New Riot.im application has been delivered to the PlayStore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app. It replaces the previous app. More details here: https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-im-android-security-update-2b3f655ad739
François and Benoit were at AndroidMakers Paris on Tuesday and Wednesday. We’ve seen plenty of interesting conferences and come back with many ideas to improve Riot UX/UI/Implementation/testing/etc.
SAS device verification review is over, will be merged once we have the tagged OLM library.
olm 3.1.0 has been released. This release adds new functions to help with SAS-based key verification (a.k.a. emoji-based verification) and with cross-signing. The Python bindings are also now available on pypi, so you can install it using "pip install python-olm", though you need the olm library and development files installed first.
Spectral's redesign continues, featuring a beautiful responsive UI(not kirigami yet, sorry) and more functionalities. Legacy UIs such as the room detail panel are changed to fit into redesigned UI better. Basic room upgrade support is added, allowing you to switch between the old room and the new room. Room settings and user detail dialogs are added. You can also ignore users in the user detail dialog.
matrix-nsfw has been ported from Golang to Rust. The backend machine learning framework is also switched to Tensorflow, giving a major performance boost. For anyone that doesn't know what matrix-nsfw is, it is a bot-like utility that detects NSFW images in a room. The new repo is at https://gitlab.com/b0/matrix-nsfw-rust
If a room member is not visible on screen, updating their name doesn't require switching to the main UI thread
Apply formatting when viewing the json source of an event
Reuse GUI components to improve performance, update content of views instead of creating new ones
Use a hash set to avoid going through the list of room members in some cases * Move more of local storage into the database: names and avatars of users and rooms, room membership, recently used accounts, etc.
Placeholder avatars are made with GUI components and instead of generated bitmap images
Switch to gradle multi-project build to modularize
After switching from plaintext files to an embedded database, some components are still in the process of being rewritten, coming next week: load messages from server on demand when scrolling, if they are not yet stored in database; add support for invitations;
matrix-appservice-discord work has finally resumed! The PRs for both migrating the room and user store to SQL have been merged, and many awesome new things should follow up soon!
The reactions and edits API is taking shape, we’re making progress on our small homeserver setup, and we’re hunting a new set of device key management bugs that came to light in the absence of matrix.org.
We’ve been a bit disrupted these past few weeks, but work towards Synapse 1.0 continues and we’ll soon be ready to offer a release candidate.
Check out the new digs! We're happy with this newly deployed blog, and all the old and loveable content is right down there. If you find issues, let me know. You may remember Nad, from previous editions of Matrix Live - huge thanks to him for his work on the design and upkeep of this new deployment.
Due to the security incident, all GitHub access tokens for the Scalar GitHub integration were cleared. This means that if you have a GitHub bot in the channel and want to use the !github bot commands, you need to re-login to github via the integration manager menu. Note, existing webhooks are untouched and should work fine without re-authenticating.
From the matrix.org bridge team, we are resurrecting bridges as fast as possible. Currently running are the freenode, slack, gitter and gimpnet (now hosted on gnome.org) with more to come today and next week.
We have the snoonet and oftc irc bridges back. Mozilla is coming soon hopefully this weekend too!
A big release of Pattle has just been pushed to the F-droid repo! Changes include:
Display names are now shown
You can now click on chats and view them!
Messages are grouped by time and sender (see screenshots)
Add fancy transition animation and ripples to chat messages (see video)
Use Sentry for error reporting (only Android version and device model is sent, along with the stacktrace of the error)
Also, please note that if you have a matrix.org you probably have reinstall the app if you're logged in because of the recent matrix.org incident (because there's no logout button yet and no detection for invalidated access tokens)
There has actually been a release since, which includes:
Quaternion 0.0.9.4 RC3, the last one before the release that will happen in the nearest days, is out. Release notes can be found at https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion/releases/tag/0.0.9.4-rc3. Translators, you literally have hours to add your translations for 0.0.9.4!
I reimplemented the matrix sdk into Neo, so it works nicer. Colors and font look nicer (base16-tomorrow, Open Sans), and there's text message sending, with localecho!
I also fixed a bug where react would recycle displayname-components across rooms, attributing them to the wrong messages
a video at https://lain.haus/_matrix/media/v1/download/lain.haus/VfshWRfaNUnpGQbdkyYczxvd
it's been a long while, but I've finally come around to improving on matrix-registration
For those of you, who have forgotten what this project is about, it basically lets you invite people to your homeserver with tokens, e.g. https://homeserver.tld/register?token=DoubleWizardSky
This whole update was about making the project more user friendly.
I made a new default registration page that requires 0 setup and you can install the project right from pypi with pip, so you don't even need to clone the repo any longer.
check a live example here: https://chat.dmnd.sh/register
and to play around with the api you can can go over to the github page: https://zeratax.github.io/matrix-registration/demo.html?token=ColorWhiskeyExpand
channel: #matrix-registration:dmnd.sh
github: https://github.com/zeratax/matrix-registration
matrix-media-repo now has s3 (and s3-like) support, making it easier to archive older media or use minimal disk space. See the new datastores option in the config and the admin docs ( https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-media-repo/blob/master/docs/admin.md#datastore-management ) for more information.
Dimension has been updated to more safely handle when upstream integration managers (like Scalar) are offline. Instead of crashing or breaking in various ways, it'll report which integrations are not accessible.
As well, due to recent events, if you use matrix.org bots or bridges in Dimension then go the the admin section and log everyone out using the red button. Dimension caches upstream tokens and isn't smart enough to realize that they are no longer valid, which means they need clearing. Clients should automatically handle getting new tokens in the background.
Last week we carried on with Synapse 1.0 work, in particular server key signing validity, a config option to verify federation certificates to support MSC1711 and support for 3PID unbinding APIs (MSC1915). Outside of that we've been thinking about how to improve room upgrades for private rooms and landed the preparatory work for a refactor of the room directory.
