News

5 posts tagged with "News" (See all categories)

Atom Category Atom Feed

Hosting FOSDEM 2022 on Matrix

2022-02-07 — Events, FOSDEM, NewsThib

Last year was the first time FOSDEM was hosted on Matrix, and it was generally a huge success - and so the FOSDEM team trusted us again this year and we’re happy to say that it seems to have gone really well! This year’s FOSDEM was massive once again, featuring 654 speakers, 731 events, and 103 tracks.

This year hosting the event went smoother than last year, the only significant issue was some of the Q&A Jitsis not being broadcast to the devrooms on Saturday before 10:15 UTC, for which we offer our apologies to the speakers impacted. This turned out to be a problem with the Matrix<->Jitsi access control sync system which hadn’t showed up during earlier testing, but we patched around it rapidly on the day.

The most notable difference between this year and the previous year has been the usage of a “attendees.fosdem.org” instance in addition to the original “fosdem.org” one, specifically for attendees. The graphs speak for themselves: Synapse could handle the load of the 23K users (13K joined users and 10K lurkers) spread across a total number of 941 rooms. The real eye-opener however is that of the 13K joined users, only 4K came came from the FOSDEM attendee server, and 1K from Libera Chat, meaning that ~70% of the Matrix participants were already on Matrix and came in from existing servers! 🤯 That means the vast majority of people attended over federation. Decentralisation at work, people! It works! We didn’t host the conference… you did!!

FOSDEM attendees heatmap

But not only did the backend handle the load smoothly: the general user experience felt tightly integrated. People were welcomed by a tailor-made home page in Element to help them navigate through all the tracks and stands:.

Homescreen of chat.fosdem.org

One of the great things is it doesn’t require heavy modifications to Element: anyone who installs their own instance of Element can use a simple html file to display relevant information to their audience.

New this year, we also generated a space hierarchy for the whole conference at #fosdem2022:fosdem.org to help navigate the maze of rooms, making it even easier for users on their own servers to jump in:

FOSDEM Space listing all the FOSDEM rooms

Another greatly appreciated feature was the famous “maximised widgets” I (Thib) keep telling you about in Matrix Live episodes. Attendees and speakers could give the conference the central attention it deserved while simultaneously keeping an eye on what was happening in the chat.

FOSDEM stand with maximised widget view

From the speaker's perspective, we tried to streamline the user journey as much as possible: a bot invited them to a backstage room, in which they joined a Jitsi widget while their talk was being played in the track or devroom. They could see the most upvoted questions by the audience in a dedicated widget. A few minutes before their pre-recorded talk was over, a countdown (new this year!) could be displayed to tell them and the host they were about to go live. At the end of the countdown, the backstage Jitsi was broadcasted to the track so the speaker could answer the questions.

Backstage room where the speaker and host could talk and see the questions

If you want to have an in-depth look at the backend’s architecture, it didn’t change much from last year. You can have a look at last year’s blog post for the details on the setup. Most of the heavy lifting was around the conference bot used to set rooms up, create the spaces, populate them with widgets, arrange layouts and trigger countdowns before going live…

Finally we are immensely proud that we had our first ever Matrix Devroom! Not only does it mean the staff of a large international open source conference thinks it’s worth having a track of our own, it also means our community has grown to the point where we could have 8 hours of back to back Matrix content! Here’s a link to the YouTube playlists to which we are going to add the videos of FOSDEM as they’re being published.

Huge thanks to the FOSDEM team for trusting us, massive shout-out to Element Matrix Services and Element’s Ops and infrastructure team for their fantastic job in setting everything up and making sure everything was ready in time, a sincere thank you to all the fantastic speakers who shared awesome content, and finally to all the attendees. What a weekend!

