Matrix Live 🎙

• On Apple Podcasts
• On Spotify
• On Pocket Casts
• or by hitting the RSS feed directly

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa said:

Here's your weekly spec update!

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2451: Remove query_auth federation endpoint.
• MSC2422: Allow color on font tag
• MSC2432: Updated semantics for publishing room aliases

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are currently in FCP

New MSCs:

• MSC2475: API versioning
• MSC2474: Add key backup version to SSSS account data
• MSC2472: Symmetric SSSS

Closed MSCs:

• MSC2261: Allow m.room.aliases events to be redacted by room admins
• Superseded by MSC2432, which provides the same functionality.

Finally some merged MSCs, and so much activity in other areas! Thanks for everyone getting involved :)

Spec Core Team

Next week the Spec Core Team is focusing on MSC2457 (password invalidation), MSC2454 (SSO UI Auth), and MSC2472 (Symmetric SSSS).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander reported:

• Backfill over federation and room history visibility are now mostly implemented in Dendrite
• Most of the room version support code is now merged into gomatrixserverlib
• More of Dendrite has been converted to use new headered events from gomatrixserverlib
• Room version support code has now been merged into Dendrite

Synapse

Neil told us:

We released 1.12.0 this week which contains some decent performance wins. Our theme for the moment is to continue working on performance, and the sharding project is starting to make some real progress. Hopefully we get onto breaking out event persistence next week.

Aside from that you'll see a lot of work to improve SSO support, in particular the ability for SSO and User Interactive Auth to work together is just around the corner.

Sorry for all the matrix.org slowness, we're doing everything we can!

Thoughts on matrix.to

julian told us:

The current http://matrix.to/ link handler is centralized and unfriendly. Before real matrix: URIs are done ( https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2312 ), I decided matrix.to needs redesigning, so I've written about it and am working on mock-ups and changes: https://blog.foad.me.uk/2020/03/24/improving-matrix-to-links/ Feedback would be appreciated. Please discuss in [#matrix.to:matrix.org.

Synapse Deployment 📥

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Updated the Kubernetes-optimized images of Synapse to 1.12.0. Both the alpine and debian-based - with jemalloc support - tags use the latest twisted package.

NB; If you're using both workers and application services, make sure that your application service config files are mounted into the worker pods as well.

Various updates on Debian packaging

andrewsh reported:

Debian backports for Buster will see updated synapse and Twisted around the weekend when packages migrate to testing

Debian packages for synapse have been updated and now pull the patched version of Twisted with CVE-2020-10108, CVE-2020-10109 and other security vulnerabilities fixed

the patched version of Twisted in Debian is 18.9.0-8, Ubuntu ships security fixes in 18.9.0-6ubuntu1; both include all necessary security fixes 20.3.0 is currently in Debian experimental and hopefully will be uploaded to unstable by the end of the week

synapse-purge

Ananace announced:

Submitted a PR that adds support for running the Synapse state compression tool to the synapse-purge utility written by djmaze. So that it's able to both launch purges for all rooms, as well as compress their state afterwards.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mx-puppet-skype

mx-puppet-bridge is a general bridging library that supports (double)bridging and relays. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for others to bridge new third-party protocols to matrix. Support room Donate

sorunome said:

There is a new skype bridge! mx-puppet-skype, also based on mx-puppet-bridge.

It already features:

• Sending normal and rich formatted text in both directions
• Sending images, audio and other media in both directions
• Some skype emoji are parsed to normal emoji
• Skype->Matrix typing and read indicators
• Skype->Matrix user updates

Please note that skype seems to be having some issues lately where sometimes messages aren't received (also in the official client), and that sadly also affects the bridge.

Icinga GoNotify Matrix v2.0.1

Oleg offered:

• A simple client to send notifications from Icinga to a [matrix] room.
• This is a rewrite of a Perl version (https://github.com/oleg-fiksel/matrix_icinga_notify).
• New and fancy notification template (thanks @micha:msqu.de !).
• Written in Go and uses mautrix-go (thanks @tulir:maunium.net !).
• Doesn't need any dependencies other than ca-certificates.
• Support/Feedback: #icinga-gonotify-matrix:fiksel.info

Dept of Clients 📱

Mirage

miruka told us:

Mirage is a new fancy Matrix client written in Qt/QML + Python, currently in alpha and available on Linux. Some of its main features are:

• A fluid interface that adapts to any size
• Keyboard shortcuts for (almost) everything, including filtering/switching rooms, scrolling, sending files, selecting and copying messages...
• A dynamic, programable theming system
• Multiple accounts in one client
• Support for end-to-end encryption

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

• The image overlay you get, when you click on an image, should now stay out of your way, when downloading an image (adasauce)
• Nheko now shouldn't show a console on launch on Windows anymore (abma)
• Typing notifications now won't sanitize users twice. This shouldn't increase Corona infections, just make special characters like < and & show up correctly, so you can put more <3 into your names. (Emi)
• A lot of edge cases, where avatars didn't show up correctly were fixed. One issue with dynamic thumbnailing and synapse is still waiting for a synapse pr to be merged.
• If you restart your server, Nheko should now use less CPU in the time the server is down. It may take a bit longer to reconnect though.

