Mattermost isn’t e2ee, but if the server is run by someone competent and they’re allowed to see everything anyway (eg it’s all group chat, and they’re in all the groups) then e2ee isn’t as important as it would be otherwise as it is only protecting against the server being compromised (a scenario which, if you’re using web-based solutions which do have e2ee, also leads to circumvention of it).

If you’re OK with not having e2ee, I would recommend Zulip over Mattermost. Mattermost is nice too though.

edit: oops, i see you also want DMs… Mattermost and Zulip both have them, but without e2ee. 😢

I could write a book about problems with Matrix, but if you want something relatively easy and full featured with (optional, and non-forward-secret) e2ee then it is probably your best bet today.

two weeks later: GitLab confirms it’s removed Suyu, a fork of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu

sad to see their new git hosting is behind cloudflare 😢

It’s a mild pain and definitely not what we were promised

I think this is precisely what the ActivityPub model of federation promised, actually 😅

💯 points for the name.

They should make it use the sosumi sound for something so that maybe they can get sued by Apple Inc too 😂

Poor choice of git hosts though; won’t gitlab.com take down anything that a big company asks them to?

Ente doesn’t seem to require a CLA.

It turns out, they do have a CLA (with full copyright assignment 😢).

They’d need to implement something like SRP.

Update: I contacted the developers to bring my comment to their attention and it turns out they have already implemented SRP to address this problem (but they haven’t updated their architecture document about it yet).

It is, but in this case I think it isn’t actually a weakness for the reasons I explained.

That’s complicated to do correctly. Normally, for the server to verify the user has the correct password, it needs to know or receive the password, at which point it could decrypt all the user’s files. They’d need to implement something like SRP.

What I proposed is that the server does not know the password (of course), but that it knows a thing derived from it (lets call it the loginSecret) which the client can send to obtain the encryptedMasterKey. This can be derived in a similar fashion to the keyEncryptionKey (eg, they could be different outputs of an HKDF). The downside to the server knowing something derived from the passphrase is that it enables the server to do an offline brute force of it, but in any system like this where the server is storing something encrypted using [something derived from] the passphrase the server already has that ability.

Is there any downside to what I suggested, vs the current design?

And is there some reason I’m missing which would justify adding the complexity of SRP, vs what I proposed above?

The only reason I can think of would be to protect against a scenario where an attacker has somehow obtained the user’s loginSecret from the server but has not obtained their encryptedMasterKey: in that case they could use it to request the encryptedMasterKey, and then could make offline guesses at the passphrase using that. But, they could also just use the loginSecret for their offline brute-force. And, using SRP, the server still must also store something the user has derived from the password (which is equivalent to the loginSecret in my simpler scheme) and obtaining that thing still gives the adversary an offline brute-force opportunity. So, I don’t think SRP provides any benefit here.

edit: the two issues i raised in this comment had both already been addressed.

this was the developer’s reply on matrix:

1. We do have a CLA: https://cla-assistant.io/ente-io/ente
2. We will update the iOS app to offer you an option to point to your self hosted instance (so that you can save yourself the trouble of building it): https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/504
3. The portion of the document that deals with authentication has been outdated, my bad. We’ve adopted SRP to fix the concerns that were pointed out: https://ente.io/blog/ente-adopts-secure-remote-passwords/

There is a version of VLC for the Nvidia Shield, but it has a somewhat irritating UI and I don’t know if it can actually read the menus like the desktop version can.

i am against paying for DRM streaming services, and i boycott apple products, but i must say this is an impressive hacking effort and a well-executed meme about it. 🥂

cloudflare’s service puts them in the middle - so, HTTPS doesn’t encrypt traffic between the browser and your server anymore, but instead between the browser and CF, and then (separately) between CF and your server. CF is an antidote to intelligence agencies’ problem of losing visibility when most of the web switched to HTTPS a decade ago.

cloudflare is an intelligence company who’s flagship product involves them mitming your TLS.

why bother self-hosting, if you do it from behind cloudflare?

There are at least four companies listed here selling new laptops with coreboot preinstalled: https://doc.coreboot.org/distributions.html

oh cool, if Edward Snowden did it I guess software freedom isn’t important anymore 🙄

But seriously, did he? which one? I’m not familiar with that.

But even if he did release something under one, I would be extremely surprised if he called a non-free license “open source” as FUTO is doing here.

deviating slightly from pure open source principles

saying that prohibiting redistribution is just “deviating slightly from pure open source principles” is like saying that a dish with a bit of meat in it is just “deviating slightly” from a vegetarian recipe.

if you saw a restaurant labeling their food as vegetarian because their dishes were based on vegetarian recipes, but had some meat added, would you say that it seems like their intentions are good?

to protect their users from scammy clones

As I said in another comment, the way free open source software projects should (and can, and do) generally do this is using trademark law. He could license it under any free software license but require derivatives to change the name to avoid misleading or confusing users. This is what Firefox and many other projects do.

TBH we’re not really into strictly following the letter of the law in the pirate community

In the video announcing the project Louis Rossmann explicitly says he intends to vigorously enforce this license. Since it is a copyright license, the only ways of actually enforcing it are to send DMCA takedowns and/or sue people for copyright infringement.

there is no single universally agreed upon definition

There is an overwhelmingly agreed-upon definition. Look at who agrees with it: https://opensource.org/authority/

And who doesn’t agree? Historically, a few of the giant software companies who were threatened by the free software movement thought that “open source” was a way for them to talk the talk without walking the walk. However, years ago, even they all eventually agreed about OSI’s definition and today they use terms like source-available software for their products that don’t meet it.

Today it is only misinformed people like yourself, and grifters trying to profit off of the positive perception of the term. I’m assuming Louis Rossman is in the former category too; we’ll see in the near future if he acknowledges that the FUTO license is not open source and/or relicenses the project under an open source license.

there are over 80 variations of open source licenses all with different term and conditions. Some are more permissive, some less so. Yet they can all be considered a variation of open source, though I’m anticipating you wouldn’t agree?

There are many open source licenses, and many non-open-source licenses. there is a list of licenses which OSI has analyzed and found to meet their definition; licenses which aren’t on that list can be open source too… but to see if they are, you would need to read the license and the definition.

Have you read The Open Source Definition? I’m assuming not.

I can’t understand why you are acting like the definition police here, it seems very pedantic tbh.

It’s because (1) FUTO are deceiving their customers by claiming that their product is something which it isn’t, and (2) they’re harming the free and open source software movements by telling people that terms mean things contrary to what they actually mean.

since you copy+pasted this wall of confused text to me in 3 different places I guess I’ll reply here too, in the not-deleted thread: https://opensource.org/authority/ (this is not even a controversial topic)