A critical security vulnerability impacting several popular Matrix clients and libraries was recently discovered. A coordinated security release of the affected components will be happening in the afternoon (from an UTC perspective) of Monday, Sept 13th.
We will be reaching out to downstream packagers to ensure they can prepare patched versions of affected packages at the time of the release. The details of the vulnerability will be disclosed in a blog post on the day of the release. There is so far no evidence of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild.
Please be prepared to upgrade as soon as the patched versions are released.
Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.
Chatting with Manu about iOS, Mobile, team growth and more. See video description for agenda!
Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️
Incoming security fix
As just blogged there is an important security fix coming for several Matrix clients. More news, and patched versions will be announced on Monday. Though there is no evidence this vulnerability has been exploited, please be ready to upgrade on Monday.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
I'm actually surprised myself that this wasn't part of the spec already! Looks like it would be a nice to-do to get this implemented and then checked off by approvers. Anyone want to submit some PRs to HS and AS implementations? 🙂
Dimension, an integration manager alternative for Element, got a refresh from @TimeWalker to bring the project up to modern day standards. Please give it a go if you've been running Dimension, and report bugs if there's problems! While I haven't personally had time to maintain it as much as I'd like, it's great to see people taking on 3 year old bad code and fixing it 😄
For TWIM readers, Dimension is an "integration manager" that replaces the default one shipped with Element. It's not entirely mobile-ready yet, but does give a user interface for managing various bots, bridges, and widgets. In practice, an integration manager isn't needed as most bots and bridges (and even widgets) can be set up without an integrations manager, like all of https://t2bot.io/ (ironically, given Dimension was originally targeted at t2bot.io). People do still use it though to configure self-hosted platforms with their very own Element, Synapse, bridges, and bots.
While I still probably won't have much time personally to maintain it, PRs are certainly accepted. Dimension is a bit complex to work within and test, but people in #dimension:t2bot.io should be able to help out.
Synapse 1.42.0 is out now! This release includes support for Room Version 9, which fixes an issue with Version 8's support for restricted rooms. We also implement a bunch of new MSCs (including MSC3231: Token authenticated registration by Callum Brown as part of his Google Summer of Code project), improve efficiency, and sidestep a longstanding issue with users getting stuck in unsupported room versions. Read the announcement for details!
This Sydent release also includes support for Jinja2 templating, a complete overhaul of our CI/CD pipeline, and a comprehensive update to the codebase to follow modern Python practices including the addition of mypy type hints throughout.
Lastly, we'd like to welcome Shay to the Backend Team at Element. Her work as an Outreachy intern paved the way for the recent improvements to Sygnal and Sydent. Thanks, Shay, and welcome aboard!
And another week, another Kubernetes Helm Chart update, this time seeing matrix-synapse updated to 1.42.0 - as well as a whole lot of fixes to support the new ingress object version introduced in Kubernetes 1.19
Hi folks, we're massively pleased to announce the third major release of the TS/JS bridging library matrix-appservice-bridge. This release contains several large breaking changes to the previous way of life, most notably we have stopped using the matrix-js-sdk for most of our code, instead using the matrix-bot-sdk (Hi TravisR , we see you up there!).
There are several reasons why we went this way:
Notably, this library focuses work on simply implementing APIs and bridge/bot logic. There is no additional cruft to support client use-cases or browsers.
It's historically had a brilliant coverage of the CS and AS APIs, and has been extremely flexible to add new stable and unstable APIs to it.
At the start of this project, it was the only library with a complete Typescript coverage. Typescript types continue to be extremely useful to us.
We're hoping to make use of the upcoming encrypted appservices support, to replace the slightly janky pantalaimon support the bridge library currently uses.
Thanks to Travis and the matrix.org bridge team for working through these changes!
There are a bunch of common sense improvements that break API compatibility in this release also, so please be sure to check them out and update. We don't anticipate supporting 2.X except for extreme circumstances.
Finally, we'll be updating the matrix-org suite of bridges over the coming weeks so please watch for bugs and let us know how we're doing!
SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.
After a couple of weeks/months of internal testing and public beta testing, the latest stable version (1.2.0.sc42) now supports UnifiedPush!
This means that you can now choose your own push provider, if you do not want to use Google's FCM push notifications.
Huge thanks to @sim_g:matrix.org for working on this!
Nheko
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
You might remember my short story from last TWIM about the race between different translators? Seems like that one was good enough to motivate a few people to contribute translations. While those don't seem to be 100% complete yet, we saw a significant jump in translation percentages (especially Portuguese), so thank you to everyone who contributed to that!
Thulinma also made the whole userprofile scrollable, which improves the experience on small screens a lot. He also implemented message deduplication by event id, which is required by the spec to be done on the client side. This fixes a lot of duplicates when using conduit and your join event appearing 2~3 times on synapse.
We also fixed an issue with how different homeservers update one time key counts and added some additional code to remove old one time keys, if we ever uploaded to many (which might have happened in the past in a few edge cases). We also now escape img tags in usernames correctly in more places, redundant date separators when paginating back in a room should not appear anymore and tastytea decreased the margins on blockquotes, so that they look less jarring and take up less space.
The biggest news is that multi-account support landed in fractal-next (don’t be fooled by the title of the MR, it’s more than just a widget!). I feel like this is one of the most requested features across all clients, yet not many have it yet, and I’m ecstatic that we’re joining them 🎉. This work was done as part of GSoC by Alejandro under the mentorship of Julian 👏.
Element Android 1.2.1 has been release to the beta channel of the PlayStore and should be push on production on next Monday. It includes improvement for the Spaces (still in beta) and improvement for the VoIP. Full changelog can be found here: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases/tag/v1.2.1
v0.6.0-beta.2 has been published of matrix-bot-sdk as an early version to support encryption on bots and improvements to appservices. It's a bit self-directed to figure out how it works, but #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io is available to try and help out.
Please give it a go and report bugs. The final v0.6.0 release is expected to contain not only encryption support for bots, but also appservices and real documentation. For now though, it's just the bots.
It's an "automation backend" bot of etke.cc and has following features:
send html forms from your website directly to matrix
manage matrix-registration invite tokens in matrix chat
Miounne hits first stable release. I already shared some info about it here some time ago... but now it's stable! Source code has 83+% of unit tests coverage and some bizarre bug have been fixed.