I'd like to thank all the contributors, that contribute seemingly random, small patches. It really helps make Nheko better in the long term and I really appreciate your help! <3

Quotient 0.5.3 RC

kitsune reported:

Quotient 0.5.3 RC goes out - this is a backwards-compatible release that you can safely use with your Quaternion 0.0.9.4. Packagers are welcome to do all the preparations necessary - 0.5.3 release will happen right after the weekend! Despite back-compatibility, this version sports quite a few recent improvements backported from the master branch, including SSO, support of reactions and message editing, .well-known and, of course, quite a few bug fixes. Check it out at https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/releases/tag/0.5.3-rc. P.S. For those who want more, Quotient 0.6 (and Quaternion 0.0.9.5) are coming real-soon-now, too!

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

We are still working on cross-signing but we see the end :). Gossiping of cross-signing private keys is now automatically done in background. We have a new modal that pops up on unverified sign-ins. We started to make cross-platform tests and fixed issues. Next week will be all about polishing this feature.

riot.swedneck.xyz (Riot on IPFS)

swedneck reported:

I have started maintaining riot.swedneck.xyz again, so riot will once again be available on IPFS! You can try it out at https://ipfs.io/ipns/riot.swedneck.xyz, or via a local IPFS gateway at http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipns/riot.swedneck.xyz Expect updates a couple of days after every new riot version is released.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy optionally supports jitsi

Slavi announced:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now optionally install the Jitsi video-conferencing platform and integrate it with riot-web. See our Jitsi documentation page to get started.

You need to tell the playbook to use the :develop riot-web though. The documentation page instructs people to do that (for now).

I did a 4-person video conference the other day and all Jitsi components combined seemed to take some ~500MB of memory and quite a lot of CPU, while the call was ongoing.

Dept of Bots 🤖

CovBot v0.1.1

Peter Roberts offered:

• Add Public Health England data for more granular stats in the UK.
• Available on WhatsApp and Telegram.
• Send a welcome message to new rooms.
• Improve !help messages.
• Add !announce to notify all rooms.
• Gracefully handle rate limiting.
• Cleanup empty rooms once per day.
• Send m.text instead of m.notice so it plays nicely with WhatsApp bridge.

MIT licensed on GitHub.

CovBot v0.1.2

Peter Roberts offered:

• Add !compare - thanks to @bertieb:matrix.bertieb.org. Works like !compare china;uk;spain. See !help for more info.
• Improve readability of !help on mobile.

MIT licensed on GitHub

CovBot v0.1.3

Peter Roberts said:

Now comes with a !risk command that takes an age and calculates some outcome probabilities for that age group. Thanks to @dctremblay:matrix.org for adding this in!

MIT licensed on GitHub.

reminder maubot plugin

Tulir said:

v0.2.0 of the reminder plugin for maubot was released recently. The primary change was a new custom date parser, which should have less weird results than before.

It also has a locale system. You can set locales with !reminder locale <list of locales>. The system is fairly simple: it just tries to parse the input with each locale in the order specified and uses the first match. It doesn't have many locales so far, so contributions are welcome if you're not afraid of regexes (contributions for reducing the number of regexes are also welcome :D)

Matrix in the News 📰

Matthew said:

for those who quite understandably couldn’t endure listening to 90 minutes of waffle about Matrix on The Changelog, the transcript is now up at https://changelog.com/podcast/384!

New Public Rooms 🏟

nico said:

To help people stay in contact in times of coronavirus, there are now coronavirus rooms in 4 languages (German: #covid-19-de:ungleich.ch , English: #covid-19:ungleich.ch, French: #covid-19-fr:ungleich.ch and Korean #covid-19-kr:ungleich.ch) They are all listed on https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/coronavirus-chats/ to give new matrix users an easy entrance

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Final Thoughts 💭

Next Tuesday is the student submission deadline for GSoC! Check out our list of projects and come and chat to us.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Synapse 1.12.0 is here.

The most important reason to upgrade to 1.12.0 is that it contains performance improvements to boost the efficiency of state resolution in room versions greater than v1 (#7095).

It also contains an implementation of (MSC2432) designed to limit room alias abuse. The MSC contains the full details, but in short admins now have more control over aliases as they appear on their local server.

There is also plenty of ground work for our master process sharding project. Nothing that can be used today unfortunately, but expect big improvements for worker based deployments over the coming weeks.

Please pay special attention to the security advisory in the changelog, TL;DR make sure your installation is using Twisted 20.3.0.

Also, note that once Synapse 1.13.0 is released, the default branch will change to being develop rather than master. Again more details follow in the changelog.

Get the new release from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since Synapse 1.11.1

Synapse 1.12.0 (2020-03-23)

No significant changes since 1.12.0rc1.