Element raises $30M to boost Matrix

2021-07-27 — General, NewsMatthew Hodgson

Hi folks,

Big news today: Element, the startup founded by the team who created Matrix, just raised $30M of Series B funding in order to further accelerate Matrix development and improve Element, the flagship Matrix app. The round is led by our friends at Protocol Labs and Metaplanet, the fund established by Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype and Kazaa). Both Protocol Labs and Metaplanet are spectacularly on board our decentralised communication quest, and you couldn't really ask for a better source of funding to help take Matrix to the next level. Thank you for believing in Matrix and leading Element's latest funding!

You can read all about it from the Element perspective over at the Element Blog, but suffice it to say that this is enormous news for the Matrix ecosystem as a whole. In addition to transforming the Element app, on the Matrix side this means that there is now concrete funding secured to:

Obviously this is in addition to all the normal business-as-usual work going on in terms of:

  • getting Spaces out of beta
  • adding Threading to Element (yes, it's finally happening!)
  • speeding up room joins over federation
  • creating 'sync v3' to lazy-load all content and make the API super-snappy
  • lots of little long-overdue fun bits and pieces (yes, custom emoji, we're looking at you).

If you're wondering whether Protocol Labs' investment means that we'll be seeing more overlap between IPFS and Matrix, then yes - where it makes tech sense to do so, we're hoping to work more closely together; for instance collaborating with the libp2p team on our P2P work (we still need to experiment properly with gossipsub!), or perhaps giving MSC2706 some attention. However, there are no plans to use cryptocurrency incentives in Matrix or Element any time soon.

So, exciting times ahead! We'd like to inordinately thank everyone who has supported Matrix over the years - especially our Patreon supporters, whose donations pay for all the matrix.org infrastructure while inspiring others to open their cheque books; the existing investors at Element (especially Notion and Automattic, who have come in again on this round); all the large scale Matrix deployments out there which are effectively turning Matrix into an industry (hello gematik!) - and everyone who has ever run a Matrix server, contributed code, used the spec to make their own Matrix-powered creation, or simply chatted on Matrix.

Needless to say, Matrix wouldn't exist without you: the protocol and network would have fizzled out long ago were it not for all the people supporting it (the matrix.org server can now see over 35.5M addressable users on the network!) - and meanwhile the ever-increasing energy of the community and the core team combines to keep the protocol advancing forwards faster than ever.

We will do everything we possibly can to succeed in creating the long-awaited secure communication layer of the open Web, and we look forward to large amounts of Element's new funding being directed directly into core Matrix development :)

thanks for flying Matrix,

Matthew, Amandine & the whole Matrix core team.

Germany’s national healthcare system adopts Matrix!

2021-07-21 — General, NewsMatthew Hodgson

Hi folks,

We’re incredibly excited to officially announce that the national agency for the digitalisation of the healthcare system in Germany (gematik) has selected Matrix as the open standard on which to base all its interoperable instant messaging standard - the TI-Messenger.

gematik has released a concept paper that explains the initiative in full.

🔗TL;DR

With the TI-Messenger, gematik is creating a nationwide decentralised private communication network - based on Matrix - to support potentially more than 150,000 healthcare organisations within Germany’s national healthcare system. It will provide end-to-end encrypted VoIP/Video and messaging for the whole healthcare system, as well as the ability to share healthcare based data, images and files.

Initially every healthcare provider (HCP) with an HBA (HPC ID card) will be able to choose their own TI-Messenger provider. The homesever for HCP accounts will be hosted by the provider’s datacentre. The homeserver for institutions can be hosted by TI-Messenger providers, or on-premise.

Each organisation and individual will therefore retain complete ownership and control of their communication data - while being able to share it securely within the healthcare system with end-to-end encryption by default. All servers in the Matrix-based private federation will be hosted within Germany.

Needless to say, security is key when underpinning the entire nation’s healthcare infrastructure and safeguarding sensitive patient data. As such, the entire implementation will be accredited by BSI (Federal Office for Information Security) and BfDI (Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information).

🔗The full context...

Germany’s digital care modernisation law (“Digitale Versorgung und Pflege Modernisierungs Gesetz” or DVPMG), which came into force in June 2021, spells out the need for an instant messaging solution.