Besides, now you can use pinned version of the bot (docker registry)
PS: we have #miounne:etke.cc room to discuss (whine) and post updates about it
Patience, a full stack integration testing approach for Matrix clients and servers, has added initial support for Hydrogen this week. As it already supported Element Web, we now have a (basic) system for testing multiple clients together which is taking shape! 🥳 From here, we plan to add configuration options to express the permutations of clients you want to test together.
This project is still in its early stages, but we hope to eventually have support for many different clients and then use it to test common flows like user verification, which can differ quite a lot across clients. If you're interested in this topic, feel free to join the new #matrix-patience:matrix.org room.
Final Thoughts 💭
Someone has been making Matrix fanfic! I'm not sure how federation ties in, and for some reason they feature rubber duck debugging at one point but otherwise it looks fun :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ix7TUGVYIo
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.
This release includes changes that you may need to be aware of before upgrading, such as the removal of two deprecated Admin APIs or a retroactive fix to ensure that email notifications are only sent to addresses which are presently associated with an account. Please see the Upgrade Notes for details.
Room Version 9: A Bugfix for Restricted Rooms
Synapse 1.42 includes support for Room Version 9, which fixes an oversight in the list of event fields which were protected from redaction in Room Version 8's restricted rooms. This makes it possible, in certain circumstances, for a restricted room to degrade into a state where participating servers will disagree about the room's membership.
Because changing a room version's redaction algorithm also changes the way that event IDs are calculated, properly fixing this issue required the creation of a new room version.
To ensure compatibility with existing servers, Synapse 1.42's MSC3244: Room version capabilities hints will continue to ask clients to prefer Room Version 8 when creating restricted rooms and Room Version 6 otherwise. A future release of Synapse will ask clients to prefer Room Version 9 for restricted rooms.
Handling Unknown Rooms
Very rarely, users find themselves in rooms created with unstable or experimental room versions. Then, when Synapse removes support for these versions, bad things happen. The server no longer understands how to interact with that room version, which means you can't interact with that room. And if you can't interact with that room, you can't leave.
In Synapse 1.42, rooms with unknown room versions are no longer returned down /sync. This prevents them from appearing in your client, though you may need to empty your client's cache and re-sync to see any effect.
New MSCs
In addition to Room Version 9 (MSC3375), this release includes:
An initial implementation of MSC3231: Token authenticated registration, which makes it possible for homeservers to disable user registration while still allowing new accounts to be made by people who know a pre-shared secret.
This MSC and its implementations were produced as part of a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project by Callum Brown.
An updated implementation of MSC2946: Spaces Summary following recent changes to the proposal.
In addition to the usual array of improvements to performance, type hints, error messages, and documentation:
Custom Presence Router modules can now be built using Synapse's new, unified module interface which debuted in Synapse 1.37.
Code around federation event handling and authentication has been significantly refactored to improve reliability and maintainability, including extracting nearly 1,800 lines of code from the FederationHandler class into a separate FederationEventHandler class.
Backfilling history and fetching missing events now use the same code paths, reducing the potential for bugs.
Concurrently fetching the same large set of events (#10703) is now much more efficient, preventing the process hangs which were possible in prior, extreme cases.
These are just the highlights; please see the Upgrade Notes and Release Notes for a complete list of changes in this release.
Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including aaronraimist, dklimpel, govynnus, and HugoDelval.
We forgot to mention that Doug is also the creator of Watch the Matrix! https://github.com/pixlwave/Watch-The-Matrix This allows you to use your Apple Watch as a native client (rather than through another iDevice)
These fellows all recently started to work for Element, and (claim!) to enjoy it. Element are HIRING, so if YOU think think you'd like to apply, check out https://apply.workable.com/elementio/ for current listings and details of how to apply.
Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️
Conduit Beta released
Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs
We finally did it! We released Conduit Beta: https://conduit.rs/release-0-2-0, we even made it to the Hacker News frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-09-02
This is huge news for us and hopefully we will see a lot more Conduit instances pop up in the near future.
Thanks everyone!
Congratulations to Timo and the gang, you're making superb progress!
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
You may be wondering: what's up with all of these abandoned MSCs?? The answer is that the matrix-org/matrix-doc repo changed its base branch to main to help preserve the git history since the spec website rewrite. In doing so, all PRs were automatically updated to the new base branch by github... except those that were coming from deleted users and repos. Those ones were simply closed!
But as they seemed to be have been effectively abandoned by their authors, it was more of a cleanup than an accident. However, if your MSC was affected by this change and you would like to continue it, please contact someone in the #matrix-spec-office:matrix.org and we'll help you out.
MSC2448 defines a way for clients to include a "blurhash", or a short, textual representation of a blurred version of an image, inside events which other clients can show while waiting for thumbnails to download from media servers. This replaces the potentially blank space while an image's thumbnail is loading with a (IMO) beautiful alternative!
Yes I wrote this MSC... but I swear it's what the script picked! We do not question the script!!
Synapse 1.41.1 is out and it contains patches for two security vulnerabilities which could inappropriately disclose private room metadata to unauthorized users on a participating homeserver. Please upgrade.
Room Version 9 is coming in Synapse 1.42 next week. This version fixes an oversight in which event fields are protected from redaction in room version 8, making it possible for restricted rooms to break if a join event is redacted. Because event IDs are based on the redaction algorithm, we can't fix this without creating a new room version.
In the interest of compatibility across the federation, Synapse 1.42 will still instruct clients to create restricted rooms using room version 8. Synapse 1.43, scheduled for release on 21 September, will begin instructing clients to use room version 9 instead.
Hey folks! I had some spare time today so I've invested it into the matrix-github bridge. The latest work is GitHub discussions support. It's still needs a bit more testing / minor feature implementation, but I leave you with a screenshot below of how it currently integrates spaces!
Dept of Clients 📱
Nheko
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
We had a race between 3 Translators this week. All 3 of them were trying really hard, so in my opinion every placement is a first place, buuuuuut Thulinma actually came first by bringing the Dutch translation from 5% to 100%. A few hours later Priit came in as a close second updating the Estonian translation to 100%. ISSOtm noticed that and tried to catch up which resulted in a 3rd place finish for the French translation. Now I understand the excitement people feel watching others compete in sports without having to do anything themselves!
red_sky (nheko.im) meanwhile fought a much more difficult enemy, Apple documentation and code signing! To be honest, I expected him to be beaten, but Nheko's DMGs are now actually properly signed and notarized. So if you are on macOS, you should now see less ugly warnings when installing Nheko. All nightlies building of the master branch are signed as well as our future releases.