Debian packages and Docker images are rebuilt using the latest versions of dependency libraries, including Twisted 20.3.0. Please see security advisory below.

Security advisory

Synapse may be vulnerable to request-smuggling attacks when it is used with a reverse-proxy. The vulnerabilties are fixed in Twisted 20.3.0, and are described in CVE-2020-10108 and CVE-2020-10109. For a good introduction to this class of request-smuggling attacks, see https://portswigger.net/research/http-desync-attacks-request-smuggling-reborn.

We are not aware of these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, and do not believe that they are exploitable with current versions of any reverse proxies. Nevertheless, we recommend that all Synapse administrators ensure that they have the latest versions of the Twisted library to ensure that their installation remains secure.

• Administrators using the matrix.org Docker image or the Debian/Ubuntu packages from matrix.org should ensure that they have version 1.12.0 installed: these images include Twisted 20.3.0.
• Administrators who have installed Synapse from source should upgrade Twisted within their virtualenv by running:

  <path_to_virtualenv>/bin/pip install 'Twisted>=20.3.0'

• Administrators who have installed Synapse from distribution packages should consult the information from their distributions.

The matrix.org Synapse instance was not vulnerable to these vulnerabilities.

Advance notice of change to the default git branch for Synapse

Currently, the default git branch for Synapse is master, which tracks the latest release.

After the release of Synapse 1.13.0, we intend to change this default to develop, which is the development tip. This is more consistent with common practice and modern git usage.

Although we try to keep develop in a stable state, there may be occasions where regressions creep in. Developers and distributors who have scripts which run builds using the default branch of Synapse should therefore consider pinning their scripts to master.

Synapse 1.12.0rc1 (2020-03-19)

Features

• Changes related to room alias management (MSC2432):
  • Publishing/removing a room from the room directory now requires the user to have a power level capable of modifying the canonical alias, instead of the room aliases. (#6965)
  • Validate the alt_aliases property of canonical alias events. (#6971)
  • Users with a power level sufficient to modify the canonical alias of a room can now delete room aliases. (#6986)
  • Implement updated authorization rules and redaction rules for aliases events, from MSC2261 and MSC2432. (#7037)
  • Stop sending m.room.aliases events during room creation and upgrade. (#6941)
  • Synapse no longer uses room alias events to calculate room names for push notifications. (#6966)
  • The room list endpoint no longer returns a list of aliases. (#6970)
  • Remove special handling of aliases events from MSC2260 added in v1.10.0rc1. (#7034)
• Expose the synctl, hash_password and generate_config commands in the snapcraft package. Contributed by @devec0. (#6315)
• Check that server_name is correctly set before running database updates. (#6982)
• Break down monthly active users by appservice_id and emit via Prometheus. (#7030)
• Render a configurable and comprehensible error page if something goes wrong during the SAML2 authentication process. (#7058, #7067)
• Add an optional parameter to control whether other sessions are logged out when a user's password is modified. (#7085)
• Add prometheus metrics for the number of active pushers. (#7103, #7106)
• Improve performance when making HTTPS requests to sygnal, sydent, etc, by sharing the SSL context object between connections. (#7094)

Bugfixes

• When a user's profile is updated via the admin API, also generate a displayname/avatar update for that user in each room. (#6572)
• Fix a couple of bugs in email configuration handling. (#6962)
• Fix an issue affecting worker-based deployments where replication would stop working, necessitating a full restart, after joining a large room. (#6967)
• Fix duplicate key error which was logged when rejoining a room over federation. (#6968)
• Prevent user from setting 'deactivated' to anything other than a bool on the v2 PUT /users Admin API. (#6990)
• Fix py35-old CI by using native tox package. (#7018)
• Fix a bug causing org.matrix.dummy_event to be included in responses from /sync. (#7035)
• Fix a bug that renders UTF-8 text files incorrectly when loaded from media. Contributed by @TheStranjer. (#7044)
• Fix a bug that would cause Synapse to respond with an error about event visibility if a client tried to request the state of a room at a given token. (#7066)
• Repair a data-corruption issue which was introduced in Synapse 1.10, and fixed in Synapse 1.11, and which could cause /sync to return with 404 errors about missing events and unknown rooms. (#7070)
• Fix a bug causing account validity renewal emails to be sent even if the feature is turned off in some cases. (#7074)

Improved Documentation

• Updated CentOS8 install instructions. Contributed by Richard Kellner. (#6925)
• Fix POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS in the contrib/docker/docker-compose.yml example docker-compose configuration. (#6984)
• Change date in INSTALL.md for last date of getting TLS certificates to November 2019. (#7015)
• Document that the fallback auth endpoints must be routed to the same worker node as the register endpoints. (#7048)

Deprecations and Removals

• Remove the unused query_auth federation endpoint per MSC2451. (#7026)

