Planet Jabber

After many months of reading Aristotle's philosophy and commentary thereon, recently I decided to re-read Ayn Rand's essay "The Objectivist Ethics", wherein Rand criticizes Aristotle for not considering ethics to be an exact science. I have no idea what that would mean. Consider, for instance, the relevant Wikipedia page (not necessarily reliable, but often a good start), which states:...

In serverless architectures, application logic is often powered by short-lived execution environments. But what does this mean for long-lived connections? After all, many applications today depend on persistent WebSocket or SSE connections in order to exchange data in realtime.

The answer is unsurprising: either the execution limitations must be tolerated, or long-lived connections must be handled by a separate component. We’ll go over these approaches below.

...

Free Software is a substantial part of my life. I got introduced to it by my computer science teacher in middle school, however back then I wasn’t paying that much attention to the ethics behind it and rather focused on the fact that it was gratis and new to me.

Using GNU/Linux on a school computer wasn’t really fun for me, as the user interface was not really my taste (I’m sorry KDE). It was only when I got so annoyed from the fact that my copy of Windows XP was 32 bit only and that I was supposed to pay the full price again for a 64 bit license, that I deleted Windows completely and installed Ubuntu on my computer – only to reinstall Windows again a few weeks later though. But the first contact was made.

Back then I was still mostly focused on cool features rather than on the meaning of free software. Someday however, I watched the talk by Richard Stallman and started to read more about what software freedom really is. At this point I was learning how to use blender on Ubuntu to create animations and only rarely booted into Windows. But when I did, it suddenly felt oddly wrong. I realized that I couldn’t truly trust my computer. This time I tried harder to get rid of Windows.

Someone once said that you only feel your shackles when you try to move. I think the same goes for free software. Once you realize what free software is and what rights it grants you (what rights you really have), you start to feel uncomfortable if you’re suddenly denied those rights.

And that’s why I love free software! It gives you back the control over your machine. It’s something that you can trust, as there are no secrets kept from you (except if the program is written in Haskell and uses monads :P).

My favorite free software projects for this years I love free software day are the document digitization and management tool paperwork, the alternative Mastodon/Pleroma interface Halcyon and the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin. These are projects that I discovered in 2018/2019 and that truly amazed me.

I already wrote two blog posts about paperwork and the fediverse / the ActivityPub plugin earlier, so I’ll focus mainly on Halcyon today. Feel free to give those other posts a read though!

I’m a really big fan of the fediverse and Mastodon in particular, but I dislike Mastodon’s current interface (two complaints about user interfaces in one post? Mimimi…). In my opinion Mastodons column interface doesn’t really give enough space to the content and is not very intuitive. Halcyon is a web client which acts as an alternative interface to your Mastodon/Pleroma account. Visually it closely resembles the Twitter UI which I quite like.

As a plus, it is way easier to get people to move from Twitter to the fediverse by providing them with a familiar interface

There are some public instances of Halcyon available, which you can use to try out Halcyon for yourselves, however in the long run I recommend you to self-host it, as you have to enter your account details in order to use it. Hosting it doesn’t take much more than a simple Raspberry Pi as it’s really light weight.

I know that a huge number of free software projects is developed by volunteers in their free time. Most of them don’t get any monetary compensation for their work and people often take this for granted. Additionally, a lot of the feedback developers get from their users is when things don’t work out or break.

(Not only) today is a chance to give some positive feedback and a huge Thank You to the developers of the software that makes your life easier!

Happy Hacking!

@guus wrote:

The Ignite Realtime community is happy to immediate release of Openfire Meetings plugin version 0.9.5!

The release is available in the download section of our website, and should present itself in your running Openfire instance in the next few hours.

The Openfire Meetings plugin adds a feature-rich audio/video conferencing solution to Openfire, which is based on Jitsi project.

This release includes 7 months worth of updates from the Jitsi project, which brings you stability and performance improvements, a brand new landing page, SIP integration (through Jigasi) and many, many other tweaks.

Importantly, it will be compatible with the upcoming Chrome 72 release (which introduces a change that will break older versions of OFMeet).

In this release, all functionality has been bundled in one plugin (ofmeet.jar). Make sure to remove the old offocus plugin from your instance of Openfire, if you’re upgrading from an earlier version!

For other release announcements and news follow us on Twitter

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In his book Confronting Aristotle's Ethics, Eugene Garver explores how, for Aristotle, personal excellence is also interpersonal excellence: because of the intensely social nature of ancient communities, virtues like courage and moderation had value because they protected and preserved the balance of the community as a whole. Thus courage was really valor in battle against another community that would have enslaved your own people, not the courage of principled resistance (e.g., Rosa Parks) or intellectual integrity (e.g., Galileo). Thus moderation was about controlling your urges (adultery upsets social harmony) and keeping in good physical condition (it's hard to be valorous if you're grossly overweight). And so on....

