XMPP Newsletter January 2020

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Status:

• Links collection: done
• Newsletter copywriting: done
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• Social media: done
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Newsletter subject/title

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

Happy new XMPP year!

Intro (remove this)

Welcome to the XMPP newsletter covering the month of December 2019.

Contribute to the community effort, which process is fully documented.

Articles

Whatsapp, Matrix or XMPP (german) - The German Federal Ministry of the Interior is looking for a messenger for the federal authorities while the German Federal Police is experimenting with XMPP. They are using an Open Source Messenger "MOKA" based on XMPP (german).

Fabian Sauter known as COM8 (and developer of UWPX) has finalised his Bachelor Thesis on "Smart Building Control with XMPP for IoT". Congratulations! The development will be continued with the goal of an official XEP.

Anoxinon e.V who intend to inform and improve the situation about privacy and free software as well run a XMPP Server are looking for new board members.

Paul Schaub has written two pieces:

• Pitfalls for OMEMO Implementations – Part 1: Inactive Devices
• Re: The Ecosystem is Moving as an answer to Moxie Marlinspike's talk at 36C3 (Moxie is the creator of Signal)

https://framapic.org/vnIr36vc8UVR/V2BVA5KG8ozl.png

Alex Gnauck wrote about Simpler code in handlers using pattern matching in MatriX.

During the 36C3 a bunch of people finalized the idea to form a SIG dedicated to end-to-end encryption.

Newsletter translations

• French
• German
• Spanish

Software releases

Servers

The Ignite Realtime community has released:

• Openfire 4.5.0 Beta
• Fastpath Openfire plugin 4.5.0 Beta

Clients and applications

Anu Pokharel the developer of Monal has made significant changes to its MUC implemenation which improves the situation for iOS (4.1 and 4.2 and 4.2 final beta) and macOS (2.5 beta 1 2.5 beta 2) users. Furthermore there has been many bug fixes, including HTTP upload, and the end of iOS9 support.

https://framapic.org/ZyopsYd66GsN/aOp2n1IrXfIy.png

Gajim has posted their Development News for December 2019: old message dialog system, compact tooltip when hovering a group chat in Gajim’s contact list, new assistant for password change and account removal, HTTP File Upload now work asynchronously with the ‘libsoup’ library, bug fixes, plugin updates, and changes in python-nbxmpp.

Tigase has released BeagleIM 3.4 and Siskin IM 5.4: BeagleIM 3.4 allows you to set MUC room avatar, simplifies MUC room settings, and bug fixes, while SiskinIM 5.4 adds support for setting MUC room avatar.

Movim 0.16.1 has been released: you can now share posts to your connected chatrooms, communities layout were redesigned, all the messages that you sent in the one to one discussions can now be edited, the videoconferencing feature was heavily refactored, and the bug fixes.

Goffi has published the SàT progress note 2019-W51: infinite scroll is now implemented in Cagou, Kivy community extensions used by SàT are now installable like any other Python dependency, e2e encryption with OMEMO, and more.

Libraries

gloox 1.0.23 released as a maintenance version.

GSoC

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

Extensions and specifications

New

XEP-0426: Character counting in message bodies

Version 0.1.0 of XEP-0426 (Character counting in message bodies) has been released.

Abstract: This document describes how to correctly count characters in message bodies. This is required when referencing a position in the body.

Changelog: Promote to Experimental as per Council decision. (mb)

URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0426.html

Proposed

Character counting in message bodies

Title: Character counting in message bodies Abstract: This document describes how to correctly count characters in message bodies. This is required when referencing a position in the body.

URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/charcount.html

User-defined Data Transfer

Title: User-defined Data Transfer 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

MAM Fastening Collation

Title: MAM Fastening Collation Abstract: This specification proposes a mechanism by which MAM results containing fastenings can be collated effectively.

URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/mamfc.html

Fallback Indication

Title: Fallback Indication Abstract: This specification proposes a mechanism by which message bodies can be marked as being purely for fallback purposes, and therefore to be ignored by intermediaries and anything that understands the remainder of the message.

URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/fallback.html

Special Interests Group End to End Encryption

Title: Special Interests Group End to End Encryption Abstract: This document proposes the formation of a Special Interest Group (SIG) within the XSF devoted to the development of end-to-end encryption within the context of XMPP.

URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/sige2ee.html

Updated

• Version 0.13.2 of XEP-0280 (Message Carbons) has been released.
• Version 0.1.2 of XEP-0284 (Shared XML Editing) has been released.
• Version 0.2.1 of XEP-0328 (JID Preparation and Validation Service) has been released.
• Version 0.1.2 of XEP-0422 (Message Fastening) has been released.

Thanks all!

This XMPP Newsletter is produced collaboratively by the community.

Thanks to Alejandra, Sven, zzz for their help in creating it!

Please share the news on "social networks":

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/xmpp
• Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@xmpp/
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• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/xmpp/

License

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