Coming up next, we'll continue to bash out 1.0 blockers, Hawkowl has started work on optimising for small hosted homeservers, and anoa will be working on the new super fast room directory. Finally Erik has started work on aggregations support so clients will be able to offer things like edits and reactions ?
Dockerfile for sytest running against Dendrite approved. Close to being able to run Dendrite against sytest. Also using sytest's new test white/blacklist functionality to include a list of tests that Dendrite is known to pass in the repo. When people make new PRs that allow Dendrite to pass new tests, they can also append the names of the tests to the testfile to help automatically track Dendrite's improving progress. Look forward to seeing further progress post Synapse 1.0.
libQMatrixClient 0.5.1 is out! This is a minor release with bugfixes and small improvements, a base for Quaternion 0.0.9.4, RC of which is coming this weekend. Full release notes here
and to follow up:
Quaternion 0.0.9.4 Release Candidate is available for all those who don't need a "release" seal of approval to use applications. Get out, grab it, report bugs that could still sneak in: https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion/releases/tag/0.0.9.4-rc. A separate call out to translators - it's a great moment to teach Quaternion a few more phrases in your language!
This weekend I took a brief pause from doing matrix work, and then went back into it by finishing the feature set for the .NET Core Synchrotron. It's "feature complete" meaning all specced features of sync are in this branch, excluding legacy endpoints. There are a few bugs logged against it and it's really only useful as a super early test, while I fix some of the p1 bugs.
The federation sender continues to be reliable and stable, and we are prepping for the release of synapse 0.99.3 which made a few changes to the replication stream. For more info, please see https://github.com/turt2live/synapse-netcore-workers
Wilko has officially discontinued the previous version of Pattle, and is focused on their Flutter SDK and new version of Pattle based on it:
After some silence here but a lot of development, Pattle has now moved to Flutter. The new app is available in the same F-droid repository, you can just update. Note that you will have to log in again. If there are issues with updating, try removing the old app and installing the new one.
Also note that this version is still very basic and does not have all features of the old Pattle unfortunately. The reason that I chose to already replace it on the repo is that the old app will not receive updates anymore.
The current features are logging in and an overview of all chats. What is new is that data is now stored locally, so you won't have to do an initial sync everytime you open the app (which was the case with old app). What's also new is that I've decided to use more red, because.. I like red.
There is still a lot to do! Please notify me of anything that you think is missing, even though some things may be obvious (sorting chats based on date, chat avatars), some may not be as obvious to me!
If you'd like to contribute, the new repo is here. Note that many contributions will probably start at the SDK level. Pattle uses my own Dart SDK, which you can find here.
There is at the moment a very specific bug in Flutter, where on Android 7.1 with release builds, the app crashes when building a list widget. If you use Android 7.1 (like me) and you crash after logging in, that's the reason. It seems I can't do anything about it, sorry.
Aqueous now comes with room categories and history messages support.
Also, a lot of code refactoring is going on to change the backend store from plain json file to sqlite, which should improve the performance a lot.
The room is at #libaqueous:encom.eu.org
Three releases this week, to fix several bugs with the new EventStreamServiceX, and to fix issue with the Jitsi conference call (Riot.im 0.8.29). FDroid users should receive the upgrade soon.
Users are happy with the new notifications!
Valere is still working on SAS, we are reaching the end :).
I'll be writing a Helm chart for 1.0 as well, just haven't had time to do so yet. I need to update all the references to TLS as well, as that's supposed to be left to kube-lego or cert-manager for a modern install
Following up on last week's effort, a number of issues on the Matrix federation tester, both on the backend and the frontend side, have been fixed, including fixing certificate validity checks, not following CNAME records in SRV records, fixing display of the SRV lookup in the UI, preventing some crashes, and a few more.
All outstanding issues on both the federation tester's backend and its frontend that could have preventing people to test efficiently how their server is performing in the context of Synapse's 1.0 release have now been fixed and deployed on https://matrix.org/federationtester/.
A few bounties have been added to Synapse and Riot recently to encourage community members to work on those projects. Although they aren't large enough to actually pay for development, I believe they can serve as a small push to help an already interested developer justify spending some time working on these projects.
pantalaimon has been seen in the wild, even appearing to run on Android. We'll get a little closer to the project and see how it's going in a future edition.
new, alpha quality, matrix python client for asyncio and with support for e2e encryption: https://github.com/SFTtech/aiomatrix Polishing is needed but the basics do work already :)
Neil, Synapse overseer, reports on the acceleration towards 1.0:
We have much improved sytest support for Synapse worker mode, Hawkowl landed a brand new super fast super shiny user directory implementation, Brendan fixed a bunch of niggles in the federation tester and we finally got to the bottom of our sync caching bug that obscured accepting invites (thanks richvdh for sticking with it). Erik solved our presence spamming bug and anoa fixed some LDAP auth bugs and submitted a PR for certificate checking - one of our final blockers for Synapse 1.0. For all the latest checkout out our latest release candidate 0.99.3rc1.
Next week, we'll ship 0.99.3, we'll be looking at server key validity periods, adding a 3PID unbind API and starting work on tuning low powered Synapse installations. https://www.arewereadyyet.com/ is still rising so keep banging to everyone you know that they ensure their federation certificates are valid.
Pantalaimon is a new project that acts as a reverse proxy for clients to connect to. Once a client is connected Pantalaimon handles end to end encryption for the client transparently.
The project is only a week old but already at a working prototype phase. A demo can be found here: http://webmshare.com/play/Qn4wg
This is a huge gain! Use of this project, as you will see in the video, permits any Matrix client to support End-to-End encryption of messages, by handling encryption/decryption in a daemon rather than in the client.