In more community contributions, resolritter fixed the right click menu not working on replies. So you can copy a link from a reply now by right-clicking it without having to scroll up. Thulinma fixed window alerts not working when using conduit, because Conduit does not implement the /notifications endpoint Nheko uses and he helped me debug and fix device lists not showing up when using Conduit as well as sessions always getting rotated in "Send encrypted messages to verified devices only" mode.
In our work to stabilize E2EE we also now require a proper secrets daemon running on Linux (and other platforms, but there it is always provided by the OS). This is used to store the pickle key as well as the cross-signing secrets, so that an attacker can't read the from the config file. We already used such a daemon before, but we failed silently and we didn't use it for the pickle key until now. So if this prevents you from running Nheko, please open an issue so that we can work on a solution. Those APIs can be really fickle so additional testing and feedback would help us out a lot!
Also exciting is that Nheko now supports playing encrypted audio and video files without storing a temporary unencrypted copy on disk as well as animated images like WebP and GIF! It took us a while to figure out a proper solution, but now you can send animated stickers and you will finally be able to understand why other people were lauging at still images. (We also had to fix some bugs in our sticker editor, where we didn't add the mimetype to the sticker info for that.)
Some more embarrassing news, I didn't know I was a moderator in #conduit:fachschaften.org, so I happily pinged everyone in the room while discussing room mentions. To prevent that from happening in the future, Nheko now shows a red warning above the message input if you will be pinging the whole room to give you time to reconsider. If that is not enough to stop me from doing that, we might require confirmation before sending such messages in the future, but so far this seems to work. Pinging everyone by accident can really scare you and composing a message in Matrix shouldn't be scary!
I hope I didn't forget anything and please make sure you check out Conduit, since they are doing a great job in revealing bugs in Nheko!
FluffyChat
FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.
This release fixes a bug which makes it impossible to send images in unencrypted rooms. It also implements a complete new designed new chat page which now uses a QR code based workflow to start a new chat.
feat: Dismiss keyboard on scroll in iOS
feat: Implement QR code scanner
feat: New design for new chat page
feat: Use the stripped body for notifications and room previews
feat: Send on enter configuration for mobile devices
fix: Prefix of notification text
fix: Display space as room if it contains unread events in timeline
fix: missing null check
fix: Open matrix.to urls
fix: Padding and colors
fix: Sharing invite link
fix: Unread bubbles on iOS
fix: Sending images in unencrypted rooms
Element Clients
Updates from the teams.
Delight team
Testing and polishing of Spaces.
Web
Released Element Web 1.8.2
We’ve added an early, incomplete prototype of Threads to Labs
Bug fixes
iOS
App startup has been improved by x3 by lazy loading room messages and read receipts
Element-iOS is now iOS12 minimum. Code have been cleaned up
URL preview is still in progress but it should be available in the next release, 1.5.3
SwiftUI: There is now a target to run the Xcode project without the MatrixSDK to speedup SwiftUI preview. This is the first piece for the coming new screen templates
Android
Working on upgrading Android Gradle Plugin to 7.0.2 and other dependencies.
Set up GitHub actions and reduce the number of tasks run by Buildkite
Spaces PRs are merged one by one to develop, the feature will be available in the coming releases
Working on crypto: dehydrated devices, Olm fallback keys
This version of the simplematrixbotlib package adds the ability to send messages formatted in markdown via the bot.api.send_markdown_message() method. Example usage is shown below:
#### Respond to all messages from users with a hello world message that involves markdown formatting
import simplematrixbotlib as botlib
creds = botlib.Creds("https://home.server", "user", "pass")
bot = botlib.Bot(creds)
@bot.on_message_event
async def hello_world_md(room, message):
match = botlib.MessageMatch(room, message, bot)
markdown_message = "# Hello World from [simplematrixbotlib](https://github.com/KrazyKirby99999/simple-matrix-bot-lib)!"
if match.is_not_from_this_bot():
await bot.api.send_markdown_message(
room_id=room.room_id,
message=markdown_message)
bot.run()
Circles is a project to build a secure, end-to-end encrypted social network, using Matrix as the foundation.
News
We're getting very close to a real App Store launch. The latest beta release this week is 0.98 This version might be The One! So please, if you haven't tried Circles in a while, give this one a shot. Also please share the link with any friends and family who you think might be interested. The current signup token has plenty of slots for everyone.
If you want to see some activity in your circles, invite me to follow your Community circle and I'll invite you to follow back. I'm @cvwright:kombucha.social.
WARNING
If you've been using Circles with your own (non-Kombucha) server, you probably DO NOT WANT this version. Support for bring-your-own-server will return very soon after our App Store launch.
Latest updates
Broke and then re-enabled new account signup. Thanks to everyone who helped diagnose this one, and sorry if you were unable to sign up using a recent build.
Fixed a weeks-old bug where posting a message into a circle would then send you back to your list of all your social circles. Big thanks to Yosef for bringing this to my attention.
Fixed a bug in recent 0.9x builds where the Matrix rooms underlying circles and groups were being created with invalid encryption parameters. If you've been unable to post anything, this is the likely culprit. The fix is to update to the latest build, then delete your old circles/groups and create new ones.
We have a new icon. It's blue! I was worried that Apple might think the old icon looked too much like the Apple Photos icon.
New and improved interface for managing your account information. Added support for changing your password and for deactivating your account. I hope you never want this last one, but Apple requires it for apps that allow you to create accounts.
Removed support for Markdown formatting in posts and image captions. This is a sad one, but unfortunately the performance of the open source library that we were using for Markdown just wasn't up to the task. On the bright side, our timelines load much more quickly now, and the scrolling should be much smoother. Look for Markdown support to return with the release of iOS 15 later this year.
Another update to the Recent Activity list. Now it should refresh itself automatically if/when it initially comes up empty.
The CoMatrix project enables the usage of the Matrix protocol (more precisely Matrix Client-Server API) for constrained IoT devices via CoAP and CBOR in a constrained network (e.g. a 802.15.4/6LoWPAN network).
CoMatrix provides a gateway, which ports Matrix to CoAP/CBOR/(DTLS). This gateway communicates with constrained IoT devices on one side via CoAP+CBOR and translates to the Matrix protocol on the other side (i.e. HTTP+JSON). CoMatrix also provides a client library (for RIOT-OS) which is a starting point to implement CoMatrix clients (for constrained devices) which are able to interact with Matrix homeservers via the gateway.
Currently CoMatrix supports the following features:
I have made a small 120k pipeline-agent software (including all dependencies except NodeJS v8) which can run on multiple platforms (including OpenWRT) and takes pipeline work over the Matrix protocol. In the end it's going to be used to setup things like VPN connections between gateways.
