeeeeeveryone!  Enjoy! :)

--Matthew, Amandine & the team.

Hi folks,

Synapse 0.24 is out (currently at 0.24.1)! This is a pretty big release as it includes initial support for Groups, also known as Communities (UI for which is landing currently on Riot/Web and later Riot/Mobile). Groups let you associate together a set of users and rooms, letting you define a community - e.g. +matrix:matrix.org is the community of the core Matrix project itself (whose users are the core Matrix.org team, and whose public rooms are the rooms we officially manage/moderate as Matrix.org).  We'll yell more about Groups once the UI is ready for action in the near future, but the good news is that Synapse should be ready to go (although the API is still fairly experimental and very much evolving).

Other stuff worth calling out in this release includes: massive performance improvements on receiving federation traffic (we now process federation traffic for different rooms in parallel); fixing a major cause of performance issues (caused when processing spurious events for rooms you've actually left); modularising and improving the the spamchecker; @room notification support; backup media repository support; and finally the ability to autojoin new users to a set of rooms on the server!

You can get the latest release from Github as usual; have fun - and thanks for flying Matrix :)

Changes in synapse v0.24.1 (2017-10-24)

Bug fixes:

• Fix updating group profiles over federation (PR #2567)

Changes in synapse v0.24.0 (2017-10-23)

No changes since v0.24.0-rc1

Changes in synapse v0.24.0-rc1 (2017-10-19)

Features:

• Add Group Server (PR #2352, #2363, #2374, #2377, #2378, #2382, #2410, #2426, #2430, #2454, #2471, #2472, #2544)
• Add support for channel notifications (PR #2501)
• Add basic implementation of backup media store (PR #2538)
• Add config option to auto-join new users to rooms (PR #2545)

Changes:

• Make the spam checker a module (PR #2474)
• Delete expired url cache data (PR #2478)
• Ignore incoming events for rooms that we have left (PR #2490)
• Allow spam checker to reject invites too (PR #2492)
• Add room creation checks to spam checker (PR #2495)
• Spam checking: add the invitee to user_may_invite (PR #2502)
• Process events from federation for different rooms in parallel (PR #2520)
• Allow error strings from spam checker (PR #2531)
• Improve error handling for missing files in config (PR #2551)

Bug fixes:

• Fix handling SERVFAILs when doing AAAA lookups for federation (PR #2477)
• Fix incompatibility with newer versions of ujson (PR #2483) Thanks to @jeremycline!
• Fix notification keywords that start/end with non-word chars (PR #2500)
• Fix stack overflow and logcontexts from linearizer (PR #2532)
• Fix 500 error when fields missing from power_levels event (PR #2552)
• Fix 500 error when we get an error handling a PDU (PR #2553)

Hi folks,

On October 19th (next Thursday, as of the time of writing) we're going to be back in Berlin for various meetings - and we're incredibly excited that BlueYard have offered to host the world's first ever official Matrix and Decentralised Communications Meetup at their offices in Kreuzberg!  Matthew, Amandine and maybe others will be attending and speaking from the core team, and giving a VIP tour of the long-long-long-awaited Groups/Communities features in Matrix and Riot as well as some of the other good stuff in the pipeline - and we're also excited to have Exul joining us from the community to talk about his recent Matrix<->Rocket.Chat bridging adventures.  We're also expecting some exciting folks to join us from the Ethereum community to talk about decentralised realtime comms in their ecosystem - plus if anyone wants to talk about other Matrix/XMPP/Tox/Briar/Richochet or similar projects please ping us and let us know asap!

Update: we're excited to announce that Jack Fransham from Polkadot (who are very active Riot/Matrix users - and just raised >$130M in their token generation event yesterday) will also be joining us to tell us all about how Polkadot bridges together different blockchains!. (The original speaker was Marek Kotewicz, but availability didn't work out).

Update 2: and our final speaker is confirmed as Maximilian Möhring, CEO of Keyp, who's going to talk about their self-sovereign decentralised identity system.

Update 3: ...and we have a last minute addition for a lightning talk from Secushare (Psyc + GNUnet, fully decentralised p2p encrypted comms)!!

Space is limited to 70 attendees, so please register on Eventbrite asap if you'd like to come!

As a taster: the official video of our massive talk from the ETHLDN meetup a few weeks ago was just released (see below).  The meetup in Berlin will have different content and be more free-form, letting folks ask their own questions and steer the conversation and discussion as you see fit: so please come hang out in person, grab pizza and beer courtesy of BlueYard, and find the answers to all the deepest Matrix questions you never knew you even had...!

See you next week! :D

TADHack Global 2017

At the end of September, TADHack Global was held where almost 150 teams spent their weekends hacking towards the $45k total prize money up for grabs. Luke spent the final day of the hack talking to teams hacking at IDEALondon in Shoreditch, meeting a few Matrix enthusiasts and long-time collaborators.