The matrix Construct server has made significant progress this week implementing the 1.0 specification and is very close to a 1.0 release! Special thanks to our star tester Yan Minari and expert Matrix consultants Tulir and Max and C++ developers Jason of Zemos and Mujx of nheko for all their hard work to make this happen. The Construct now fully supports IPv6 and is ready to participate in fully end-to-to-end encrypted ipv6 networks like #yggdrasil:matrix.org and #cjdns:matrix.org. This week also saw additions for .well-known support, m.fully_read and even DNS caching inside a matrix room shared between servers (which is really cool if you ask me).
The Construct is written in C++ for maximum performance and scalability. It is the first fully federating server after the Synapse reference implementation. Your contributions in code and participation are essential to bring Construct to its upcoming release; get involved at https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and in #zemos-test:matrix.org.
We've been upgrading and optimising our Jitsi instance so people should see more reliable video conference calls, especially if they avoid connecting from Firefox over poor connections. We've been squashing scroll jumps (where the timeline pops out of position unexpectedly due to images loading, etc.). We've come up with a radical reimplementation of the timeline (which should be imperceptible, except it doesn't jump) - try it out on https://riot.im/develop now.
Bruno, who has been working on scroll functional for Riot deserves a call-out - scrolling in new Riot web works great, and he may now be the most qualified dev on scroll: anchor outside of Mozilla or Google…
You can now get all Riot updates from #riot-web-announcements:matrix.org, the official room of Riot web announcements! You can especially get this update, which was also featured on Twitter:
Attention Riot Web Admins! We reset Scalar tokens to address a potential security vuln. with some clients - if you run your own Riot instance please upgrade to at least v1.0.4 to keep using integrations (widgets, sticker picker, any bots and bridges configured through Scalar).
Another case of UTD (https://github.com/vector-im/riot-ios/issues/2320) has been fixed. Some logs have been added to track push notifications that disabled themselves. SAS verification implementation is still in progress.
UTD = "Unable to Decrypt", messages as seen in Riot
Rework of EventStreamService, to fix many issues (crash) reported by users. The feature is available on the develop branch.
Also we are trying to upgrade Jitsi library, to fix other errors reported by users.
SAS verification implementation is still in progress.
Also, you may have already seen the use of Android 9-style notifications, featuring "Mark as read" + "Quick reply" buttons. This addition has started to make Riot Android my client of choice for burning through notifying rooms.
Quick note that nheko (v 0.6.3) is now packaged for FreeBSD as well. The C++ code was fine (we use Clang, that does trip up some people) but I have Opinions about the CMake code (in particular that the find code for nlohmann/json.hpp, lmdb++.h and tweeny.h could use a lot of work -- if I feel perky I may come up with a PR). Thanks for the good work!
Black Hat has been using Dart and Flutter this week, and is making progress with an SDK and reference client:
I am trying to use libaqueous(Matrix Dart SDK) to create a cross-platform matrix client for Android and iOS. Almost nothing works except Already a significant number of client features are available: login/logout, room list, basic timeline and message posting
Flutter is quite good for rapidly building mobile apps. ? Strong-typed json serialization/deserialization in Dart is a bit difficult at first, but I managed to solve that. the repo is here, the SDK is here, and the room for discussion is at #libaqueous:encom.eu.org
I chatted with Kitsune, maintainer of libQMatrixClient, Quaternion and Spec Core Team member. We talked about the history and future of these projects, platform preferences, the importance of decentralisation and more.
Huge thanks to everyone who has helped increase the number of ‘1.0 ready' synapse installs. If you don't know what this means, see our blog. https://arewereadyyet.com reports > 60% adoption on a per server basis, and high 90s on a per user basis. We are now really close to being able to ship a 1.0 release candidate and start the 2 week countdown before releasing 1.0 proper.
This week we have focussed on performance, richvdh has been working on batching of outgoing read receipts and hawkowl shipped a much more performant implementation of user search. Erik has been putting the state compressor through its paces, he saw one room compress down to 1% of its original size. Andrew has been focusing on ensuring spec compliance on various Synapse endpoints and is currently looking at some bugs in the federation tester.
It's the most up to date version straight from the pipeline, so not necessarily stable.
You can now scroll up and load history
As part of the project, Wilko also announced the intention to create a Dart SDK:
I'm currently working on a Matrix SDK for Dart, which will be used for the Pattle rewrite in Flutter.
The reason for this is outlined here. To summarize: My goal for Pattle is to release for not only Android but also iOS and web, with a single code base. Other reasons include that Android native development is just bad, and the fact that I'm not too happy with the official Matrix Android SDK design and documentation.
I will maintain and also add some features to the current version of Pattle, to try things out. The Flutter version will replace the native one once the features are in sync.
Click on the smiley face to the right of where you type messages then the Edit button in the top right.
Paste the URL of the sticker pack into the box and click "Add Stickerpack".
Start using your new stickers.
These instructions are also available at https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-dimension/blob/master/docs/custom_stickerpacks.md as is the admin/operator guide for running your own sticker bot (you're not stuck with using t2bot.io unless you want to be). Custom sticker packs are still beta while the proposals to share this with the wider Matrix ecosystem are still works in progress. This serves as a proof of concept to see how crazy of an idea it is to have stickerpacks-as-rooms (yes, they're just plain Matrix rooms under the hood) and what needs ironing out before moving ahead with the MSC.
Brendan has created a notification profile manager:
Over the past few weeks, I grew a bit fed up of always having to turn on and off every notification rule each time I'm having a slight change in what I'm working on or depending on what mood I was in (e.g. want to focus only on work-related stuff and nothing else, don't want to hear about work at all, somewhere in the middle, etc.), so I built a notification profile manager for Matrix. It's available both as a command line interface or a Go package in case people want to build on top of it.
It allows one to take a snapshot of their current notifications settings and save that as a profile, so that this profile can be applied later. It also allows one to delete a profile or list the existing profiles (more features to be added as time goes by). In order to make the whole thing interoperable with other projects building on top of the Go package, it also uses the user's account data on the user's Matrix homeserver to store profiles.