Internal Changes

• Add type hints to logging/context.py. (#6309)
• Add some clarifications to README.md in the database schema directory. (#6615)
• Refactoring work in preparation for changing the event redaction algorithm. (#6874, #6875, #6983, #7003)
• Improve performance of v2 state resolution for large rooms. (#6952, #7095)
• Reduce time spent doing GC, by freezing objects on startup. (#6953)
• Minor perfermance fixes to get_auth_chain_ids. (#6954)
• Don't record remote cross-signing keys in the devices table. (#6956)
• Use flake8-comprehensions to enforce good hygiene of list/set/dict comprehensions. (#6957)
• Merge worker apps together. (#6964, #7002, #7055, #7104)
• Remove redundant store_room call from FederationHandler._process_received_pdu. (#6979)
• Update warning for incorrect database collation/ctype to include link to documentation. (#6985)
• Add some type annotations to the database storage classes. (#6987)
• Port synapse.handlers.presence to async/await. (#6991, #7019)
• Add some type annotations to the federation base & client classes. (#6995)
• Port synapse.rest.keys to async/await. (#7020)
• Add a type check to is_verified when processing room keys. (#7045)
• Add type annotations and comments to the auth handler. (#7063)

Matrix Live 🎙

Matrix Live S04E30 - Matthew updates on Synapse perf, P2P and new Jitsi

• On Apple Podcasts
• On Spotify
• On Pocket Casts
• or by hitting the RSS feed directly

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa announced:

Here's your weekly spec update!

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2422: Allow color on font tag
• MSC2451: Remove query_auth federation endpoint.

New MSCs:

• MSC2463: Exclusion of MXIDs in push rules content matching
• MSC2461: Proposal for Authenticated Content Repository API

Spec Core Team

Next week the Spec Core Team is focusing MSC2432 (alias changes), MSC2451 (remove query_auth), and implemention.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander announced:

• P2P work is continuing at p2p.riot.im, with various fixes and a new public room directory
• Room version work is continuing with new headered event support in Kafka, the internal APIs and the sync API in Dendrite, and in the event code in gomatrixserverlib
• Joining rooms over federation is a bit more reliable now, as prev events are handled properly in this case and therefore the first message into the room doesn't get lost
• Some improved error handling work has been merged - thanks to prateek2211 and abbyck
• The /joined_rooms endpoint is now implemented - thanks to prateek2211

Notes on usage:

In order to try p2p.riot.im, do I need to create an account or should I be signing in to some user?

Just register as normal. Be aware you are registering into your local in-browser Homeserver, rather than a remote service.

Neil Alexander also mentioned:

We've also created #homeservers-dev:matrix.org as a general non-implementation-specific channel for homeserver developers :-)

matrix-media-repo

TravisR offered:

v1.1.0 has been released with experimental (incomplete) IPFS support, memory leak fixes, and other improvements. This is a highly recommended upgrade if you use expireAfterDays or have memory problems.

Synapse

Neil reported:

This week we have seen a huge increase in traffic and so we are spending a lot of time battling with scaling. Most notably we shipped an optimisation to improve state resolution for room versions > 1. Our sharding effort continues and we are working towards backing matrix.org with redis for pub sub which is prerequisite for the project.

Aside from that we had some problems with push reliability, this should now be fixed. Sorry if you were bitten!

We also put out 1.12.0rc1 expect a full release early next week.

Next week performance performance performance. We’ll also complete improvements to user Interactive Auth for SSO installations.

Synapse Deployments

Mathijs told us:

The docker image for synapse v1.12.0rc1 is now on mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.12.0rc1

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Welcome Christian!

Welcome to Christian, who is joining the Bridges team as an employee. He'll start out on the Slack bridge but will be working more generally with Half-Shot on all bridges.

mx-puppet-bridge

mx-puppet-bridge is a general bridging library that supports (double)bridging and relays. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for others to bridge new third-party protocols to matrix. Support room Donate

sorunome told us:

• add adminme thanks to dhmf
• more tests
• unified namespaces!

Unified namespaces is a big update! This means that, if the remote protocol has globally unique IDs (e.g. as discord has the case) it will only create one room on matrix for any amount of puppets. Combining this with the advanced relay option, this means that protocol implementations (e.g. discord) now can act like a normal relay bridge only with super awesome puppeting! As in, the for the puppets, the DMs work and channels&guilds that the relay bot is not in. All this is possible without any changes to the protocol implementation, should the protocol have unique global IDs.

Dept of Clients 📱

Quotient / Quaternion SSO support

kitsune told us:

In preparation to the upcoming (long-awaited) releases for Quotient and Quaternion, the library has gained full-blown support of SSO flow, such as the one used by the Mozilla's homeserver, and adventurous Mozilla Matrix users can use the master branch of Quaternion to login to their accounts. Next step - official releases and backports.

gomuks

Tulir said:

gomuks now supports markdown formatting in rainbow messages.

Or if you prefer:

gomuks now supports markdown formatting in rainbow messages.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

Emi added a new sorting method to the room list, that keeps rooms with unread messages on top, even when the messages are older than the messages in silenced or read rooms. It makes the room list a lot nicer to use and after being skeptical at the start, I now use it on all my systems. Huge thanks to Emi for bearing with my long and confusing review!

