XMPP Newsletter March 2020

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[ Friendly, human introduction for the month (remove this mention before publishing) ]

Intro

Welcome to the XMPP newsletter covering the month of February 2020 (release in March 2020).

Help us sustain this as a community effort, which process is fully documented.

Include newsletter survey, call to action -- Nÿco

Don't forget this!:

Subscribe by email https://tinyletter.com/xmpp

Subscribe to receive the next edition in your inbox -- emus

Articles

https://www.altaruru.com/que-es-xmpp/

Marvin Schirrmacher analysed WhatsApp's VoIP protocol. He extracted cryptographic keys and also showed that code obscurity does not finally protect against attackers. Further readings on GitHub here, here and here.

Mobile Kommunikation: zeitgemäß und rechtskonform German article about mobile communication in authorities mentioning MOKA/XMPP.

https://blog.jabberhead.tk/2020/02/17/smack-some-more-busy-nights-and-12-bytes-of-iv/

https://blog.jabberhead.tk/2020/02/25/how-to-implement-a-xep-for-smack/

http://nitter.net/iNPUTmice/status/1228950491805167617#m

A discussion (Spanish) on Quey compared the performance of XMPP and Matrix. Seems that XMPP outperforms easily!

Liz Flynn scheduled a notification for IETF-107 for Messaging Layer Security (MLS). You can read the current architecture draft here.

After a recent secruity flaw in WhatsApp groups, the FSFE recommends XMPP as decentral and open alternative amd solution. The XSF tweeted about this already. LINK https://post.lurk.org/@pep/103736689790093261

debxwoody has started to build a place for German users of XMPP including social media, mailing list, homepage and a blog. He is calling for supporters!

https://www.ag-software.net/2020/02/28/run-snikket-on-your-nas/

https://blog.samwhited.com/2020/02/extensions-in-mellium/

Events

In March there will be two XMPP Sprints in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

Feel free to join and support the community and their work!

On 1-2 February, FOSDEM, was held in Brussels, Belgium. As usual the XMPP community coordinated the Real-Time Lounge, a corner where several open source projects around Real Time Communication can present themselves. At the XMPP booth there were lots of nice conversations with FOSDEM visitors. The easy onboarding of Snikket was one of the eye catchers at the booth. In the Real Time developers room thee was a talk about the modularity of the XMPP protocol by Winfried Tilanus.

As usual, before FOSDEM a part of the XMPP community gathered for XMPP summit 24. Over the course of two days many aspects of the XMPP protocol were discussed, including onboarding, 'rich presence', several aspects of encryption, MIX, Bind/SASL, Stickers and rich markup. The attendants regarded this summit as very productive and many of the discussions already resulted in proposed protocol extensions and patches to existing extensions.

Software releases

Servers

https://github.com/ortuman/jackal/releases/tag/v0.8.2

https://discourse.igniterealtime.org/t/openfire-4-5-1-is-released/87183

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/improving-push-notifications-with-mongooseim.html

https://github.com/esl/MongooseIM/releases/tag/3.6.1 https://github.com/esl/MongoosePush/releases/tag/2.0.1

https://discourse.igniterealtime.org/t/rest-api-openfire-plugin-1-4-0-released/87286

Clients and applications

https://tigase.net/beagleim-3.6-and-siskin-5.6-released/

https://www.goffi.org/b/HsWxUHzXdvsH7Syrx8f6Ne/progress-note

Conversations has switched OMEMO IV 16 byte to 12 byte: https://github.com/siacs/Conversations/commit/d6ae9d8d14cca2afb0ddc7a66c68bcb89a64ab3b + https://github.com/siacs/Conversations/commit/d73cb08ec687355866df62ace0cd48fd63ccb4d5 https://github.com/siacs/Conversations/releases/tag/2.7.0

Psi OMEMO IV 16 byte to 12 byte: https://github.com/psi-im/plugins/commit/d39789cb986644bcc4c34ca55a20b50357ae342a

Profanity OMEMO IV 16 byte to 12 byte: https://github.com/profanity-im/profanity/commit/0089fbcf0a7bf3ba92fa2ba657c5e7d70e395ed7

Gajim OMEMO IV 16 byte to 12 byte: https://dev.gajim.org/gajim/gajim-plugins/commit/25cba9eea702336e82f75faf829873987c72dd33

https://github.com/ChatSecure/ChatSecure-iOS/releases/tag/v5.0.1

Movim 0.17 – Catalina https://nl.movim.eu/?post/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/87633da7-3963-4923-aabc-54ac5f6ad1d8

Pix-Art Messenger will remove its OTR legacy code by mid of 2020. Experts on any future OTRv4 implementation are invited to contribute new code.

https://github.com/profanity-im/profanity/releases/tag/0.8.0 https://profanity-im.github.io/blog/post/release-080/ https://github.com/profanity-im/profanity/releases/tag/0.8.1

https://profanity-im.github.io/blog/post/lmc/

Gajim Development News February 2020: Redesigned invites, color improvements and a new Flatpak Nightly

Refactored Monal on Catalyst (CS did it too) with fixes and UI changes, but limits it to iOS 12 and 13, when released it will come back to the France store too, pushed IV to... See nitter link

https://monal.im/blog/mac-catalyst-delayed-in-the-appstore-its-blocking-the-keychain/ https://monal.im/blog/removing-google-talk/ https://monal.im/blog/new-mac-and-ios-beta-bre-updated/ https://monal.im/blog/xmpp-is-weird/ https://monal.im/blog/monal-ios-is-available-in-france/ https://monal.im/blog/expect-to-see-4-3-this-week/ https://monal.im/blog/mac-and-ips-improving-error-handling/ https://monal.im/blog/new-builds-again/ https://monal.im/blog/monal-4-3-is-coming-out-in-about-a-week-even-in-france/ https://monal.im/blog/new-mac-and-ios-builds/ https://monal.im/blog/catalyst-looks-more-like-a-mac-app/ https://monal.im/blog/sending-encrypted-images/ https://monal.im/blog/ios-4-3-beta-in-testing/

https://discourse.igniterealtime.org/t/pade-1-6-0-released/87226

Libraries

https://blog.jabberhead.tk/2020/02/17/smack-some-more-busy-nights-and-12-bytes-of-iv/

Smack OMEMO IV 16 byte to 12 byte: https://github.com/igniterealtime/Smack/commit/1051cd2640616385f80997cad51bf7411e8e04cc

Python OMEMO IV 16 byte to 12 byte: https://github.com/Syndace/python-omemo/commit/45e56db33581c86c7e156115b7714bc32b6e154a

https://godoc.org/mellium.im/xmpp

Other

https://blog.prosody.im/introducing-snikket/

https://www.cryptologie.net/article/487/a-history-of-end-to-end-encryption-and-the-death-of-pgp/

https://hund.linuxkompis.se/2020/02/13/hur-du-kommer-igang-med-xmpp-pa-android.html

Services

https://twitter.com/jabberpl/status/1231030107273355265

https://twitter.com/jabberpl/status/1231032793968279553

Thanks all!

This XMPP Newsletter is produced collaboratively by the community.

Thanks to xxx, yyy, zzz for their help in creating it!

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License

This newsletter is published under CC by-sa license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/