F0x has recommenced development on the Matrix client Neo:
After discussion following https://cyberia.social/@foks/101785513826000032 I've resumed development on Neo. Suggestions are very much welcomed on the pad and mastodon thread I'm implementing components one by one now, with just mocked events. Actual Matrix integration will come when the gui components are ready.
Neo is now partly integrated with matrix-js-sdk because I grew tired of having to write my own mock events. There's a basic authentication flow, with 0 error handling, and parsing of m.text and m.image events
mautrix-telegram 0.5.0 was released after I finally fixed the bug that was causing the bridge database to lock up. It turned out to be a single line of ORM usage that I had missed while converting everything to use SQLAlchemy Core.
The full release notes are at https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-telegram/releases/tag/v0.5.0.
I also released v0.5.1 to fix a bug that made the DBMS migration script not work and Python 3.5 compatibility. I wouldn't recommend using Python 3.5 though, I'm going to drop support for it some time after Debian 10 is released
I love that you've got Amazon with their Alexa messaging, Apple in their own bubble with iMessage, Facebook doing chat 3-ways and Google trying 50 ways to do chat. And that's before you even get into things like Slack, Discord, Telegram, Riot, Line, WeChat etc etc. And then the current hot way to chat is in a document...
I mean, how much money is being invested in trying to create the perfect chat solution?
That's the news, if you have something to say, or something to add, then you should go to #twim:matrix.org and share it. If you have other projects to discuss, come share them. If you'd prefer to come quietly, my door is always open: @benpa:matrix.org.
This week you're stuck with me, but I'm chatting to Ryan, who works on Riot web. Having previously worked at Mozilla, Ryan has a LOT of interesting things to say about Firefox, the browser market, the importance of decentralisation, Matrix being GREAT, and more.
It's all about 1.0 for the Synapse gang this week. This means performance improvements across the board in the form of read receipt batching, user directory (room directory coming soon!) and rate limiting on log in and registration APIs.
Brendan shipped the low bandwidth CoAP proxy we demo'd at FOSDEM
As well as a bunch of spec implementation projects to ensure that Synapse (and Sydent) are ready for Synapse 1.0.
Turn-of-phrase of the week from Half-Shot ("make it more performant and less crashy"):
synapse-netcore-workers is progressing as strongly as ever. This week has mainly been supporting a couple of users trying to use the fed sender, and also trying to make it more performant and less crashy. I've been using it solidly for two weeks now, and by and large it's been working nicely :)
Black Hat has been working on Cortex, a similar project in Rust:
Support for replication protocol in Cortex is mostly complete. A federation sender worker implementation is being worked on. If anyone is interested or wants to contribute, please go to #cortex:encom.eu.org
Wilko announced Pattle, a Matrix client for Android:
Hey all, I've been working on my Matrix Android app, Pattle! The goal of Pattle is to be an easy to use app for Matrix, with it's design inspired by popular apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Development happens here, and contributions are encouraged! The app is not currently suited for daily use, but some functionality is there, such as registering, logging in and viewing chats.
Currently it's an Android only app using the official Matrix Android SDK, but the plan is to support iOS and web too, in the future.
There's also a sort of design document available, stating how Pattle differs from standard Matrix apps and what it's goals are. The intent of the design document is to make development easier later on for other platforms
Quaternion 0.0.9.4 beta 2 (too many numbers? That too shall pass) is out, with bugfixes and translation updates. Notably, Quaternion won't crash on upgraded rooms in some cases, and won't cry in #gsoc:matrix.org and other v3 rooms. Translators are still strongly encouraged to push forward - due to all the features and fixes, there are many untranslated strings across the board! Also, some bugfixes are still in order before we can call the release RC, and some of them are really easy - so if you'd like to contribute, it's a great time to start!
iOS released 2 times. Last release was to fix an issue with invalid scalar token.
Review of one PR from the community for iOS10 notifications.
Started implementing device verification with emoji.
We've released v0.8.25 on Thursday, containing refresh of invalid scalar token, and some bugfixes. Links on m.notice messages are now clickable again. Started implementing device verification with emoji.
I just realized that I haven't had lazy loading activated by default in the Ruby SDK, despite having had lazy loading code in place since ages back, so now that's going to be the default value going forward.
Further:
I started hacking - just a couple of hours or so ago - on a notification sender for The Foreman, a server orchestration system. So it can forward notifications to Matrix. https://github.com/ananace/foreman_notification_send
If you're using, or considering using, The Foreman for orchestration this may be very useful.
matrix-appservice-bridge got a 1.8.0 release last night, featuring automatic handling of room upgrades for all your room upgrade needs. Providing your bridge uses the RoomStore as designed, it's literally a few lines to enable :). Changelog here
What is this? A matrix-appservice-irc release? No, it's a release candidate. Announcing that 0.12.0-rc1 is now out and about for folks to play with. More IRC updates to come in the future :)
I wrote a small bot that takes a kick/ban policy from room state from all rooms it's a member of and tries to enact that policy. In practice that means it applies a regex to all MXIDs and tries to kick/ban them based on that. It's been a request of TravisR , source code is available at https://gitlab.com/jcgruenhage/banhammer, documentation is still lacking but will hopefully soon be added
So that's all I have to say! I hope you enjoyed this edition of This Week in Matrix, and whether you did or you didn't, I'd love too hear from you in #twim:matrix.org. If you have Matrix news to share, that's the place to come and do so!
Folks, in the run up to Synapse 1.0, if you are running your own homeserver now would be an excellent time to check that your TLS certificates are up to date. Point your server name at https://matrix.org/federationtester/ and if there are errors check our handy FAQ on how to fix it. If you do not have valid TLS certificates Synapse 1.0 will refuse to federate with you.
benpa has put together a federation checker to quantify how many homeservers are 1.0 ready - https://www.arewereadyyet.com/ - It currently stands at 50.5% let's try and get that to 60% over the weekend.