Riot Web

Ryan reported:

• Keyboard shortcuts are more discoverable with a help popup that explains them
• Jitsi support for voice and video is moving into Riot itself (the integration manager is no longer used for this)
• Self-hosted Riots can be configured to use a different Jitsi server if desired
• Encrypted messages are faster to encrypt and send
• The room directory server selector has been reworked and is much easier to use and understand
• Many cross-signing polish fixes continue to land, hoping to ship cross-signing in a few weeks

RiotX, Quick corrective release 0.18.1

valere told us:

Improvements 🙌:

• Implementation of /join command

Bugfix 🐛:

• Message transitions in encrypted rooms are jarring #518
• Images that failed to send are waiting to be sent forever #1145
• Fix / Crashed when trying to send a gif from the Gboard #1136
• Fix / Cannot click on key backup banner when new keys are available

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

We are still working on cross-signing. QR code screens have landed on develop like storing and gossiping of cross-signing private keys.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

py-matrix-utils

swedneck offered:

I'm working on a Gtk GUI for py-matrix-utils, progress can be followed at https://gitlab.com/Swedneck/py-matrix-utils This isn't going to be a fully fledged matrix client, it's just a graphical interface for various matrix tools.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy Raspberry Pi support

Slavi offered:

Thanks to Gergely Horváth's efforts, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports installing at least some of its services to a Raspberry Pi server.

See our Self-building documentation page to learn how to get started.

Dept of Bots 🤖

CovBot v0.0.10

Peter Roberts announced:

• Search by country code.
• Better handling of issues in the data.
• Do more things with asyncio.

MIT licensed on GitHub.

Thanks to the super awesome bridging powers of Matrix anyone on WhatsApp can now chat with the bot! Feel free to chat with it and share with anyone who prefers to use WhatsApp!

More magic bridging means Telegram users can now chat with the bot! Please feel free to share with anyone who prefers to use Telegram!

Additionally:

CovBot has a couple of contributors working on it now too 🙂

Check the repo for details!

Final Thoughts 💭

Organising IT Support via Riot

Karl told us:

We are mid in building a team to give free IT support and security help to critical infrastructure operators during Corona times organized via Riot. Added a local alias for this room here at #helpeurope:matrix.org . room where we startet creation #helpeurope:matrix.ctseuro.com. Everybody wanting to help is welcome.

Join the room and get involved for more info.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Matthew talks to Kegan and Neil about the status of P2P Matrix, and about Dendrite development.

You will know Matrix Live as a weekly video produced by the Matrix team and shared on YouTube. We are now offering the same content as an audio-only podcast, as a way of reaching more people. You can find the podcast:

• On Apple Podcasts
• On Spotify
• On Pocket Casts
• or by hitting the RSS feed directly

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Matthew on The Changelog podcast

Matthew announced:

The Changelog invited me to do a podcast on all things Matrix - the 90 minutes of high density braindump can be found over at https://changelog.com/podcast/384

Google Summer of Code

We are still welcoming GSoC students who want to apply to work on Matrix projects this summer. You can browse the suggested projects list or submit your own by chatting in the appropriate project room or #gsoc:matrix.org. Student applications begin on Monday!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander announced:

• The P2P in-browser demo has been improved to use a single set of keys, like the previous Go demo
• The P2P code no longer performs unnecessary federation requests to find server keys when they can be derived from the node ID
• Other hardening bits for the P2P demo
• Fixed a race condition in Dendrite when creating guest accounts
• Room version work is progressing still

Dendrite/P2P

Matthew also mentioned the work that is going on with Dendrite P2P:

• We've got our first ever public Riot running with P2P Matrix, by compiling Dendrite to WASM and embedding it in the browser as a service worker. It's still quite early, but you can try to play with it now at https://p2p.riot.im. You can hear (and see!) all about it in this week's Matrix Live.
• It's using libp2p (IPFS's network layer) for P2P, coordinating via our shiny new libp2p websocket rendezvous server at https://rendezvous.matrix.org:8443
• Lots of limitations still: the room directory isn't hooked up; it doesn't persist your database yet; and no store-and-forward for users who are offline.
• Meanwhile Neil has been making good progress on v3, v4 and v5 room versions in Dendrite
• Spent a few days in London discussing the shape of P2P and Dendrite to come... watch this space ⭕️

Synapse

Neil reported:

This week we’ve been working on alias abuse support, fixing a SSO limitation with user interactive auth which will allow SSO users to deactivate devices etc. We’ve also fixed a few SSO registration bugs and are currently investigating a push problem causing push to be delayed for certain users.

Next week more of the same, plus a return to Synapse performance work.

Synapse available on OpenBSD

Synapse is now available on OpenBSD from ports. https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports-cvs&m=158368701415531&w=2

Thanks Linda for making us aware.