We also have a commercial web portal almost published where one can create web apps and configure pipelines to process the results. And yes, the portal also uses Matrix as its persistent storage -- it was implemented using my Matrix CRUD Repository from last week :)
The agent software (pipeline-runner) is open source and has zero (0) runtime dependencies except NodeJS, and available from here: https://github.com/sendanor/pipeline-runner -- It's still in early development, though.
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
"Discover music through peers - Please write a small description of your discoveries. No uploads of non-free music please. For discussions and chat please visit the room's sibling #musicdiscussion:matrix.org "
Today we are releasing Synapse 1.41.1, a security update based on last week's release of Synapse 1.41.0. This release patches two moderate severity issues which could reveal metadata about private rooms:
GHSA-3x4c-pq33-4w3q / CVE-2021-39164: Enumerating a private room's list of members and their display names.
If an unauthorized user both knows the Room ID of a private room and that room's history visibility is set to shared, then they may be able to enumerate the room's members, including their display names.
The unauthorized user must be on the same homeserver as a user who is a member of the target room.
GHSA-jj53-8fmw-f2w2 / CVE-2021-39163: Disclosing a private room's name, avatar, topic, and number of members.
If an unauthorized user knows the Room ID of a private room, then its name, avatar, topic, and number of members may be disclosed through Group / Community features.
The unauthorized user must be on the same homeserver as a user who is a member of the target room, and their homeserver must allow non-administrators to create groups (enable_group_creation in the Synapse configuration; off by default).
Note that in both cases:
The private room's Room ID must be known to the attacker.
Another user on the attacker's homeserver must be a legitimate member of the target room.
The information disclosed is already present in the database and thus legitimately known to the administrators of homeservers participating in the target room.
We'd like to credit 0xkasper for discovering and responsibly disclosing these issues.
This release also fixes a small regression in 1.41.0 (#10709) which broke compatibility with older Twisted versions when Synapse was a configured to send email.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
MSC2582 (Removing mimetype from EncryptedFile object) was one of those MSCs that were relatively small, but had been languishing for ages. Partly because it required client implementations to update, but also partly because one needed to go in after a while and actually confirm that all known clients had updated. @uhoreg took up the mantle on his own to do so, and as a result this MSC has hit FCP and is soon to be merged. Thank you!
Alongside MSC2957 and MSC3265, this MSC is requesting a better way of communicating one's password to the homeserver without sending it in plaintext (over TLS, hopefully).
Remember that this is only done in exchange for an access token, which is then used for all subsequent requests. Still though, I can see the merit!
Synapse 1.41.0 is out! Check the release announcement to find out about all of the details, including progress on MSCs, great new Admin APIs, and the ability to handle the /createRoom endpoint on workers. As mentioned in last week's TWiM, Synapse 1.41 uses MSC3244: Room version capabilities to tell clients that they can and should use Room Version 8 when creating restricted rooms. The future is here!
We've also stopped publishing Debian packages for Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy).
⚠️ We expect to publish a security release Synapse 1.41.1 on Tuesday, 31 August which fixes two moderate severity issues.
Lastly, the Synapse team would like to extend a warm welcome to Sean Quah, who joined Element's backend team this week. Welcome, Sean!
This release adds more functionality for spaces, enhances the html viewer, adds a brand new video player and brings some improvements for voice messages. Thanks to everyone involved!
Please note: It will take some days until it arrives in all appstores.
All changes:
change: Nicer design for selecting items
change: Placeholder at username login field should be just username
chore: cleanup no longer used translation strings
chore: switch image_picker back to upstream
chore: update flutter_matrix_html
chore: Update matrix sdk to 0.3.1
feat: Add option to not autoplay stickers and emotes
feat: Add remove rooms to and from spaces
feat: Add video player
feat: Cupertino style record dialog
feat: Display amplitude
feat: Implement official emoji translations for emoji verification
feat: Nicer displaying of verification requests in the timeline
fix: Allow fallback to previous url if there is no homeserver on the mxid domain
fix: Correctly size the unread bubble in the room list
fix: Design of invite rooms
fix: Disable autocorrect for the homeserver url field
fix: Disable broken audioplayer for web
fix: Display loading dialog on start DM
fix: Dont add/remove DMs to space
fix: Empty timelines crashing the room view
fix: excessive CPU usage on Windows, as described in https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/78517#issuecomment-846436695
fix: Joining room aliases not published into the room directory
fix: Keep display alive while recording
fix: Load space members to display DM rooms
fix: Make translations use plural forms
fix: Re-add login fixes with the new SDK
fix: Reply with voice messages
fix: Report content localizations
fix: Requirements when to display report event button
fix: too long file names
fix: Try different directories on all kind of errors thrown for hive store
fix: Use plural string in translation
fix: use vrouter.toSegments
fix: Wait for sync before enter a room a user has got invited
This week Tobias implemented blurhash in NeoChat for a smoother image loading experience. Tobias also continued working on E2EE and this past week his focus was on decrypting encrypted files.
Ement.el, a Matrix client for Emacs, gained some more improvements this week:
Multi-account support was merged, so you can now use multiple accounts at the same time. You can even be in the same room in two different accounts, at the same time, in side-by-side windows (which is useful for testing). (Note that existing users will need to log in again, because the format of the saved-session file changed.)
Rooms you have been invited to now show up in the rooms list, and you can join them by clicking a button in the room's buffer.
Encrypted rooms now display a warning in the header and suggest that users consider using Pantalaimon.
Membership events are now formatted more usefully, similar to Element's style.
Completion for room and user names and IDs is implemented using standard Emacs commands and bindings (i.e. C-M-i by default).
The last-read marker may be jumped to, even if it's at an earlier event that has not yet been retrieved.
Emotes (i.e. /me-style messages) can be sent by pressing e.
Timestamps in the room list are shaded according to how "hot" (i.e. recently updated) the room is (see screenshot).
Nheko now supports uploading to online key backup and warns you before enabling it, that we don't recommend using the asymmetric version. If you update to one of the current builds (and or the next version), you will also experience a bit longer load times on first startup. That is because we force-cleared the cache to be able to handle the new goodies like spaces and sticker/emote-packs. In the best case, everything is seamless.
We also had contributions by various people:
resolritter cleaned up that while tab moved you down most popup lists, it didn't move up when shift was pressed.