Aside from all that, the team have been working on preparing for Synapse 1.0, you can track our progress here. We promise not to just land 1.0 out of the blue - we'll give everyone a 2 week warning to give stragglers a chance to get their certificates in order.
And this week we have Neil and Erik talking about this in more detail on Matrix Live
ma1uta has been working on Jeon - Java interfaces to the various Matrix APIs - and is now getting ready to start work on a homeserver. He was previously asking for a name for this project, but might now have settled on "JeonServer".
First Release Candidate of the Jeon Project with upcoming Client-Server API 0.5, Server-Server API 0.1.1, Application API 0.1, Identity API 0.2 and Push API 0.1.
Also the RC of the jmsdk has been prepared with Java Matrix Client for Client-Server API 0.5.
Changes in the C2S: Added the m.push_rules event, removed presence list methods and other minor fixes.
Added S2S API of the 0.1.1 version.
I prepared a very simple page https://ma1uta.github.io/ with links to the swagger schemas (json and yaml) for all Matrix API which generated from the Jeon code.
There's a lot of progress, a few endpoints and features have been implemented this week such as Room Tags and all of the spec features for /createRoom. Most of the progress has been with testing and bugfixes thanks to Yan Minari, and tulir and mujx.
We've fixed several interactions with synapse such as invite accept/deny and synapse's ability to join and leave construct created rooms without any issues.
Lastly and most important, we've generated an official issues list thanks again to our star tester Yan Minari available here https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct/issues
pztrn has created a new mechanism for relaying apps that use Slack webhooks into Matrix:
To everyone who wonders how to connect his application to Matrix (at least for notifications of some kind) - use OpenSAPS! It just reached v0.1.0. OpenSAPS stands for Open Slack API Server and able to retransmit messages from applications (like Gitlab or everything that can send data to Slack) to somewhere else. Right now these "somewhere else" is a Telegram (with HTTP proxy support) and Matrix! Written in Golang to ensure minimal memory footprint. Take a look at https://gitlab.com/pztrn/opensaps Tested with Gitlab and Gitea but should work with almost any service. Join #opensaps:pztrn.name to talk with developers or get help. BTW, there is OpenSAPS instance in our room that transmits everything from gitlab.com into room! (almost) immediately after 0.1.0 comes 0.1.1, with fixed URLs parsing and fixed inability to login into servers which use .well-known for delegation. It should work [with other webhooks]. If something strange happens there is also a possibility to write own parser to make everything work :)‚ Tested with Gitlab and Gitea ATM. Share application names that work, I'll start to make a list of them. :D
🔗matrix-puppet-bridge: matrix-puppet-slack and matrix-puppet-hangouts updates
Minivector, a minimalistic fork of riot-android had a new release last week, getting rid of a few more unused dependencies. This brings the final apk size down to 13mb vs riot android's 25mb. This work was done by @hrjet:matrix.org. The project room is here: #miniVectorAndroid:matrix.org
🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, now with Discord and email templates
The volume of discussion about installing/configuring Synapse and other Matrix-related components is like a subculture in itself. Standing tall within this is Slavi's matrix-docker-ansible-deploy collection of Ansible playbooks. They're a great way to quickly and reliably get a Synapse instance running.
between chasing bugs in Quaternion 0.0.9.4 beta (translators, your help is hugely needed to catch up with new and updated strings) there happens almost literal bikeshedding in #qmatrixclient:matrix.org, under an excuse of discussing The Universal Algorithm to Colour Usernames. Join the fun!
Bifrost is now starting to comfortably support gatewaying. For those that don't know, gateways allow a remote user to participate in the matrix network without prior bridging, it's very fancy. The latest changes are that XMPP clients can now ask for the public room list by querying the bridge component. There is a video on this using the Yaxim XMPP client on Android (Credit to Ge0rG). Come chat with us in #bifrost:half-shot.uk
You can check out the video of the bridge in operation here:
Spectral development now continues after a short break. The new "material design" has been merged into master, along with a few bug fixes. I plan to work on Kirigami port in the following two weeks.
I made a room for !pinging echo maubots: #ping:maunium.net. The room has a bunch of echo bots, currently on maunium.net, c.mau.dev and matrix.vgorcum.com. It also has a new maubot plugin called pingstat, which collects the pong data and makes a leaderboard website. The website is linked to the room as a widget.
Not much news to report on the netcore-workers other than it's maturing and we have nice things now like logging, metrics and a docker image you can run at home. I'm running the federation sender fulltime on half-shot.uk to dogfood it and will announce when I think it's good for general consumption :)
Related: Black Hat is investigating a similar project in Rust. Anyone interested in that please do go chat, and take a look at the repo they've created.
🔗matrix-wug, IPA rendering bot, gets support for cherokee
This is "script" or written language has a very interesting story behind it, where the creator of it actually couldn't read and write. Regardless, he wanted to write down his language, and developed his own writing system. The characters look a lot like latin characters because he tried to imitate the characters of a bible. Just a fun history lesson!
since weechat-matrix is a bit involved to install, I create a dockerfile that takes care of it: https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix/pull/60 . And people allergic to docker can look inside to check the steps (just reading the readme doesn't give a full picture)
Modular.im is a Matrix-as-a-SaaS offering. It's suitable for users who want the benefits of having their own Matrix homeserver, but don't want to host and run one.
