XMPP Newsletter March 2020

Status:

• Links collection: DONE
• Newsletter: DONE
• Blog post: WIP
• Social media:
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Newsletter subject/title

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

Intro

Welcome to the XMPP newsletter covering the month of February 2020. We are very sorry for the late publish. :(

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

Include newsletter survey, call to action -- Nÿco

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Newsletter translations

The translations of the XMPP Newsletter will be release here:

- German - French - Spanish

Articles

A nice and short summary about XMPP - en español!

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.

Daniel Gultsch (iNPUTmice) published several posts commenting on the situation on OMEMO initial vectors.

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.

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!

After the Prosody team released Snikket, Alexander Gnauck explains how to run it on your NAS.

Sam Whited wrote about the Go XMPP library.

Events

In March there will be two XMPP Sprints in Düsseldorf and Berlin. Feel free to join and support the community and their work! Please stay informed about the Berlin Sprint due to the COVID-19 situation.(And yes the Düsseldorf Sprint already happened!)

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

Jackal (XMPP server written in Go) was released in version 0.82.

The Ignite Realtime Community releases version 4.5.1 of Openfire with fixes and improvements you can review in their changelogs. REST API Openfire plugin was also released in version 1.4.0.

Erlang Solutions were writing about improvements of push notifications within MongooseIM. Mongoose also release MongooseIM version 3.6.1 and MongoosePush version 2.0.1.

Clients and applications

Tigase has released new versions of BeagleIM and Siskin.

Goffi has released his SàT progress note 2020-W08.

A bunch of clients have switch OMEMO IV 16 byte to 12 byte. Those were Conversations, Gajim, Psi and Profanity

Chris Ballinger release version 5.0.1 of ChatSecure.

The release of Movim 0.17 - Catalina includes 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.

Profanity has release notes for version 0.8.0 and 0.8.1 as well as a blog post. Continue reading about their last message correction.

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

Again, this month many changes and improvements were implemented into Monal 4.3 and 4.4. The app was refactored on Catalyst with fixes, removing of Google Talk, comeback of the app in France again and UI changes to name the important blog posts and changes! Monal can now read OMEMO 12-bytes IV but from now limits it to iOS 12 and 13.

Pàdé 1.6.0 was release by the Ignite Realtime community.

Libraries

Smack supports now Direct MUC Invitations, Stanza Content Encryption, Message Fastening and Message Retraction. Read Paul Schaub's (vanitasvitae) blog post which is also about the recent OMEMO's 12 bytes of IV changes. You want to implement a XEP to Smack? Start reading here!

The switch from OMEMO IV 16 byte to 12 byte goes on for Smack and Python

XMPP library for Go.

Other

As already previously mentioned: Snikket!

The title says everything: 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

JabberPL.org turns 15 - Congratulations! For their users they also improved their service.

GSoC

Google Summer of Code 2020 has been announced, some XMPP projects have already shown interest to mentor students.

Extensions and specifications

Deferred

- XEP-0386 (Bind 2.0)

Last Call

Due to the late publishing this is already over.

- This message constitutes notice of a Last Call for comments on XEP-0398. Title: User Avatar to vCard-Based Avatars Conversion Abstract: This specification describes a method for using PEP based avatars and vCard based avatars in parallel by having the user’s server do a conversion between the two. URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0398.html This Last Call begins today and shall end at the close of business on 2020-02-26.

- This message constitutes notice of a Last Call for comments on XEP-0402. Title: PEP Native Bookmarks Abstract: This specification defines a syntax and storage profile for keeping a list of chatroom bookmarks on the server. URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0402.html This Last Call begins today and shall end at the close of business on 2020-03-03.

Miscellaneous

ProtoXEP

The XMPP Extensions Editor has received a proposal for a new XEP.

- Title: Simple JSON Messaging Abstract: This specification proposes a simple mechanism by which applications can transfer data safely, without needing additional protocol design work. It is intended to provide a protocol that is trivial to implement and can be driven with a simple API. URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/udt.html

- Title: Extended Channel Search Abstract: This specification provides a standardised protocol to search for public group chats. In contrast to XEP-0030 (Service Discovery), it works across multiple domains and in contrast to XEP-0055 (Jabber Search) it more clearly handles extensibility. URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/extended-channel-search.html

- Title: Trust Messages Abstract: This document specifies a way to communicate the trust in public long- term keys used by end-to-end encryption protocols from one endpoint to another. URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/trust-messages.html

The Council will decide in the next two weeks whether to accept this proposal as an official XEP.

Experimental

Version 0.1.0 of XEP-0434 (Trust Messages) has been released. Abstract: This document specifies a way to communicate the trust in public long- term keys used by end-to-end encryption protocols from one endpoint to another. Changelog: Accepted by vote of Council on 2020-02-19. (XEP Editor (jsc)) URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0434.html

Active

- Version 1.0.0 of XEP-0345 (Form of Membership Applications) has been released. Abstract: This specification outlines the form and mandatory content of membership applications. Changelog: Voted to Active by Board on 2019-03-07. Sorry for the delay in the editor queue. (XEP Editor (jsc)) URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0345.html

Draft

- Version 1.0.0 of XEP-0363 (HTTP File Upload) has been released. Abstract: This specification defines a protocol to request permissions from another entity to upload a file to a specific path on an HTTP server and at the same time receive a URL from which that file can later be downloaded again. Changelog: Accepted as Draft standard by the XMPP Council. Voted on 2020-01-29. (XEP Editor (jsc)) URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0363.html

- Version 1.0.0 of XEP-0363 (HTTP File Upload) has been released. Abstract: This specification defines a protocol to request permissions from another entity to upload a file to a specific path on an HTTP server and at the same time receive a URL from which that file can later be downloaded again. Changelog: Accepted as Draft standard by the XMPP Council. Voted on 2020-01-29. (XEP Editor (jsc)) URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0363.html

Call for Experience

Due to the late publishing this is already over.

- The XEP Editor would like to Call for Experience with XEP-0066 before presenting it to the Council for advancing it to Final status. During the Call for Experience, please answer the following questions: https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2020-February/037071.html

- The XEP Editor would like to Call for Experience with XEP-0368 before presenting it to the Council for advancing it to Final status. During the Call for Experience, please answer the following questions: https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2020-February/036992.html

- The XEP Editor would like to Call for Experience with XEP-0198 before presenting it to the Council for advancing it to Final status. During the Call for Experience, please answer the following questions: https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2020-February/036986.html

Thanks all!

This XMPP Newsletter is produced collaboratively by the community.

Thanks to Aleja, emus, MDosch, Neustradamus, Nyco, pep, Sven, Vanitasvitae, Winfried, Wurstsalat 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/