The urgency has increased by a significant rise in the use of instant messaging and video conferencing within the healthcare system - for instance, the amount of medical practices using messenger services doubled in 2020 compared to 2018 (much of this using insecure messaging solutions).

gematik, majority-owned by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health, is responsible for the standardised digital transformation of Germany’s healthcare sector. It focuses on improving efficiency and introducing new ways of working by setting, testing and certifying healthcare technology including electronic health cards, electronic patient records and e-prescriptions.

TI-Messenger is gematik’s technical specification for an interoperable secure instant messaging standard. The healthcare industry will be able to build a wide range of apps based on TI-Messenger specifications knowing that, being built on Matrix, all those apps will interoperate.

More than 150,000 organisations - ranging from local doctors to clinics, hospitals, and insurance companies - can potentially standardise on instant messaging thanks to gematik’s TI-Messenger initiative.

🔗The road to interoperability

By 1 October 2021, TI-Messenger will initially specify how communication should work in practice between healthcare professionals (HCPs). Physicians will be able to find and communicate with each other via TI-Messenger approved apps - specifications include secure authentication mechanisms with electronic health professional cards (eHBAs), electronic institution cards (SMC-B) and a central FHIR directory. The first compliant apps for HCPs are expected to be licensed by Q2 2022.

Eric Grey (product manager for TI-Messenger at gematik), reckons there will initially be around 10-15 TI-Messenger compliant Matrix-based apps for HCP communications available from different vendors.

Healthcare professionals will be able to choose a TI-Messenger provider, who will be hosting their personal accounts and provide the messenger-client.

Healthcare organisations will choose a TI-Messenger provider to build the dedicated homeserver infrastructure (on prem or in a data center), provide the client and ongoing support.

🔗What does this mean for the Matrix community?

Matrix is already integral to huge parts of the public sector; from the French government’s Tchap platform, to Bundeswehr’s use of BwMessenger and adoption by universities and schools across Europe.

Germany’s healthcare system standardising on Matrix takes this to entirely the next level - and we can’t wait to see the rest of Europe (and the world!) converge on Matrix for healthcare!

We'll have more info about TI-Messenger on this week's Matrix Live, out on Friday - stay tuned!

Synapse 1.0.0 released

2019-06-11 — General, News, ReleasesNeil Johnson

Well here it is: Synapse 1.0.

Synapse 1.0 is the reference implementation of the Matrix 1.0 spec. The goal of the release overall has been to focus on security and stability, such that we can officially declare Synapse (and Matrix) out of beta and recommended for production use. This means changing the default room protocol version used for new rooms to be v4, which includes the new state resolution algorithm, as well as collision-resistant event IDs, which are now formatted to be URL safe.

Synapse 1.0 also ships with support for the upcoming v5 room protocol (which enforces honouring server key validity periods), but this will not be used as the default for new rooms until a sufficient number of servers support it.

Please note that Synapse 1.0 does not include significant performance work or new features - our focus has been almost exclusively on providing a reference implementation of the Matrix 1.0 protocol. But having cleared our backlog on security/stability issues we will finally be now unblocked to pursue work around reducing RAM footprint, eliminating forward-extremity build up, and shipping new features like Edits, Reactions & E2E cross-signing support.

As part of the security work, Synapse 1.0 contains a breaking change that requires a valid TLS certificate on the federation API endpoint. Servers that do not configure their certificate will no longer be able to federate post 1.0.

It is also worth noting that Synapse 1.0.0 is the last release that will support Python 2.x and Postgres 9.4. For more information see here but the TL;DR is that you should upgrade asap.

This release has been a long time coming. Many thanks indeed to everyone who helped test the release candidates and provided feedback along the way.

Synapse 1.0 is just one component of a larger Matrix 1.0 release, which you can read all about here.