There are some new announcements this week:
Today we are pleased to announce that you can now customise your Modular hosted Riot at the touch of a button, through the Modular host admin interface. Better yet, this is available to all Modular customers at no additional cost. Today we are also launching a proof of concept for purchasing additional content via the Modular integration manager. For the initial experiment we're offering a set of "snazzy", limited edition Matrix stickers for the princely sum of $0.50. These are digital versions of the Matrix and Riot hexagons that some of you may have seen in real life.
decred.org are an organisation concerned with blockchain technology, and they also use Matrix for their communications! They now have a stickerpack available in Riot, so if you'd like to use their stickers you can add the pack and get going with blockchain-related memes.
If you have a stickerpack you'd like to see included, please let me know.
I've made a room for anyone interested in drums and percussion. Acoustic, Electronic, Played or Programmed, anything goes as long as it's rhytm related. The room is focused on both playing/programming drums and equipment.
There was a somewhat longstanding bug that affected a number of users: often manifesting as unexpected and frustrating "Unable to decrypt" messages - this has now been fixed, take a look at https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6838
No Ben this week, apparently he is allowed to go on holiday from time to time. Also no Matrix Live because we are terrible people - bring back Ben, that's what I say.
Quaternion (master branch, and upcoming v0.0.9.4) can now open rooms by their aliases or ids upon pressing Ctrl+O, as long as those rooms are already in your room list (opening arbitrary public rooms will come in later versions). You can even paste matrix.to URIs for users (will open direct chat) and rooms in the same dialog. Navigation to known rooms inside Quaternion also works.
weechat-matrix's e2e support is really impressive (via matrix-nio and python-olm). It can only read rather than send right now, but otherwise looks to be massively on the right track. It even does fingerprint-based verification!
We shipped 0.99.2 this week, it's a point release containing all the usual bug fixes and perf improvements. We have also been taking a look at our docs and trying to improve where we can.
Hawkowl has spent some time improving CI so that we don't get queued up for hours waiting for builds (woo).
Admins - your weekly reminder that if you've not already done so, you must ensure the TLS certificate on your federation endpoints is no longer self signed - see our handy guide for all the details.
Sets rooms invite-only when they're touched, instead of relying on others not knowing the room ID (thanks to https://matrix.to/#/@AndrewJDR:matrix.org , from all of us who federate on the homeservers we use to bridge!)
Matrix rooms representing remote rooms being joinable by anyone who knows the room ID (which is generated, at least in part, from the remote room ID in all the matrix-puppet-bridge applications) was a big deficiency, and it's finally resolved. It wasn't known whether or not we could do this, and have our ghost users still be able to join the rooms (they need to be invited instead of just joining themselves), until it was attempted and tested in a few of the bridge applications. Because it is a big deal, new minor versions of matrix-puppet-slack, matrix-puppet-facebook, matrix-puppet-hangouts, matrix-puppet-signal, matrix-puppet-imessage and matrix-puppet-groupme, bumping the matrix-puppet-bridge version to 1.17.0, have been released.
matrix-media-repo has alpha-quality support for s3 (and s3-like services) on the travis/s3 branch. Intrepid testers are encouraged to give it a shot, and report bugs. Caution: may upload your cat.
Implementation of .well-known support (SDK and Riot)
Minor change on some colors of the themes (link, home badges)
Many issue will be fixed regarding linkification
KeysBackup: improvement on recovery process: importing keys step is 8 times faster, and user get more feedback during the process which can take several seconds
We will prepare a new release for the beginning of next week.
PlayStore new descriptions have been updated for the following languages: Bulgarian, German, English (US), French, Hungarian, Russian and Chinese (Taiwan).
Aaron Raimist has made some updates to Riotic, which was a good chance for me to revisit it. It works nicely and is a great alternative to the Electron version of Riot. I also like being able to use https://riot.im/develop as an app.
I've slightly tweaked Joakim Ahlen's Riot wrapper for macOS, riotic, which uses the native WKWebView instead of Electron. I updated the app to be sandboxed so it has very limited access to your system. I also updated the interface to follow macOS conventions and updated it to use the latest version of Swift.
riotic does have some limitations though. Riot doesn't support VoIP on Safari so riotic can't support VoIP either and WKWebView doesn't support notifications as far as I can tell. Right now it uses a really old Riot icon, maybe I'll ask about using one of these community made icons https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/pull/4474.
It does have some advantages over the official Riot Electron app though. The app is only ~12 MB compared to Riot which is ~180 MB, it also uses significantly less RAM. riotic also allows you to pick what Riot URL to use so you can run /develop as a desktop app.
The synapse-netcore-worker project has continued to evolve. You can now federate with other servers using the federation sender implementation. It supports everything except device lists at the moment, so it supports PDUs/EDUs and can just be connected up to one of your existing synapse instances. It's not been battletested enough yet to be put in production (hence no dockerfile), but it's very fast. Oh and for those of you who don't know, "synapse-netcore-worker" is Travis's .NET implementation of synapse workers, the room can be found at #synapse-netcore-workers:t2bot.io.
If you're as uninitiated as I was three days ago, this project is a replaceable worker component for Synapse, which just happens to be written in .NET.
To give an update to the earlier exploits of synapse-netcore-worker's federation sender, we've still got a few more things to iron out before we can suggest people use it actively. The hit list of remaining things to fix is in https://github.com/turt2live/synapse-netcore-workers/pull/5
That Ben guy eh? When he's not swanning off on holiday and having fun, he's writing super groovy guides to getting whatsapp bridging up and running. You don't even need a real device. Check it out.
Just merged the protocol split branch I've been working on for the Ruby SDK, including a first PoC for an application service base. Not tested in any actual use as of yet, but expect Things TM in the next release.
in project koma, a new bot picsay is created. It like the classic easter-egg program cowsay, but it uses actual photos instead of ASCII art. It configured to use any image just by editing a json file. So you can run your own version for fun.
I took some time to hack on Tchap again. This time I disabled virus scanning of thumbnails and downloads in Tchap to be able to see avatars. I also wrote a non-scanning virus scanner API implementation to be able to see files, pictures and videos that are sent. The updated Tchap can be found at https://github.com/14mRh4X0r/tchap-android, the virus scanner API implementation at https://git.snt.utwente.nl/14mRh4X0r/tchap-media-scanner.