ProcessOne curates two monthly newsletters – tech-focused Real-time Stack and business-focused Real-time Enterprise. Here are the articles concerning business aspects of real-time development we found interesting in Issue #19. To receive this newsletter straight in your inbox on the day it’s published, subscribe here.

Moving away from Facebook

ProcessOne is a company deeply invested in building the Open Internet. We build ejabberd, a leading Open Source product, implementing the XMPP protocol, an IETF standard.

Building a more Decentralized Web: Linking your profiles together

The Web is built by people. Authors are producing content that makes the web as it is. They write blog posts, microblog entries, share pictures and videos, etc. And people have typically profile pages to introduce themselves and showcase their work.

Why are Facebook and Twitter so bad at parsing RDFa metadata?

Facebook and Twitter both chose to use RDFa for their “optimized link sharing” metadata formats. Well, it would seem Twitter didn’t realize that what they had done until a later stage.

Stop using URL shorteners, to help protect the Web, please

At this time, size of tweets were limited and it was useful to use URL shorteners to be able to squeeze more text into your posts. The habit of shortening links started at that time and somewhat persisted until now.

Enter the Matrix and reclaim data ownership

Speak to anyone who owned a domain in the early days of the web and they will burst with nostalgia at the promises that the now popularized information space was meant to bring.

What is Solid?

Solid is an exciting new project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.

Web3 and the Decentralized Web

In the early 1990’s the WWW revolutionized information. 10 years later, the Internet became more mature & programmable. We saw the rise of the so-called Web2, which brought us social media and e-commerce platforms.

MIT research: the Decentralized Web

The Web is a key space for civic debate and the current battleground for protecting freedom of expression. However, since its development, the Web has steadily evolved into an ecosystem of large, corporate-controlled mega-platforms which intermediate speech online.

ProcessOne curates two monthly newsletters – tech-focused Real-time Stack and business-focused Real-time Enterprise. Here are the articles concerning tech aspects of real-time development we found interesting in Issue #19. To receive this newsletter straight in your inbox on the day it’s published, subscribe here.

20th Anniversary of Jabber Server

In the last twenty years, we have seen protocols and services come and go, but XMPP, an IETF standard, is here to stay. It is backed by an international community of developers, does not depend on a single company, and is enhanced continuously by the XSF.

Slack Closes Account of an Iranian Living in Canada

Using a proprietary protocol that doesn’t allow any form of federation is a dangerous way to build a global community. While Slack reverted this decision, other users weren’t so lucky.

Build Your Own MQTT Node for Less Than $2

ESP-12F as a stand-alone module is of no use unless mounted on a base board like wemos-d1-mini. This blog explains how to use ESP-12F module without the need of a base board but with minimal set of components.

IoT Standards Could be Vulnerable to Hacking

New research from security firm Trend Micro has discovered major design flaws and vulnerable implementations related to two popular machine-to-machine protocols used in IoT devices, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Constrained Application Protocol (Co2P).

Proxy Protocol in ejabberd

This article describes how to configure HAProxy and ejabberd together. If you are using a proxy in front of ejabberd, the support for proxy protocol is a new feature allowing the XMPP server to know the real IP addresses of the connecting client instead of seeing just the IP used by the proxy server.

Data Portability Kit

This is the Swift Army Knife that let you take back control of your online data. Thanks to GDPR, online providers now have to offer takeout features for your data. This is a great opportunity to get back your data.

Today, we are rebranding and expanding our well-received ejabberd SaaS platform!
The new name is Fluux, supporting both XMPP & MQTT, in the cloud, as a single service with a unique and simple business model.

From XMPP to Realtime Standard-based Multi-protocol Service

ejabberd SaaS was launched five years ago. It was one of the first XMPP software-as-services and still is the reference today. Five years later, it runs very reliably in production for many customers, providing service to millions of concurrent online users every day.

When we launched, it was the perfect tool to run a highly reliable, highly scalable mobile chat service for a great price. You received your dedicated servers, managed by ProcessOne, developers of ejabberd, with all the features provided by our Business Edition. You could even develop your own backend API to store most of the data on your own private servers and just enjoy ejabberd, the realtime service, in a “stateless” fashion, no strings attached.

Over time, however, our customers have been using the platform to go further than chat. We have helped them build game services with ejabberd. We have also seen customers using it to connect devices and build large scale Internet of Things projects.