Harmathy extended the FAQ to answer commonly asked questions like "Does Nheko support E2EE" or "What commands are supported". Don't worry, we know most of you won't read that and will still answer that question when you undoubtedly come asking it again. We just can now be even more passive aggressive than just pointing at the right wiki page. Instead we will point at the FAQ now, which will point at the wiki!
thombles made the emoji completer behave more nicely. Instead of jumping to the bottom left corner before closing, it will now just close. It should also now behave correctly when selecting text.
alfasi updated the install instructions for Gentoo.
I'm not sure we have ever seen that many new faces contributing to Nheko in a week, I'm pretty happy to see that!
Fractal
Busy week in Fractal land! It is the end for GSoC, but it’s not really over. While some merge requests from our interns are still ongoing, Julian merged a bunch of them. On Kai’s side, the long awaited Room details are finally here. Alejandro, on the other hand, landed code to get display name and avatar of accounts at startup.
Circles is a project to build a secure, end-to-end encrypted social network on top of Matrix. The iOS app is currently in the final stages of beta testing in preparation for a 1.0 release.
Updates this week include:
Fixed a bug that prevented some new users from registering. If you tried to sign up last week but the email validation failed, please give it another try with the latest build.
Cleaned up the "Home" tab for a simpler, cleaner look.
Fixed a bug where the summary of recent activity was failing to load on app startup. Also added a manual "refresh" button as a fallback.
If you would like to try the latest Circles beta (v0.93), you can get it from Apple here
Element Clients
Updates from the teams
Delight team
Room version 8 was marked as the preferred version for MSC3083 restricted rooms on matrix.org and in Synapse 1.41, released this week. This means Element clients can now show UI to create restricted rooms within a Space, and prompt users to upgrade rooms if necessary when making them restricted.
Improvements to the performance of the room summary API.
Lots of testing of Spaces in anticipation of it leaving beta.
VoIP
Fix cases where a call ringtone would continue even after the call was answered.
Add active speaker indicators when a user in a call is currently talking.
Working on showing call duration in call tiles.
Web
We’ve released 1.8.2 RC3 which includes fixes to windows font rendering, blur hashing and accessibility improvements, and other bugs.
Our internal threads prototype is in code review.
This week, we’ve been doing more work on threads, fixed some more cross-signing bugs, iterating on more compact replies, and investigating our process for translations.
iOS
Continue to work on URL preview.
App Navigation improvement: Continue to work on room navigation.
Account notification settings are now available.
Voice message rendering and playback fixes have been made.
We added a banner to advertise that iOS 11 will be dropped soon.
Room creation: prevent room duplication on creation.
Media upload sizing: Continue to improve media size selection.
Android
We are still improving the experience with Spaces
Notifications setting will be updated in the next release, with the ability to get notified when keywords are included in any message (only on un-encrypted rooms for now)
Working on Olm fallback key support
Besides that we are fixing bugs across the application and the SDK. We have fixed the issue of crashing when opening a room on devices running API 21. The fix will be in the next release.
Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰
Ruma
Ruma is a set of Rust library crates around Matrix
It's been so long since our last update that I couldn't possibly list all of the individual changes, but here's a rough overview of the work since then (three months ago):
There's been loads of bug fixes, many compatibility improvements and at least one large refactoring. We've been much faster about releasing changes to crates.io after ruma 0.1.0, now we're already at ruma 0.4.0 (!); the changes needed to upgrade are really not that significant though. Notable areas of improvement are
UIAA: No more stringly-typed auth type + map of properties. The AuthData enum that holds the authentication information clients send to servers now has one variant for every auth type defined in the spec.
Event relations: These used to be serialized wrongly for encrypted events and were only (de)serializable as part of a larger event (making using them in custom ways impossible). Both of these issues were fixed.
If you want more detailed updates about Ruma, please watch our repository's GitHub releases, since nobody in the project currently wants to write regular blog posts or TWIM updates (if you are interested in changing that, get in touch over at #ruma:matrix.org).
This week a new stable version of libQuotient, 0.6.8, has been released. While the main focus has been fixing bugs and sustaining the codebase, one significant highlight is that read receipts and fully read markers are distinguished now, which should improve interaction with other clients that has been treating them differently for quite some time now. This version is anticipated to become the base of the upcoming Quaternion 0.0.95.
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
"Channel dedicated to games running in terminal environment (or one that looks like terminal) As long as the game could be easily ported to terminal, it belongs here :) Telegram: t.me/cligaming"
If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek
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.
NOTE: We anticipate publishing a security release next Tuesday, the 31st of August.
Synapse 1.41.1 will contain fixes for two moderate severity issues.
Synapse 1.41 includes changes to forward proxies, template settings, and media workers which may require your attention. Please see the Upgrade Notes for details.
Also, this release removes support for Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla), which reached End of Life last month. Support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) will be withdrawn near the end of this year under our platform deprecation policy.
Promoting Restricted Rooms
Synapse 1.41 includes experimental support for MSC3244: Room version capabilities, which indicates to clients that they should use Room Version 8 when creating restricted rooms. For example, Element's clients will use the MSC3244 metadata, which is on by default in Synapse 1.41, to determine whether to show end users the UI for creating restricted rooms.
Room Version 6 will remain the default for newly created rooms which do not explicitly request the restricted room capabilities at creation time. This strikes a balance between the broad compatibility of an older default room version, while still making newer features available upon request.
New MSCs
This version of Synapse implements experimental support for:
MSC3266: Room summary API which provides a simple way to obtain information about a specific room, such as its join rules, room type, etc.
Synapse can now route outbound federation requests, remote media downloads, and public key fetches through a forward proxy.
Custom template configuration has now been centralized into a single custom_templates_directoryconfiguration setting.
Matrix clients which allow users to set a status_msg with their presence will find that Synapse no longer arbitrarily unsets the message when a user goes offline. Instead, each user's status_msg will persist until it is deliberately cleared by their client.
The extension module API now exposes a function, get_userinfo_by_id, which accepts an MXID and returns a UserInfo object. This should simplify writing extension modules like spam checkers.
These are just the highlights; please see the Upgrade Notes and Release Notes for a complete list of changes in this release.
Bridge team has been busy, on the EMS side we've released Signal/WA for early bird testing.
Landmark changes in bridge libraries: we've released 3.0.0-rc1 of matrix-appservice-bridge. Both the IRC bridge and the Gitter bridge have tested it with great results.
Tadzik has been making massive gains on the IRC bridge, formatting tweaks and bugs being nailed.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
Otherwise, there has been a small amount of activity across the spectrum of MSCs this week. One MSC to call out is https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3283, which could do with some more input from the wider community.