Dandellion'sWug now supports Inuktitut Syllabics and Iñupiatun Orthography. In the bot's own words.
Hi I can help you translate X-SAMPA, Z-SAMPA to IPA, and transcribe into proto-indo european notation! Use (x/z/p) together with either / or [] as delimiters x/"hEloU/ z[or` 5aIk DIz] p/mreghnom/
I also can transcribe to Inuktitut Syllabics like this: i[tusaumaqattautijjutinik aulattijiit]. Find my source at https://github.com/Dali99/matrix-wug
Aaron Raimist has created a new room for Formula 1 fans:
Now that the Formula 1 season is getting underway it's probably a good time to announce @CIA:matrix.org's new(ish) room: #f1:matrix.org When this blog post is released there will be 16 days left before the first race of the 2019 season There was previously a Formula 1 room but it was merged with Snoonet's IRC channel which tends to be extremely busy. This is a matrix only room.
That's it folks, your normal Ben orientated programming will continue next week. Bring back Ben, bring back Ben.
The remainder of 0.6.x is expected to be bug fixes. This includes bug fixes in mtxclient as well as nheko. 0.7.0 will be the next feature release. The end goal here is to add some of the capabilities that people have been requesting, and other things that people haven't been requesting. AFTER 0.7.0 releases, I will then focus on updating the encryption to include more than just text messages.
kitsune has been writing the codes this week, Quaternion now supports room upgrades and more:
Master branch of Quaternion can now store access token in your secure storage/keychain, better integrating into frameworks of GNOME and KDE, as well as macOS and Windows. Also, you can see the room version and upgrade rooms in Quaternion (just like Matthew said on FOSDEM ;) ) - this feature is enabled by libQMatrixClient, so other clients are welcome to support room versions/upgrades too!
All this is within the work on the upcoming release of libQMatrixClient 0.5 and Quaternion 0.0.9.4 - stay tuned!
Oh we will. Spectral support for these new features when?
Just tagged and pushed a new version (0.0.4) of the Ruby SDK, since I've completely forgotten to do that for a while now.
What's new?
A whole bunch of small stuff I did, mostly just additional exposed methods and parameters, and some fixed issues as well. I did add support for HS URL discovery using both SRV and .well-known though, which I think is probably the largest new feature.
As if all this wasn't enough, a room on Matrix!
Created a discussion room for the Ruby SDK - since it seems like there are now people who have actually used it apart from me; #ruby-matrix-sdk:kittenface.studio
Fix txnId generation that made sending messages unreliable. Work around a bug in OkHttp that crashed the dispatcher thread when the server certificate was not received in time.
Good thing to fix! Here's a screenshot of Continuum-desktop, the client from koma:
>
yuforia continues:
Fix text processing in the bot avecho, feel free to try it out in #koma-im:matrix.org
mxisdv1.3.1 is out. It is a maintenance release that fixes a set of regressions following the changes in v1.3.0 to massively improve performance. If you haven't updated to the v1.3 branch, now is the time!
Over the past three weeks Construct has made rapid progress with covering the Matrix 1.0 specification! Last week we implemented room version 1 and room version 2 authentication rules. This week we implemented device support and management, and have nearly wrapped up successful End-To-End Encryption testing. The Construct is a community-driven server implementation written in C++ for maximum performance. To all experienced C++ developers out there: we need your contributions to accelerate and test the 1.0 release! Please check out https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and stop by #test:zemos.net / #zemos-test:matrix.org today!
Make the c++ code less heavy, we should focus on speed
Offload js code to direct qml binding, with this i mean instead of having ablock if-else code that modifies qml object that runs on component load, we do this directly in qml: see 0a800fc and https://github.com/uMatriks/uMatriksblob/0a800fcdc0af4fa2e08526dbff88e06bcb591779/uMatriks/componentsChatItem.qml as an example for a cleaner code
Make all ui depended calls async, we should NEVER block ui
Offload heavy js logic to c++
Cleaner UI, with less crust
Async everything
Merge our WIP call support
Finish impl of call support (maybe move to a standalone webrtc module)
We linked to the announcement last week, and have been using it for even longer, but somehow I missed a great labs feature that shipped with Riot 1.0: "room breadcrumbs", which you can enable from the Labs page of Riot settings. This gives you a series of quick links with the history of rooms you were most recently in. So if you're like me, clicking between rooms all day, you can get where you're going a little faster.
There is no big news about mautrix-whatsapp this week, other than that I installed it on my own server and found that it works really really well. I'd love to switch to this as a main interface for my less-decentralised friends, but like others, I've been stung by this issue in an upstream project. If there are go-fans reading (and I know there are), I wonder if it's an issue which can be fixed?
A tidy little article on "non-centralised" applications. Article by Jontheniceguy helps pin down some of the terminology around decentralisation and the like. https://jon.sprig.gs/blog/post/1041
All good things must come to an end - and here we are!
Matrix is getting a lot of attention recently (has it been on the front page of HN every day this week? I remember that I used to be excited seeing that happen), and seeing a lot of growth as well.
If you have something to say here, something to add, come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org - I love that this is a supportive and engaged project ecosystem, so come share what you have!
We also have Synapse v0.99.1.1 available, as the race to Synapse v1.0 gets closer and closer and closer!
Brendan also said, regarding low-bandwidth:
Some of the week has been spent finalising the components used in the low-bandwidth demo we did at FOSDEM. This required polishing some internal developments, which are now almost ready to be published to the wide world! This should happen in the next few days so stay tuned :)
If you're following Matrix much at all, you will surely have seen it by now: Riot, the most popular client, has announced the v1.0 milestone. I won't reiterate the features and improvements here, but do check out the blog post, or just head over to https://riot.im/app and see for yourself!