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 Synapse installation guide page

The changelog since 0.99.5 follows:

🔗Synapse 1.0.0 (2019-06-11)

🔗Bugfixes

  • Fix bug where attempting to send transactions with large number of EDUs can fail. (#5418)

🔗Improved Documentation

  • Expand the federation guide to include relevant content from the MSC1711 FAQ (#5419)

🔗Internal Changes

  • Move password reset links to /_matrix/client/unstable namespace. (#5424)

🔗Synapse 1.0.0rc3 (2019-06-10)

Security: Fix authentication bug introduced in 1.0.0rc1. Please upgrade to rc3 immediately

🔗Synapse 1.0.0rc2 (2019-06-10)

🔗Bugfixes

  • Remove redundant warning about key server response validation. (#5392)
  • Fix bug where old keys stored in the database with a null valid until timestamp caused all verification requests for that key to fail. (#5415)
  • Fix excessive memory using with default federation_verify_certificates: true configuration. (#5417)

🔗Synapse 1.0.0rc1 (2019-06-07)

🔗Features

  • Synapse now more efficiently collates room statistics. (#4338, #5260, #5324)
  • Add experimental support for relations (aka reactions and edits). (#5220)
  • Ability to configure default room version. (#5223, #5249)
  • Allow configuring a range for the account validity startup job. (#5276)
  • CAS login will now hit the r0 API, not the deprecated v1 one. (#5286)
  • Validate federation server TLS certificates by default (implements MSC1711). (#5359)
  • Update /_matrix/client/versions to reference support for r0.5.0. (#5360)
  • Add a script to generate new signing-key files. (#5361)
  • Update upgrade and installation guides ahead of 1.0. (#5371)
  • Replace the perspectives configuration section with trusted_key_servers, and make validating the signatures on responses optional (since TLS will do this job for us). (#5374)
  • Add ability to perform password reset via email without trusting the identity server. (#5377)
  • Set default room version to v4. (#5379)

🔗Bugfixes

  • Fixes client-server API not sending "m.heroes" to lazy-load /sync requests when a rooms name or its canonical alias are empty. Thanks to @dnaf for this work! (#5089)
  • Prevent federation device list updates breaking when processing multiple updates at once. (#5156)
  • Fix worker registration bug caused by ClientReaderSlavedStore being unable to see get_profileinfo. (#5200)
  • Fix race when backfilling in rooms with worker mode. (#5221)
  • Fix appservice timestamp massaging. (#5233)
  • Ensure that server_keys fetched via a notary server are correctly signed. (#5251)
  • Show the correct error when logging out and access token is missing. (#5256)
  • Fix error code when there is an invalid parameter on /_matrix/client/r0/publicRooms (#5257)
  • Fix error when downloading thumbnail with missing width/height parameter. (#5258)
  • Fix schema update for account validity. (#5268)
  • Fix bug where we leaked extremities when we soft failed events, leading to performance degradation. (#5274, #5278, #5291)
  • Fix "db txn 'update_presence' from sentinel context" log messages. (#5275)
  • Fix dropped logcontexts during high outbound traffic. (#5277)
  • Fix a bug where it is not possible to get events in the federation format with the request GET /_matrix/client/r0/rooms/{roomId}/messages. (#5293)
  • Fix performance problems with the rooms stats background update. (#5294)
  • Fix noisy 'no key for server' logs. (#5300)
  • Fix bug where a notary server would sometimes forget old keys. (#5307)
  • Prevent users from setting huge displaynames and avatar URLs. (#5309)
  • Fix handling of failures when processing incoming events where calling /event_auth on remote server fails. (#5317)
  • Ensure that we have an up-to-date copy of the signing key when validating incoming federation requests. (#5321)
  • Fix various problems which made the signing-key notary server time out for some requests. (#5333)
  • Fix bug which would make certain operations (such as room joins) block for 20 minutes while attemoting to fetch verification keys. (#5334)
  • Fix a bug where we could rapidly mark a server as unreachable even though it was only down for a few minutes. (#5335, #5340)
  • Fix a bug where account validity renewal emails could only be sent when email notifs were enabled. (#5341)
  • Fix failure when fetching batches of events during backfill, etc. (#5342)
  • Add a new room version where the timestamps on events are checked against the validity periods on signing keys. (#5348, #5354)
  • Fix room stats and presence background updates to correctly handle missing events. (#5352)
  • Include left members in room summaries' heroes. (#5355)
  • Fix federation_custom_ca_list configuration option. (#5362)
  • Fix missing logcontext warnings on shutdown. (#5369)