Dept of Clients 📱

Quotient prgressing to 0.6

kitsune announced:

Quotient is getting traction again, with 0.6 release finally in sight. This week a long standing PR from aa13q has been merged with a few (still very much work-in-progress) E2EE additions. One notable change is that by default the master branch (and the upcoming release) now builds without E2EE. This is to relieve packagers from a chore of adding E2EE dependencies (QtOlm and olm) for not much merit, while the work on E2EE stack for Quotient continues. In the meantime, the recommended way of using E2EE with Quotient-backed clients is to use pantalaimon next to your client application.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

One could say not much exciting stuff happened. Emily contributed a fix, that drops the filesystem access requirement from the nheko flatpaks. Otherwise I've heard someone working on hiding events in the timeline and some random branches named device-verification appeared. We'll see, where that will lead...

Riot Web

Ryan announced:

v1.5.13-rc.1 available on staging with some more goodies like an option for alphabetically sorted room list, an option to dismiss the read marker and a fix for the right panel causing scroll jumps. Cross-signing work continues and is tantalisingly close to completion for release!

Interesting article about using matrix-client.el with Pantalaimon

gergely offered:

Some folks over at #matrix-client.el:matrix.org suggested i should submit my article here. Itʼs about making matrix-client.el able to participate in encrypted rooms via Pantalaimon.

FluffyChat for Android

krille said:

There is a new FluffyChat for Android version in the F-Droid repository:

• Improved design
• Minor bug fixes
• End2End encryption for normal messages (not yet files)
• Key sharing
• Device keys verification UI

The encryption feature still needs some testing but should be fully compatible with Riot so far.

Paul added this link which krille previously wrote: https://ko-fi.com/post/FluffyChat-for-Android-and-iOS-S6S71BMEY

And finally:

You can find the F-Droid repository at http://fluffy.chat

RiotX

valere announced:

RiotX 0.18.0 has been released:

Improvements 🙌:

• Share image and other media from e2e rooms (#677)
• Add support for /plain command (#12)
• Detect spaces in password if user fail to login (#1038)
• FTUE: do not display a different color when encrypting message when not in developer mode.
• Open room member profile from avatar of the room member state event (#935)
• Restore the push rules configuration in the settings

Bugfix 🐛:

• Fix crash on attachment preview screen (#1088)
• "Share" option is not appearing in encrypted rooms for images (#1031)
• Set "image/jpeg" as MIME type of images instead of "image/jpg" (#1075)
• Self verification via QR code is failing (#1130)

SDK API changes ⚠️:

• PushRuleService.getPushRules() now returns a RuleSet. Use getAllRules() on this object to get all the rules.

Build 🧱:

• Upgrade ktlint to version 0.36.0
• Pipeline file for Buildkite is now hosted on another Github repository: https://github.com/matrix-org/pipelines/blob/master/riotx-android/pipeline.yml

Other changes:

• Restore availability to Chromebooks (#932)
• Add a documentation to run integration tests

Riot-iOS

Manu said:

We have been working mainly on cross-signing verification. The QR code verification code has landed in the SDK. Now we are attacking the UI.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruby SDK

Ananace reported:

Just released version 2.0.1 of the Ruby SDK - which should probably by 2.1.0 but I'm apparently quite tired today - adding support for non-final MSCs without polluting the main APIs. Currently only MSC2108 - Sync over Server Sent Events - is implemented, but more MSCs can easily be plugged in as wanted.

As always, #ruby-matrix-sdk:kittenface.studio is available for discussion and questions.

Dept of Bots 🤖

auto-invite-matrix-bot

MTRNord reported:

The auto-invite-matrix-bot utility bot now not only can relay invites to one primary account but it also is relaying mentions from your secondary accounts to your primary account now!

Check it out at: https://github.com/MTRNord/auto-invite-matrix-bot

CoV Tracking Bot

You may have learned that recorded cases of COVID-19 are increasing exponentially. Also increasing exponentially are updates from Peter Roberts, who has developed a maubot to help provide information:

My first maubot! It tracks SARS-COV-2 statistics using data from https://offloop.net/covid19/ and was inspired by BrainstormBot on freenode IRC.

It's running as @covbot:shortestpath.dev. Send !cases for world-wide stats or !cases <location> for something more specific. E.g. !cases US.

v0.0.1 MIT licensed and on GitHub.

he continued

I've done a flurry of updates today:

• Searching is now limited to countries until search is improved more. I'll add region breakdowns back in soon!
• When the bot has multiple matches for your search it will let you know what they are and ask for more details.

It's running as @covbot:shortestpath.dev. Send !cases for world-wide stats or !cases <country> for more specifics. E.g. !cases Italy.

v0.0.4 MIT licensed and on GitHub.

and then

Another update:

• Search within states / regions / counties.
• Better feedback on ambiguous matches.
• Made unreliability of recoveries clear in the messaging.
• Made the messaging clearer when there are no matches.

v0.0.5 MIT licensed and on GitHub

and most recently

A few more changes:

• Improve search for provinces / regions / states / counties / areas.
• Add case numbers as well as percentages.
• Format numbers nicely for humans to read.
• Add a !help command.
• Add a !source command to get details on the bot source code and data.
• Improve handling when fetching the latest data fails.
• Improve handling of malformed data.

v0.0.9 MIT licensed on GitHub.