Particularly exciting is the new encryption verification process, involving sharing a list of emojis out-of-band:
thank you @matrixdotorg@RiotChat - with the new update the office is full of people yelling names of emoji at each other
Since we haven't featured their work here at all I wanted to give some space to poljar. They've been working on a Weechat-Matrix protocol script, but as part of this project they created a new Matrix client library, matrix-nio, "designed according to sans I/O principles".
As if this wasn't enough! python-olm is a library providing Python bindings for Olm (enabling E2E encryption for Matrix.)
FluffyChat is a pure QML Matrix client, designed to be used on smartphones running Ubuntu Touch. Krille, the author is working on:
boring refactoring stuff :-( at the moment to prepare everything for e2e encryption work
. . .which seems to me not boring at all - we can expect, in the next few months, another Matrix Client with E2EE support, and on mobile!
In my role as editor of this particular blog post, I enjoy certain luxuries that others might envy. For example, today, I tried a new preview build of FluffyChat. This I installed on my barely-repaired OnePlus One running Ubuntu Touch 16.04.
Over the past week, Fractal has adapted its main view and room settings views for mobile phones, and implemented long-press for right-clicks on messages for touch devices. It's also received some changes in the backend to use the serde_derive Rust crate instead of parsing JSON by hand.
mxisdv1.3.0 is out! This release brings the massive performance improvements, bug fixes and enhancements. This release also marks the two years anniversary of the project. Thank you to all our users for your undying support!
a new bot avecho is created using the koma-library. It's a simple bot that echos text messages prefixed with avecho, but renders it into an image and include the sender's avatar.
More improvements to the .NET sdk, to make it stable in this 0.4.0 world. To that end, I've written a room archiver app (for moving "old" rooms into a archive tag without removing them) and a simple caching project for bridges https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-cache. Progress as always can be followed in #dotnet:half-shot.uk
QMatrixClient project has been busy merging PRs from contributors (close to tray and middle-click in room list and user list, to mention a couple) and streamlining the translation process before the upcoming releases of libQMatrixClient 0.5 and Quaternion 0.0.9.4. At the same time the feature branch to support room versions and room upgrades is at an advanced stage; expect the features to land in master next week.
Linda has been working on new Debian package called matrix-archive-keyring:
I've paused porting Synapse to OpenBSD this week, while I attempt to both fix and revert some security issues caused by sudo apt-key add for Matrix.org and Riot.im packages for Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution users. matrix-org/synapse PR #4609 was my first attempt to fix the problem, however I fell short this time in ease-of-use and my implementation had other issues. (Read: The repo-key.asc downloaded from Matrix.org Debian repository should go to /usr/share/keyrings, and must not be added by apt-key add or added to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d directly. I attempted the latter with my first PR; but that would've allowed the Matrix.org signing key to also be used to verify packages from Debian's main repositories. Yikes!) As my second attempt, I'm now creating a new Debian package called matrix-archive-keyring. There's multiple things this package intends to do:
A post-install script to remove any previously added Matrix.org package signing keys from /etc/apt/trusted.gpg. (This is the file apt-key add most commonly uses, and the most commonly found bad advice on the Internet.)
Convert repo-key.asc to a de-armorized .gpg format, understood better by apt(8). (Essentially, gpg --dearmor.)
Install the converted .gpg key to /usr/share/keyrings.
Make sure apt(8) uses the newly added key for Matrix.org repository only?
Deliver any updates to repo-key.asc directly to you via apt upgrade. Your operating system might then also do it automatically for you if unattended-upgrades(8) is installed on your system. ?
Make sure everything goes away when this keyring package is uninstalled. No more sudo sh -c 'apt-key del C35EB17E1EAE708E6603A9B3AD0592FE47F0DF61; rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrix-org.list to get rid of the repository.
I have one more interesting enhancement to disclose. We can ask you with debconf if you want to install deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian $(lsb_release -cs) main to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrix-org.list while you're installing the new keyring with apt install matrix-archive-keyring. You'll most likely notice the difference in install instructions, as a result of this package. Before and after:
# After
sudo apt install matrix-archive-keyring
sudo sh -c 'apt update && apt install matrix-synapse-py3
If you are a Debian or Ubuntu user and Synapse homeserver operator using Matrix.org repositories, I'll be towncrying when this package becomes available as much as I can. All you should need to do then is apt install matrix-archive-keyring and it should patch the security holes in your operating system if you've formerly installed packages from Matrix.org or Riot.im! (The command may change a bit, because next Debian operating system release "Buster" has entered soft-freeze just today (2019-02-12) and not accepting new packages into that release.) PS: I'm at #debian-matrix:matrix.org, please come talk to us if Debian packaging interests you!
For the eager early testers not afraid of building from source, matrix-archive-keyring version 2015.12.09+debian0.10 is available for early testing (attached).
# Something like this!
sudo apt install devscripts
tar -xfvJ matrix-archive-keyring_2015.12.09+debian0.10.tar.xz
cd matrix-archive-keyring_2015.12.09+debian0.10
debuild -us -uc
sudo dpkg -i dpkg -i ../matrix-archive-keyring_2015.12.09+debian0.10_all
Please follow Debian Bug#922155 for updates. Debian binary packages will be available later sometime this/next week from Debian's unstable distribution (contrib), if all goes well and there are no remaining Debian policy violations or serious bugs.
Gridepo, as a Matrix Homeserver, is gaining basic support for Matrix Client API. We have basic login, room creation, message sending and sync working! A little screen recording of the progress can be viewed here for live action with Riot. As a reminder, Gridepo is a clean rewrite of mxhsd.
This is not usable yet outside of a dev environment but we should have a first usable version with federation in a couple of weeks!
Ananace
yuforia
Willem
andrewsh