We soon realized that both, our service and ejabberd, needed to look beyond just XMPP. We put a lot of effort and our skills from building a large scale messaging platform, to develop a clustered high performance MQTT server based on the core building bricks of ejabberd. We support geoclustering and the brand new MQTT 5. Our open test server is already widely used for home-made IoT. You can learn more in our MQTT server announcement.

Fluux: Offering XMPP & MQTT as a Service

The next natural step was to offer MQTT as part of our software-as-a-service platform. Today, we are ready to announce that MQTT is available on all our new instances, and upon request for our existing customers.

However, ejabberd name was always associated with XMPP. Jabber is the former name of the XMPP protocol. So, it also made sense to rebrand our ejabberd SaaS platform to a name that shows the support to a wider variety of realtime protocols. That’s why, starting today, ejabberd SaaS is called Fluux.

The business model remains the same one that our customers love. No per-user costs that end up very expensive. You pay for what you consume, measured in “Jabs”. For MQTT, it is even more straightforward, with fewer rules:

• 2 Jabs for authentication
• 1 Jab per MQTT packet published
• 1 Jab per recipient on MQTT publish
• 1 Pab per subscribe or unsubscribe
• 1 Jab per 15 minutes for inactive session.

And the greatest part? You can build hybrid projects using both XMPP & MQTT on the same platform and the same pricing plan. This is great for both gaming, IoT and mobile projects, using the best of both protocols to fit a use case.

Join and Build with Fluux

Fluux is feature-full and future-proof:

• Relies on standards, with no lock-in. We want you to stay with us because your are happy with the service, not because you now have no other choice.
• Enables innovative use cases through the availability of multiple protocols on a single platform.
• Takes away the pain of running a highly reliable and scalable service and lets you focus on your product.
• Keeps the costs predictable with a single unit of usage – the Jab.

You can start using MQTT, XMPP or both on Fluux today. Welcome to your new standard-based realtime platform!

@guus wrote:

Last weekend, a number of Ignite Realtime community members attended FOSDEM (in Brussels, Belgium) the yearly free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

@Dele_Olajide prepared a presentation for the Real Time Communications devroom, in which he elaborated on Pade, and focused on how the plugin architecture of the Chromium web browser, ConverseJs and Openfire made it possible to quickly integrate HTTP and SIP with XMPP and create a feature-rich and very extensible unified communications solution for small and medium businesses.

For your convenience, a recording of his rather entertaining presentation:

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For Aristotle, the various excellences of character (courage, moderation, justice, and the like) are all instances of tending to find a balance between overdoing and underdoing a particular kind of action or feeling, either generally or in a particular respect (e.g., becoming angry in the wrong situations, toward the wrong kinds of people, too quickly, too strongly, etc.). Borrowing terminology from archery, he speaks of balance as a matter of hitting the target (σκοπός) and of imbalance as a matter of missing the mark (ἁμαρτία)....

While submitting Monal for review, I have discovered that with OMEMO, I can’t distribute Monal in France without government approval there. There is no point in holding up this release for the rest of the world, so I will be removing it from the French store while I file the paperwork for a future release. Something tells me this is probably not the last time this happens.

Chatsecures version of the same issue

Atmosphere at a train station in Brussels

Day one and two of my stay in Brussels are over. I really enjoyed the discussions I had at the XMPP Standards Foundation Summit which was held in the impressive Cisco office building in Diegem. It’s always nice to meet all the faces behind those ominous nicknames that you only interact with through text chats for the rest of the year. Getting to know them personally is always exciting.

A lot of work has been done to improve the XMPP ecosystem and the protocols that make up its skeleton. For me it was the first time ever to hold a presentation in English, which – in the end – did not turn out as bad as I expected – I guess

I love how highly internationally the XSF Summit and FOSDEM events are. As people from over the world we get together and even though we are working on different projects and systems, we all have very similar goals. It’s refreshing to see a different mind set and hear some different positions and arguments.

I’ve got the feeling that this post is turning into some sort of humanitarian advertisement and sleep is a scarce commodity, so I’m going to bed now to get a snatch.

@akrherz wrote:

The Ignite Realtime Community is happy to announce the release availability of Openfire version 4.3.2. This release fixes a regression found with release 4.3.1 that impacted interaction with OFMeet. The changelog denotes the one regression fix and you can find the downloads here.