You can invite @covbot:shortestpath.dev to your own room to catch the latest.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Final Thoughts 💭

Last week we featured a new stickerpack, Isabella, check out the composite image below!

I got to use a sneak preview of Riot nightly on Electron earlier, look out for more news on that soon if that's your thing.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander said:

• Initial support for building for WASM with the P2P demo has been merged into the Dendrite master branch
• Initial State Resolution v2 code has been merged into gomatrixserverlib master branch, with wiring for Dendrite to follow shortly
• Further room version support is in progress
• Error logging now actually reports where errors happened
• A minor bug in the sync API has been fixed
• gomatrixserverlib now doesn't make unnecessary key requests over federation

matrix-media-repo

TravisR told us:

matrix-media-repo has early support for IPFS! Currently it's only gateway support, but in the coming days it should be possible to also upload into the IPFS world. See https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-media-repo/issues/115#issuecomment-593772429 for details.

Synapse

richvdh said:

A busy week in Synapse this week! We've released Synapse 1.11.1 to fix a security problem with single-sign-on, Patrick has been putting the finishing touches to the room-alias-spam mitigation measures in MSC2432, and Erik has been doing some exciting work in replacing the inter-process replication protocol for worker-based deployments.

We've also started the design work on single-sign-on support for user-interactive-auth, which we'll be starting implementation work on next week.

Also:

Oh hello... is that Synapse replicating data streams using Redis, paving the way to multi-master Synapse clustering for arbitrary horizontal scalability!?! 😍 pic.twitter.com/E7pcFWQEgC

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) March 6, 2020

Synapse Deployment 📥

multi arch synapse docker image

Black Hat announced:

I finally remembered to update my multi arch synapse docker image to 1.11.0. Now with more architectures!

Docker-matrix

Mathijs offered:

The image for synapse 1.11.1 is now available as avhost/docker-matrix:v1.11.1 and mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.11.1. As always these images use jemalloc and mjolnir anti-spam.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix Icinga notifier

Oleg told us:

Send notifications from Icinga(1,2) to a Matrix room.

• https://github.com/oleg-fiksel/matrix_icinga_notify

v1.2.0

• Changed POST to PUT for sending the message to comply with the spec (https://matrix.org/docs/api/client-server/#!/Room32participation/sendMessage)

Roadmap

• New, cool templates from @micha:msqu.de
• Rewrite in Go and gomatrix (https://github.com/matrix-org/gomatrix) to have a static binary

mx-puppet-slack

sorunome said:

mx-puppet-slack supports xoxc tokens now! That means you are able to bridge slack workspaces without the need of legacy tokens or oauth - no permission from the workspace admins are required for those!

mx-puppet-bridge

mx-puppet-bridge is a general bridging library that supports (double)bridging and relays. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for others to bridge new third-party protocols to matrix. Support room Donate

sorunome offered:

• Added optional parsing of file metadata (filling in the info block) for images, video and audio (requires ffprobe to be installed)
• Adding advanced relays --> protocol implementations can e.g. use webhooks to display relayed messages more nicely
• Add userlist syncing options for rooms

mx-puppet-discord

• Use the advanced relay to bridge relay messages using webhooks
• Implement userlist syncing: The userlist on matrix now accurately reflects the discord members in that room

Mumble Bridge

There is a simple Mumble-Matrix Bridge available.

A simple Matrix to Mumble bridge. It sends messages between bridged rooms and tells you when people join / leave Murmur.

Written in TypeScript and based on matrix-appservice-bridge.

The creator, mymindstorm said:

Hello again, I made a public room at #mumble-bridge:evermiss.net

Dept of Clients 📱

gomuks

Tulir announced:

gomuks now supports sending replies, reactions and redactions with commands. You can either run the command (e.g. /react 👍️) first and then select the message with up/down arrows and enter, or you can click on a message to select it first and then run the command.

Ditto v0.3.0 Release

Annie offered:

Ditto is a user-friendly Matrix client for iOS and Android.

Updates

• Long press to show button for leaving a room
• Data is stored on the device, you can now browse offline
• More helpful error messages on login failure
• Show if a chat has unread messages in chat list
• Send typing notifications
• Send read receipts
• and a lot of other major code-quality things!

See the full list of changes here

Help Wanted

In general, we'll welcome any help if someone would like to contribute - great way to get some experience with React Native! Just reach out!

If anybody has the skill set or interest, we are also looking at creating a React Native specific Matrix SDK to improve performance and allow others to develop RN clients easily.

Website | #ditto:ditto.chat | Contact Annie

RiotX

benoit said:

We have fixed several errors on file and media sending/downloading/sharing. Also we are still working on cross-signing and e2e stabilization.

