Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat securely

Re:Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat se... by mxuribe on Monday November 21, 2016 @04:21PM (#13009320)

I'll start right off the bat: I'm not affiliated with the riot chat or matrix crew, however, I am an enthusiastic user of both technologies. So any of the following is what I've learned, and not any official communications...

Matrix is a protocol for decentralized communication. Plenty more info can be gained from their FAQ: http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html The gist: the protocol can theoretically be used for decentralized chat, WebRTC, and comms between internet of things...With decentralized chat so far appearing to be the most popular. As to your question on the "Who is behind" this? See: http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#who-is-funding-matrix...

Riot (aka Riot chat, formerly known as Vector.im) is one of a number of client applications for interacting with Matrix servers. More clients can be found here: http://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#clients

Also, the folks who created Riot/Vector, manage a public matrix homeserver that anyone can join. See https://riot.im Naturally, the point of this being a decentralized effort (and shying away from silos), you don't have to create an account on the riot.im homeserver, but in fact can setup/manage your own (matrix) homeserver! You know...like email used to be more decentralized ;-)

Cheers!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat se... by hackuser on Monday November 21, 2016 @06:22PM (#13010245)

Thank you! How mature is it? How usable is it - usable for the HN crowd? Power users? Typical end users?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat se... by philsnow on Monday November 21, 2016 @09:10PM (#13011057)

I have a private homeserver set up and I tell my (nontechnical) wife to fall back to using Riot on her phone to talk to me if / when hangouts doesn't seem to work.

We end up talking on Riot instead of hangouts roughly 1x / month, and I've had no troubles with it so far (except that the matrix server seems to want to use way more memory than I think it "should", so I have it running in a loop that restarts the server whenever the OOM killer kills it. It gets killed fairly regularly (>1x / hour) and I don't really notice it while using Riot).

edit: I don't use the e2e encryption stuff. I have an SSL cert and if chat messages are encrypted as far as the server (which I control), that's fine with me.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat se... by neutral16 on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @08:32AM (#13013960)

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse#help-synapse-eats-all-...

I launch my instance like this: SYNAPSE_CACHE_FACTOR=0.01 synctl restart /etc/matrix-synapse/homeserver.yaml

I run synapse on a machine with 1.5GB of total RAM and have had zero memory issues since limiting the memory usage with the above command.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat se... by philsnow on Wednesday November 23, 2016 @11:33AM (#13023714)

thanks for trying to help out. just checked, this is how I'm running it:

    while : ; do SYNAPSE_CACHE_FACTOR=0.01 python -B -m synapse.app.homeserver -c homeserver.yaml  ; sleep 20 ; done

I'm not even using runit or anything; I set it up like this several months ago and haven't bothered touching it since because it's been relatively solid and reliable.

Even at a "cache factor" of 0.01, my tiny DO droplet is still swapping and eventually the homeserver gets OOM killed.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat se... by Arathorn on Monday November 21, 2016 @06:48PM (#13010388)

IMO Riot is a late beta - pretty much all the features are there, but performance needs work and the UX needs work (this is next on the plate now E2E is done). HN and Powerusers are fine. Right now typical end users require a little handholding to get started.

[ Parent | on HN ]