The sha1sum values for the download artifacts are as follows:

0fc0baaf9673f045a1218f24a4a08062b3fa6969  openfire-4.3.2-1.i686.rpm
7b7274c50fcf9392ed5fc2fc2d696ed944c155bf  openfire-4.3.2-1.noarch.rpm
0cdad55c44b0cff6226b67b9738c265cd5e20033  openfire-4.3.2-1.x86_64.rpm
5b16c340bd163996c19865940a0e5cac48df7b65  openfire_4.3.2_all.deb
ba67999151de96a8836a50925af14b756b0ed17d  openfire_4_3_2_bundledJRE.exe
8954b65b79d0398773330e567f2b994a2819564d  openfire_4_3_2_bundledJRE_x64.exe
cda5fa8223e3fdbd723f2f869b8ffbb03cc482e8  openfire_4_3_2.dmg
4e689ae4e8a96184234947a593344d4bf971b790  openfire_4_3_2.exe
a3cb5d5598b0e9915a18e8da05dbd96652657fe9  openfire_4_3_2.tar.gz
e5d37c1be2915e658924681d488160b62ffaa225  openfire_4_3_2_x64.exe
37a58dcce6aa1c6bf82d6179b263f4662a23f229  openfire_4_3_2.zip
3bb7b1f9030ca1e12ad97779e57dbac45a1e15b1  openfire_src_4_3_2.tar.gz
d3a6cd4ed5fa3062429dd0aad2e658d8f4f4004e  openfire_src_4_3_2.zip

Thanks for your usage and interest in Openfire.

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I have posted what I hope are the final beta for the next iOS client the Mac one will come soon afterwards. These will be what I plan to ship to the App Store barring any serious bugs. This will be my first production release of OMEMO. I have tried to debug this quite a bit over the past few months. Theres still a lot to do but as usual I would prefer to do more frequent releases rather than large ones. I am sure as more people use these new clients there will be more bugs and I will fix them in weekly releases in Feb.

Welcome to the XMPP newsletter.

If you have an article, tutorial or blog post you'd like us to include in the newsletter, please submit it on the XMPP wiki.

This week in Brussels we held the UI/UX Sprint, the 23rd XMPP Summit and over the weekend many XMPP developers and enthusiasts will attend FOSDEM19.

Subscribe to receive the next edition in your inbox

News

The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is applying as Google Summer of Code organization and open source projects are invited to submit project ideas.

Process One has announced that they followed Basecamp's initiative and have became a Facebook-free busines.

Paul Schaub has written about how the new OpenPGP for XMPP XEP solves the problem of encrypting arbitrary payload elements and therefore overcomes some of the limitations arising from OMEMO due to the fact that it only encrypts the message body.

*Diaspora developer Dennis Schubert has written an article explaining why he does not consider ActivityPub as a viable base federation layer for that project. He criticizes ActivityPub for not focusing enough on compliance and claims that following the spec doesn't guarantee interoperability with other implementations. As a positive counter-example, he presents XMPP and it's usage of XEPs and compliance specs. It's an interesting perspective from someone not directly involved with XMPP.

Anu keeps on writing regular small blog posts about develoment of the Monal client for iOs. You can read his posts for January here.

FOSDEM

Members of the Ignite Realtime, Prosody and Salut à Toi communities will be attending FOSDEM in Brussels this weekend (2nd and 3rd February).

There will also be 5 XMPP-related talks at FOSDEM this year.

Tutorials

Linus Jahn, (Kaidan) developer, explains how to set up your own Ejabberd instance using Ansible.

Mike Kuketz has written a guide in German on installing and running Ejabberd. Here's the Google Translate version.

Software releases

Clients

• Converse.js has reached version 4.1.0.
• Gajim versions 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 have been released.

Servers

• Prosody 0.11.2.
• OpenFire 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2.
• Tigase 7.5.1.

Libraries

• slixmpp 1.4.2.

Other

OTR version 4 has been released. Highlights are improved deniability through "Deniable Authenticated Key Exchange" (DAKE) and improved forward secrecy by using "Double Ratcheting".

Welcome to the XMPP newsletter.

If you have an article, tutorial or blog post you'd like us to include in the newsletter, please submit it on the XMPP wiki.

This week in Brussels we held the UI/UX Sprint, the 23rd XMPP Summit and over the weekend many XMPP developers and enthusiasts will attend FOSDEM19.

Subscribe to receive the next edition in your inbox

News

The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is applying as Google Summer of Code organization and open source projects are invited to submit project ideas.

Process One has announced that they followed Basecamp's initiative and have became a Facebook-free business.

Paul Schaub has written about how the new OpenPGP for XMPP XEP solves the problem of encrypting arbitrary payload elements and therefore overcomes some of the limitations arising from OMEMO due to the fact that it only encrypts the message body.