Riot-iOS

Manu said:

Riot-iOS: We have fixed an issue with push notifications but we are still investigating rageshake logs before doing the release. In parallel, we are still working on cross-signing: QR code and Secret Sharing.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

• We welcomed adasauce as an official member to the Nheko project on Github! Adasauce has been working on a lot of the smaller annoyances and layout issues.
• Adasauce started working on configuring what events get shown in the timeline on a per room or account wide basis.
• We have merged the dev branch to master, because it confused a lot of people. If your packages use 0.7.0-dev, now is the time to switch
• red_sky merged the dev branch and started updating everything, that depends on this branch. This includes the AUR package and our Weblate instance (for translations).
• Nheko now has experimental support for MSC2448. This adds a blurry preview for images (and videos) sent via nheko directly into the event body (at the cost of ~30 bytes). This considerably reduces latency until clients show something, that isn't an empty box, to preview media, since downloading the media over federation and generatig a thumbnail has positive latency.
• Avatars should now not be blurry when using display scaling. Please report, if this is still happening to you (in the timeline or room list, there is a known issue with the user profile dialog and servers that don't do dynamic thumbnailing)
• Misc fixes and translation updates from multiple contributors.

Various Riot-theme news

Dylan told us:

Selenized Light, Dark, and Black for Riot! If you have your own build of riot-web you can simply modify the config.json and add this theme to it!

• GitHub: https://github.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes#selenized-light-theme

I particularly like the Selenized Dark:

Nord Light Theme for Riot is also available from Dylan:

• GitHub: https://github.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes#nord-light-theme

Aaron said:

Dylan created #riot-web-themes:m.dhdf.dev

If you use https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/ it will automatically download and install all of the themes just by setting matrix_riot_web_themes_enabled: true

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

simplematrixlib

swedneck reported:

i have updated simplematrixlib and py-matrix-utils adding (among other things) the ability to upload and download media, and send messages! Simplematrixlib is available on PyPi.

simplematrixlib now also has a matrix room, #simplematrixlib:matrix.org (also used for py-matrix-utils)

Dept of Ops 🛠

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Another image bump, this time to 1.11.1 The accompanying Helm chart I've been writing has sadly gotten rather delayed due to prioritisations at work, so might be a bit until then.

Dept of Bots 🤖

OBS bot

msirringhaus told us:

During last hackweek, I wrote a chat bot integration in Rust for openSUSEs Open Build Service. OBS is used for development of the openSUSE distribution and can build packages from the same sources for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise and other distributions.

The bot follows given packages and pull requests and pings a room if any changes occur (build finished, PR got commented or accepted, ..).

Sources can be found here, RPMs exist as well.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

Matrix Notepad v0.2.1

KB1RD reported:

• Fixes some bugs
• Adds a new theme
• Allows the editing of room names

Unfortunately, there still are bugs. Sorry ;(

Final Thoughts 💭

There's a new stickerpack available in Riot, Diego "rehrar" Salazar offered:

Isabella the Monero Girl is a fun sticker pack made by Cypher Stack designed to be cute, fun, and used by anyone. We hope you enjoy emoting with Isabella.

We'll have a cool image and more info next week.

Tulir offered:

also working on mautrix-manager, although I'm not sure if/when that'll be ready for general usage

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Hi all,

Heads up that yesterday at 12:00 ET, the Mozilla IRC network was switched off after over 22 years of valiant service, and the mozilla.org Matrix instance is now in full production. You can get at it via the Riot instance at https://chat.mozilla.org, by pointing your client at https://mozilla.modular.im, or by joining rooms on the mozilla.org server over federation via its room directory.

We'd like to thank Mozilla again for putting their faith in Matrix, and are determined to do everything we can to ensure we're a more than worthy successor to IRC; we have big boots to fill :)

We've been gathering a huge amount of invaluable FTUE (first time user experience) feedback from the commentary in #synchronicity:mozilla.org - and we're in the process of implementing it over the coming weeks. In particular, we've already implemented alphabetic room ordering, custom theming support, and done a bunch more SSO work.

The immediate priorities include:

• Fixing a regression in jumps/jank when scrolling (fix PRed to develop today)
• Enabling Mozilla IAM SSO authentication on remaining "interactive user auth" flows (e.g. managing devices)
• Fixing the UX around selecting server when browsing the room directory.
• Fixing notification defaults, behaviour and settings UX
• Better educating users to connect to the mozilla.modular.im if using a random app.

Finally, it's worth noting that the matrix-ircd project is seeing some commits again, many thanks to jplatte from the Ruma project - so if you are currently despairing the demise of moznet, never fear: you may yet be able to connect to the Mozilla matrix server via IRC (authing via Mozilla IAM, of course) and pretend that none of this newfangled Matrix stuff exists :D

Please keep the feedback coming in #synchronicity:mozilla.org - we're gathering it all up into Github (under the mozilla label) as well as a high level Google Doc to help collate everything.

thanks,

- The Matrix Core Team.

(Comments over at HN)