Out of 10 hacks, 2 of 4 local winners won prizes locally and went on to be global winners alongside 6 other teams using Matrix as part of their hacks. Checkout the TADHack London Wrap-up for details on all of the awesome hacks, especially Aviral Dasgupta's Pushtime and Polite.ai.

https://twitter.com/TADHack/status/915284069046419456

Well done to everyone who took part, and a special thanks to those flying Matrix :)

THE Port 2017

The following weekend was THE Port 2017, a humanitarian-themed hackathon held at CERN, Geneva in Switzerland. Among the 7 teams participating, the Matrix team consisted of a few software developers from Bity including Matrix enthusiast Alejandro Avilés (who very kindly helped us get a team into the hackathon). Luke and Dave from the Matrix London office also flew out to help the cause and by the end had a very stable, working prototype by the end of the competition.

The hack we made was a communications system backed by Matrix for use in refugee camps, an idea that hatched at the start of the hackathon (whereas the other projects were well established ideas up to 6 weeks before the event). Check out the code on GitHub if you're interested in the client-side apps we made over the weekend.

https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/916672581473890304

It was another fun weekend for the Matrix team and we look forward to the next one. Stay tuned for updates on upcoming Matrix events!

We've just released Synapse 0.23 - which contains a bunch of significant performance improvements, bug and stability fixes - as well as a few new features: basic spam checking (the ability to configure your homeserver to reject events which match arbitrary rules, both from users and other servers) - and long-awaited support for privacy-preserving ('event_id_only') push notifications.  This means that apps can choose to register themselves to receive push notifications which do not contain any information about the actual push, but instead act as a simple "wake up!" event, which triggers the app to then sync via the client-server API in order to display the actual push notification details.  This is particularly useful for push notifications for E2E encrypted rooms, as it means the client has a chance of decrypting the message in order to display the push notification details in the UI (if the user wants that).  matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk are in the process of being moved over to use the new 'event_id_only' push format.

Long-awaited Communities/Groups will land in Synapse 0.24, which should come quite soon (we're almost ready to merge it to develop, but it's a major update so we wanted to get 0.23 out the door first).

As always, you can get your latest Synapse from https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse or a OS repository of your choice (we've just released the official Debian packages).

Full details of Synapse 0.23:

Features:

• Add a frontend proxy worker (PR #2344)
• Add support for event_id_only push format (PR #2450)
• Add a PoC for filtering spammy events (PR #2456)
• Add a config option to block all room invites (PR #2457)

Changes:

• Use bcrypt module instead of py-bcrypt (PR #2288) Thanks to @kyrias!
• Improve performance of generating push notifications (PR #2343, #2357, #2365, #2366, #2371)
• Improve DB performance for device list handling in sync (PR #2362)
• Include a sample prometheus config (PR #2416)
• Document known to work postgres version (PR #2433) Thanks to @ptman!

Bug fixes:

• Fix caching error in the push evaluator (PR #2332)
• Fix bug where pusherpool didn't start and broke some rooms (PR #2342)
• Fix port script for user directory tables (PR #2375)
• Fix device lists notifications when user rejoins a room (PR #2443, #2449)
• Fix sync to always send down current state events in timeline (PR #2451)
• Fix bug where guest users were incorrectly kicked (PR #2453)
• Fix bug talking to IPv6 only servers using SRV records (PR #2462)
• Fix regression in performance of syncs (PR #2470)

Occasionally folks ask why we don't update the blog more often - we're infamous in only doing big formal updates once every 3 months, unless there's something very specific to yell about.  However, it's possible that some readers don't realise that we have been publishing a weekly status update blog since July - albeit a video blog: Matrix Live!  The episodes are published on YouTube (for now, although in future we're going to use Matrix to distribute them), and are first made available to Quadratic ($5+) Patreon supporters.  After a week we make them public to everyone though and add them to the YouTube Playlist.  The videos also have very brief bullet-point summaries of the contents in the description for those who don't have time to watch and just want to skim for interesting stuff.

We appreciate that video blogs are unusual for a FOSS project relative to written blogs - but we've chosen to go down this path because counterintuitively it takes much less time to just speak about what's going on than write it down; for whatever reason my blogposts always seem to take hours to write as I get sucked into the details and try to be as comprehensive and accurate as possible.  Whereas just chatting about it with Amandine is much easier, and given that we do it anyway; why not film it for everyone's benefit?  We always film the show in one continuous take (hence the "live"), so it's literally only eating 10-15 mins out of our week.

Eitherway, just wanted to remind anyone who reads this blog that the video blog exists, and to gently encourage folks to donate at Patreon or Liberapay if they want to get access to the videos on the day they air, rather than having to wait for a week!  Finally, we'd suggest that folks subscribe to the playlist itself on YouTube even if they don't donate, so they can be reminded about new eps.

So, without further ado, here's an alarming montage of Matthew & Amandine geeking about Matrix, in case you've missed the show so far!