*Diaspora developer Dennis Schubert has written an article explaining why he does not consider ActivityPub as a viable base federation layer for that project. He criticizes ActivityPub for not focusing enough on compliance and claims that following the spec doesn't guarantee interoperability with other implementations. As a positive counter-example, he presents XMPP and it's usage of XEPs and compliance specs. It's an interesting perspective from someone not directly involved with XMPP.

Anu keeps on writing regular small blog posts about develoment of the Monal client for iOs. You can read his posts for January here.

FOSDEM

Members of the Ignite Realtime, Prosody and Salut à Toi communities will be attending FOSDEM in Brussels this weekend (2nd and 3rd February).

There will also be 5 XMPP-related talks at FOSDEM this year.

Tutorials

Linus Jahn, (Kaidan) developer, explains how to set up your own Ejabberd instance using Ansible.

Mike Kuketz has written a guide in German on installing and running Ejabberd. Here's the Google Translate version.

Software releases

Clients

• Converse.js has reached version 4.1.0.
• Gajim versions 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 have been released.

Servers

• Prosody 0.11.2.
• OpenFire 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2.
• Tigase 7.1.5.

Libraries

• slixmpp 1.4.2.

Other

OTR version 4 has been released. Highlights are improved deniability through "Deniable Authenticated Key Exchange" (DAKE) and improved forward secrecy by using "Double Ratcheting".

@wroot wrote:

Members of the Ignite Realtime community will be around in Brussels this weekend as part of FOSDEM 2019 (Free and Open Source Developers Europe Meeting). In case you always wanted to meet up with some of the faces behind projects like the free XMPP server Openfire , the client library Smack , the web conferencing solution Pàdé or the chat client Spark you should definitely come by for some chatter! You can find Ignite Realtime folks at the Realtime Lounge in the K building (level 2).

We are looking forward to see you there!

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This is a reminder that the 2019 community survey is still open, as announced earlier. We are always discovering new people and projects using Prosody that we were unaware of. We do not have any kind of tracking in Prosody, and it is impossible for us to know how many deployments there are worldwide. It is therefore easy for us to miss out on feedback from users who are not actively engaged in the project, but whose feedback is just as valuable to us.

I am still trying to chase down the bug that shows duplicated contacts for some people. At this point I suspect it is several different bugs that all look the same. I have posted new iOS and Mac betas that attempt to address this. Let me know is the betas solve the problem for your or not.

@akrherz wrote:

The Ignite Realtime Community is happy to announce the release of version 4.3.1 of Openfire. This release signifies a quick turnaround of a few issues found in the 4.3.0 release and also includes some new goodies. Please consult the changelog for a listing of issues resolved.

You can find the release artifacts on our downloads page and here’s the sha1sum values for the files.

c3d0f8ebab02d6e03c344f97fa8ee73c092a24b2  openfire-4.3.1-1.i686.rpm
8971796a69fecd7968e31c86d807f4c7ce25fa70  openfire-4.3.1-1.noarch.rpm
e781f1cb4af0d7f6c4981e9c10e880d0564c43d9  openfire-4.3.1-1.x86_64.rpm
57792a92866ef90908d33e6d45b5094e5a52f160  openfire_4.3.1_all.deb
55d0b56845c9fce0cbfffdc93290fa12165e87b7  openfire_4_3_1_bundledJRE.exe
e080d86aa99be71a4b11a8194b893c20402dcf12  openfire_4_3_1_bundledJRE_x64.exe
4f1c3d7d5d8ec1e2a5d44bf95ae7d6a9e7267f37  openfire_4_3_1.dmg
aa62a0c91b96b3feffbfc1c0bb7481cbba92df2f  openfire_4_3_1.exe
1b99a1ba6002c95230935862cc9c05607c2f36b8  openfire_4_3_1.tar.gz
eae08c8d22fc1aeb0651816ecfb1e1ecb40e3dbf  openfire_4_3_1_x64.exe
7ff456d40febbd8437502c8a3c5c2f55cdd22355  openfire_4_3_1.zip
51db259afd3f7d0e451b88910236ca5255daf0f7  openfire_src_4_3_1.tar.gz
03db09fc571ab2a68be597001fa663d68eb90af1  openfire_src_4_3_1.zip

Thanks for your interest and usage of Openfire!

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We are on our 13th beta. It has been a lot of iteration and improvement (thank you for helping test) and we are marching towards a good release. There are a couple of more issues I want to address and then we are going to ship this off to the App Store. I am eager to have a reasonably stable, modern XMPP client with OMEMO available on the Mac. It has been too long.