Random MSC of the week
And finally, something fun. I've written a small script to pick a random MSC that people may or may not want to have a look at.
This week, we tagged the v0.5.0 release candidate, which contains two major advancements on the encryption front: support for server-side key backups and support for cross-signing. The addition of these features makes Dendrite significantly more user-friendly, as it is now possible to log out or share keys across devices without losing your conversations.
We'll be aiming to finalise this release next week. Stay tuned in #dendrite:matrix.org for more details.
Sytest compliance currently sits at:
Client-server APIs: 65%, up from 61% last time
Server-server APIs: 92%, same as last time
Those sytest numbers!! Might be time to start playing with dendrite?
We are on track to release Synapse 1.41 next week. This version will use an unstable property proposed by MSC3244: Room version capabilities to advertise to clients that they may create restricted rooms using Room Version 8, despite the default room version remaining at 6 for the time being.
This strikes a balance between the broad compatibility of an older default room version, while still making newer features available when requested at room creation time. However, from next week you are more likely to encounter v8 rooms, so please do ensure your homeserver is running at least 1.40.
I'd also like to tip my hat to Element employee Olivier, who has put in the work to ensure that tagged Sygnal releases are automatically built and uploaded to Docker Hub via GitHub Actions. Thanks, Olivier!
Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.
Automatic queries (DM rooms) from IRC users can now be disabled and a query opened manually if needed (messages appear in network rooms)
Plumbs can now be set to not do disambiguation or ZWSP injection
Small cleanups and fixes
Heisenbridge is now considered stable and v1.0.0 has been released! 🍻 🥳
Focus is shifting to v2.0.0 which will be a major refactor. The 1.x series will at least receive bug fixes if not features. Do note that if you are using the master branch or latest tag for Docker it may cause a breaking change in the future when the work starts being merged. Highly suggest moving to version tags regardless of the deployment method. If you are using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy it has been updated to v1.0.0 as of writing so pulling the latest master there is advised.
If the car wasn't enough, I bring more news! Our matrix.org bridge library, matrix-appservice-bridge has had a total shakeup. Version 3.0.0-rc1 is out and with it comes the migration from the matrix-js-sdk to the matrix-bot-sdk. This is a massive change underneath that should result in faster performance, better typings and hopefully lower memory footprints too.
I'd encourage everyone using this library to update and see how well it works for you! The IRC and Gitter bridges have already experimented with this change and have seen good results, so I look forward to hearing feedback :)
(See details about the referenced car below and in Matrix Live above)
This week Janet improved receiving files in NeoChat. Now downloading a file can be stopped, a file type icon is displayed and it looks better! Other than that Felipe Kinoshita made some small visual improvements to the day separator in the timeline and Tobias continued working on E2EE inside Quotient.
Tomorrow Tobias and I will be doing a small presentation/demo of NeoChat at frOSCon in German. It's online so you don't have any excuse to not watch it: https://programm.froscon.de/2021/events/2711.html
Nheko
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
Nheko now shows you the verification status of all devices in a room as well as in the memberlist. This is important so you can tell, if an unverified device may get access to a message, if you send it. You can always disable sending messages to unverified devices for extra peace of mind.
manu's room directory (finally) got merged. This means you can now discover public rooms on your server and join them by clicking the room directory button, that Nheko had for 3 years but was disabled until now! Support for the room directories of other servers as well as filtering by network should come in the future.
There is now an "Allow them in" button on pending knocks in the timeline, joins via room membership in a different room now tell you, what user's server was used to sign off on the join and you can set a room to restricted or knock only. (You currently can't change the list of allowed servers though).
Dialogs should now have a close button again on Windows, the emoji search field now clears on closing the emoji picker and we added a workaround for stickers not showing on Element iOS, because iOS can't display stickers without a thumbnail, even if a thumbnail makes no sense for stickers. (We just copy the sticker url into the thumbnail url.)
Nheko can now download encryption keys from online key backup. Uploading to online key backup will come soon(tm).
If you are interested, I will talk about Nheko tomorrow (21.08. starting 16:10) at FrOSCon in the Matrix dev room. Make sure you check out the other talks too, if you speak German! https://programm.froscon.de/2021/events/2706.html
Phew, that was a mouthful.
Element Clients
Updates from the teams
Delight team
This week, our web, iOS and Android engineers are all enjoying some time off.
On backend, we’ve completed pagination of the Spaces Summary. This week, we’ve been looking at performance improvements to the Summary API.
We intend to mark room Version 8 as the preferred version for MSC3083 restricted rooms on matrix.org and in Synapse 1.41 (due for release next week) via MSC3244. Once this change is made, Element clients will show UI to create restricted rooms within a Space, and prompt users to upgrade rooms if necessary when making them restricted.
Our design team is exploring some tweaks on how to make Spaces a little bit clearer and easier to understand.
Web
We released 1.8.1 which fixed some regressions with calls - sorry for any failed calls!
Work on our threads prototype continues. We’re hoping to have something to look at internally next week.
Sentry submission support has been added to Rageshakes. We expect to enable this on https://app.element.io next week.
We’ve been fixing some bugs around cross-signing, Windows font rendering, and image blur hashing.
Our new triage process has been published on the wiki.
iOS
Element Alpha work is complete. This is a new app for internal testing. A QR code is available on every PR like this one to install the build on a device. Only devices registered in the Element Apple Developer account can install this app.
Improved notification content: No more “Message” notification.
Fixed some timeline layout issues.
Media upload sizing: We added a prompt when sending video to select the resolution of the sent video. Media size prompt can be disabled in settings.
URL preview work has started.
App Navigation improvement: Working on room navigation to prepare the ground for threading.
On the performance side, we are working on room messages lazy loading to improve application speed.
Android
Fix authenticated jitsi not working in release (proguard issue)
Handle call ended reasons (busy, invite timeout).
Working on Olm fallback key support
Work on call ui and call tiles is finished, waiting to be reviewed
Start working on extracting API client from the SDK
Polyjuice Client v0.4.2 has been released. This release features more functions for creating messages, including file and media messages (thanks to multi prise), replies, reactions, and edits. Polyjuice Client can also now be considered a serious Matrix library as it has a new function to generate rainbow-coloured messages! 🌈 Multi prise has also added support for registering a new user, redacting messages, and searching the user directory.
Polyjuice Util v0.2.1 (an Elixir library for Matrix features that can be used on both the client-side and server-side) was also recently released. The main feature for this release is support for handling Matrix URIs, and supports mxc:, matrix.to, and matrix:-style URIs.