🔗Improved Documentation

  • Fix docs on resetting the user directory. (#5282)
  • Fix notes about ACME in the MSC1711 faq. (#5357)

🔗Internal Changes

  • Synapse will now serve the experimental "room complexity" API endpoint. (#5216)
  • The base classes for the v1 and v2_alpha REST APIs have been unified. (#5226, #5328)
  • Simplifications and comments in do_auth. (#5227)
  • Remove urllib3 pin as requests 2.22.0 has been released supporting urllib3 1.25.2. (#5230)
  • Preparatory work for key-validity features. (#5232, #5234, #5235, #5236, #5237, #5244, #5250, #5296, #5299, #5343, #5347, #5356)
  • Specify the type of reCAPTCHA key to use. (#5283)
  • Improve sample config for monthly active user blocking. (#5284)
  • Remove spurious debug from MatrixFederationHttpClient.get_json. (#5287)
  • Improve logging for logcontext leaks. (#5288)
  • Clarify that the admin change password API logs the user out. (#5303)
  • New installs will now use the v54 full schema, rather than the full schema v14 and applying incremental updates to v54. (#5320)
  • Improve docstrings on MatrixFederationClient. (#5332)
  • Clean up FederationClient.get_events for clarity. (#5344)
  • Various improvements to debug logging. (#5353)
  • Don't run CI build checks until sample config check has passed. (#5370)
  • Automatically retry buildkite builds (max twice) when an agent is lost. (#5380)

Matrix wins Best Innovation Award at WebRTC Paris!

2014-12-24 — Events, NewsMatthew Hodgson

Last week we had a great time attending WebRTC Conference Expo Paris 2014 - chatting to lots of new folks about Matrix; speaking in the "To Build or Not To Build" panel discussion; giving a general presentation on Matrix, and participating in the Demo shoot-out.

And we're very proud to say that we won the Best Innovation Award for a slightly frantic demo, showing an iPad mounted on our pet Trossen Robotics PhantomX Hexapod being used for robot telepresence by streaming video and audio to an Oculus Rift VR headset. This was using our proprietary in-house WebRTC stack, but once Matrix has fully taken off we hope to share our WebRTC stack with the world too :) This was a very last minute demo - we wanted to show something different to normal browser-to-browser IM/Video calling via Matrix and had the idea to use the Rift at the last minute - and in fact it still wasn't working when we went on stage (turns out that iOS 8.1 introduces some quirks in the video capture API which were producing corrupt video). By switching from an iPhone 5S running iOS 8.1 to an iPad running iOS 6 we were able to turn the demo around in the nick of time and get it working live on stage (modulo a RGB<->BGR colourspace bug) just in time to win the award. Huge thanks to the jury for voting for us against the odds :D For those interested in displaying raw video straight onto the Oculus Rift (without using any head-mounted tracking), there's an OpenGL code snippet up at https://gist.github.com/ara4n/875b5e8b66be3617efb7.

iOS to Oculus Rift Telepresence

(Image credit to Victor Pascual Avila at Quobis)

Also, huge congratulations to Vladimir Beloborodov who won the Best Data Channel Award for hacking his Romotive telepresence robot to rendezvous via Matrix with his iPad, stream video via Google's WebRTC stack and control the robot's motion via the WebRTC Data Channel:

Vladimir Beloborodov

We're really excited to see other folks' Matrix projects out there winning prizes!