Version 2 of Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib will release very soon. It is complete in all but the documentation. If you would like to try version 2 early, you can find it on a branch of the git repository here https://github.com/KrazyKirby99999/simple-matrix-bot-lib/tree/v2.
Some of the changes are shown below:
Version 1
Version 2
Summary
bot.add_message_listener(example_handler)
@bot.listener.on_message_event or @bot.listener.on_custom_event
In version 1, each the bot.add_message_listener method was used on message handler functions for them to react to messages. In version 2, this has been replaced by a decorator, @bot.listener.on_message_event. A similar decorator, @bot.listener.on_custom_event(event) can be used to react to other events. For information on supported events, refer to the matrix-nio docs.
In version 1, the only way to login to a homeserver was to use a combination of a username and password. In version 2 it is also possible to login using a SSO login token as well. As before, the homeserver argument is required, and the session_stored_file argument is optional.
match.args #For message "one two three", returns "two three"
match.args #For message "one two three", returns ["two", "three"]
In version 1, match.args returned a string. In version 2, match.args returns a list of strings.
These changes are only some of the most important changes between versions 1 and 2, and there are more changes in addition to these. I apologize for the delays in releasing version 2.
Mjolnir v0.1.19 is out now with a voice message protection built-in (ideal for public communities where voice messages can't be easily moderated) and updates to the shutdown room command to support modern Synapses. Check out !mjolnir protections after upgrading, and visit #mjolnir:matrix.org for help and support.
Since element now landed voice message support I build a small maubot plugin which prevents audio and voice messages as those cannot yet get restricted by power level.
It starts by warning you via replies, after a configured amount of warnings goes over to kicking and after a certain amount of kicks it will ban you in the room the event was sent in.
The counter is global so if a user in room A runs out of warnings and the same user sents a voice message in room B where the bot is present the bot will ban the user also in room B without further warnings.
New version of Middleman, the helpful relay bot in the middle. Version 0.2.0 in addition to various smaller changes and fixes, enables sending out messages from the command room to any room the bot is in, supports relaying notices (so you can command other bots using the Middleman bot 🤖) and adds support for flagging certain rooms as "mention only", in which case only mentions are relayed.
Howdy folks, it's been aaaaages since I've done mad little project but I had some LEGO and was bored on a Sunday. I present to you matrix-poweredup! This is a little bot that connects to any LEGO PoweredUp devices (using the node-poweredup library). You can then start controlling the motors via Matrix, and have the sensors report back into the Matrix room. It's currently limited to a RC buggy I picked up over the weekend but it's very extendible. It also includes a web application to control things via a gamepad, if that's your bag.
There will be a little demo at the end of Matrix Live, so watch this space
As a few of you noticed the pages are currently down due to some mess that happened (not going into detail on purpose here).
The pages however will soon come back. I am now using the time they are down to improve the code and some pages on it. So dont be worried it is not dead but it will come back as soon as I get those changes done 🙂
Circles is an iOS app for end-to-end encrypted secure social networking and sharing, built on top of Matrix. Its goal is to provide a safe and convenient way for close friends and families to share things that they wouldn't post publicly -- e.g. for parents to safely share pictures of their kids. You can also use it to share updates with your friends, without a creepy advertising company data mining every word.
Circles features include:
Social "wall"-like functionality and timeline of friends' posts for each of your social circles, e.g. Friends, Family, Neighbors, Coworkers, etc.
Private groups
Encrypted photo galleries
Recent updates to the Circles beta include:
Support for use with any Matrix homeserver, including a new encrypted recovery and key backup mechanism that should be compatible with other Matrix clients like Element. (Please note: For use with standard Matrix accounts, be sure to select "Advanced options" at login and enter your passphrase for key backup / recovery.)
Emoji reactions
Markdown formatting for text posts and image captions
Better support for larger screens (iPad)
The latest beta build of Circles (v0.91) is available from Apple on TestFlight
As a hobby, I built a website called Digital Justice. It's a website that explains in layman's terms what certain digital topics are (like data sovereignty, software autonomy and abandonware continuity) and why those topics matter.
The website may be a bit too simple for privacy gurus who know their stuff, but it's meant as an accessible resource to help people understand why privacy matters. Feel free to use the website as a resource, share the RSS feed or use it as a FAQ to your colleague who doesn't understand why you're so adamant on using an open communication protocol.
If you'd like to see something corrected or would like to add something to the website, the source code's here and you can always contact me through the website.
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
"Friendly Physics Related Discussion Talking Point: LIGO & Hawking's area theorem https://tinyurl.com/nzuaaepv Book Club 22nd August 15:00 BST | Bishop & Goldberg (manifolds) | Book Club Site: https://tinyurl.com/2sn9upx2 +stardust:matrix.org"
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
Work on Spaces continues with MSC2946 (Space Summary API), specifically revolving around how to paginate the summary. This has called into question how pagination across Matrix works in general, which is a prime target for refactoring - perhaps an upcoming consistent pagination MSC? :)
Otherwise, as listed above, MSC3289 (room v8) has merged! It brings with it the ability to grant the ability to join a room based on one's membership in another room. While the was originally conceived for allowing users that are part of one Space to be allowed to join rooms, it has been built upon in other creative ways. Such as in MSC3325, where it could be used to make room upgrades more seamless!
And finally, a special thanks to Lukas Lihotzki for all of their spec PRs this week. They're been stellar!
Dept of Servers 🏢
Synapse
Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.
Big news! Synapse 1.40 is out and it comes with support for Room Version 8! Version 8 includes "restricted rooms" which are only visible and joinable by members of a specific Space (or via direct invitation). This finally makes it useful to use Spaces as containers for private rooms, like you might with a company, guild, or open source community. Once invited to the parent Space, members can join and discover the otherwise private rooms within. No more /invite spam every time you bring someone on board!
Also: If you've received any push notifications in Element Android or Element iOS this week, they've come via our shiny new stateless release of Sygnal! If you haven't received expected push notifications on those platforms this week... please alert us immediately. 😉
Lastly, Element is overjoyed to welcome David Robertson to the Synapse team. Welcome aboard, David!
Exciting update this week on the MSC2716 front for backfilling historical messages into existing rooms! All of the bigpieces are now merged for full-fat federated historical messages in Synapse 💪
MSC2716 was also consolidated and updated to propose the /batch_send implementation we're using in Synapse. There is also a plan for how this can be backwards compatible with existing room versions so no need for those pesky room upgrades. This will help us be able to jump in early and use this for Gitter as soon as the new event types become stable. Go jump in on MSC2716 to give feedback and read up on the details 😀
Ement.el, a Matrix client for Emacs, continues to improve. Some of the changes in the past week:
Additions
Messages may now be written in Org-mode syntax (a format similar to but more powerful than Markdown). Internally, it's automatically converted to HTML and sent as the message's formatted body. This supports nearly any HTML feature that Org-mode can export to, including rich text, bulleted and numbered lists, and even tables (this message is being written directly in Org syntax; see a table of new bindings at the end of this list).
An optional pop-out compose buffer makes writing and editing long messages easier (also being used for this message).
Read/fully-read marker lines are now displayed after the last read message, and these are synced with the server and other clients. These lines can also be placed with a command, making it easy to return to a certain event later, even on other clients.
Usernames at the beginning of messages may optionally be colored to match the addressee's username. This especially helps following conversations in busy rooms.
Ement.el is confirmed to work with Pantalaimon, the E2EE-aware reverse proxy, making encrypted rooms work transparently. Once Pantalaimon is installed and configured, connecting through it with Ement.el is trivial, and this step is documented in the readme.
Improvements
Per-user displayname and message colors have improved (and configurable) contrast ratio with the background color.
Reactions are sorted by the number of users who have sent each one.
Unread rooms are displayed more prominently in the room list.
New default bindings make it quick to jump to the mentions and notifications buffers.
Sync timeouts are handled more gracefully and Ement.el re-syncs automatically.
Various minor fixes and enhancements.
And here's the new-bindings table, written directly in Org syntax and sent automatically as HTML:
The tool for migrating communities to spaces in Element Web has been completed
Lots of accessibility support for Spaces in Element Web
Preparing Element Web to take Spaces out of Labs
Pagination of the spaces summary now works for local rooms, we're continuing work on fetching data over federation.
On iOS, we’re working on exploring rooms and browsing users in a space
Web
v1.8.0-rc1 is available on https://staging.element.io/
Work on threads continues - we are narrowing down on a first prototype based on treating chained replies as threads
We’ve spiked support for Sentry which will give us more insights into how the app is working in the wild
Support for hot module reloading for React components, following last week’s work on CSS hot reloading
Improved the look and feel of image blur hashing by adding some animations
iOS
The release candidate 1.5.1 is available for testing on TestFlight. Voice messages are enabled by default
Towncrier is now enabled on all of our 3 repositories
Reaction count got a fix. Please rageshake if you see unexpected count
Notifications content has been fixed or improved
Element alpha is almost finished. This is a new app that we will use for internal testing. There will be a QR code on every PR like this one to install the build on a device. This device must be part of our ad-hoc device list
On the performance side, the incremental sync has been improved and merged on develop. Next is lazy loading room messages
Android
We made 2 releases this week: 1.1.16 to fix a regression that prevented sending messages in e2ee rooms and 1.2.0 with voice messages enabled by default
Voice messages have been improved before the release
We continued to update the call UI with call tiles in the timeline
You now get notified, if someone reuses a megolm session index, because that in theory could be used by an attacker to send seemingly verified messages. We also now render decryption errors more nicely and users can now explicitly request decryption keys (in addition to the automatic key requests in the background that already existed). We also fixed an issue, that could corrupt the database when using the flatpak and if you lost your network connection, Nheko should now reconnect faster instead of potentially waiting 17 minutes for a TCP timeout. The storage for cross-signing secrets should now be more reliable, you can close image popups with the "Escape" key, close the current room by double clicking it and a few more miscellaneous bugfixes.
You can track the remaining E2EE bits, before we declare our E2EE support as stable, in this comment now: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/issues/23#issuecomment-894689158
It has learned how to handle images / videos, and can now insert them directly into the rendered markdown. Creating new posts has been significantly simplified and now makes even less work for the author. For example, Hebbot now automatically generates a command to quickly download all images/videos at once.
Maybe other communities are interested in creating a "This Week in X" blog as well👀?
I find "read it later" services like Pocket extremely useful, but fail hard at actually keeping my read it later list at a sane level. For me it's hard to maintain the list and actually read through things as choosing which one to process feels overwhelming due to the amount of items.
Randomization to the rescue! I made a Pocket plugin for Maubot which gives me a random article from my list and allows me to easily archive it. Now I don't need to decide which article to pick, the computer does that for me!
Source code and info: https://github.com/jaywink/maubot-pocket
Ps. Maubot is truly awesome as a bot system, well documented and easy to develop on 😻
Bornhack is a 7 day outdoor tent camp where hackers, makers and people with an interest in technology or security come together to celebrate technology, socialise, learn and have fun.
This year, Asbjørn and I are hosting a couple of events related to Matrix:
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
This release of Synapse includes stable support for Room Version 8! Version 8 codifies a concept of "restricted rooms" which are private rooms joinable only by direct invitation or by being a member of other, designated Spaces / rooms.
This means you can create a Matrix Space for your company, team, or guild, and instead of inviting people to the Space and directly to a bunch of private rooms, you can simply configure your private rooms such that membership in the Space automatically confers access to the private rooms.
This is a major improvement to access control in Matrix, and we can't wait to use it ourselves.
Note that client support for managing restricted rooms is still forthcoming, and you'll want to ensure that your users are on homeservers which support v8 before upgrading existing rooms. To ensure compatibility across federation, the default for newly created rooms remains at v6 for the time being.
Everything Else
A few other items worth calling out:
Synapse can now optionally recycle PostgreSQL connections after a specified number of transactions (#10440), which may mitigate slow memory leaks in the database. Thanks to GitHub user hifi.
We have a whole new documentation page explaining Room DAG Concepts like depth, stream ordering, extremities, outliers, and state groups.
The Admin API for listing accounts now returns a creation_ts property indicating when an account was created. Thanks to work by dklimpel.
Synapse should better detect character encodings in URL previews thanks to a contribution by srividyut.
MSC2033: The /account/whoami endpoint now includes the device_id associated with the access token used to make the request.
(Experimental) MSC3244: The /_matrix/client/r0/capabilities endpoint may include metadata about which room versions support which capabilities (like knocking on restricted joins).
(Experimental) MSC2285: Clients may mark messages as read on the server without updating their externally visible read receipts, implemented by SimonBrandner.
These are just the highlights; please see the Release Notes for a complete list of changes in this release.
Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including dklimpel, hifi, SimonBrandner, and srividyut.
