Thib

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew reports

Last week US Senators Wyden (D) and Schmitt (R) wrote an open letter to the US Department of Defense encouraging them to adopt Matrix more widely, rather than wasting money on unencrypted, centralised or closed systems. The letter also reveals a whole bunch of info at the end about the US Navy's Matrix deployments. This feels like a huge step change forwards - not only is the FBI encouraging citizens to use end-to-end-encryption in the wake of realisations that the public telephone network is insecure, but US Senate is pushing for Matrix adoption (without any lobbying from us, I hasten to add). You can read more about it at the Element blog (Element provides the deployments for the US Navy).

P.S. it really is bleakly amusing that we've been constantly pointing out that legislation like EU's ChatControl and the UK's Online Safety Act are catastrophically flawed because the surveillance backdoors they propose will be exploited and abused by attackers. And here we are, with the lawful intercept backdoors in the US public phone system being compromised by attackers, causing the FBI to recommend non-backdoored E2EE instead. We live in a very strange timeline.

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The Matrix.org Foundation has been made aware that an international investigative operation took down a service called MATRIX which was used by a cybercriminal network, which has no relationship with the Matrix.org Foundation or the Matrix protocol itself.

The takedown site has a Matrix-the-movie branding, which is a probable source of confusion. The app showcased doesn’t look like any of the Matrix clients we’re aware of.

In a statement to the Matrix.org Foundation, Europol confirmed that the MATRIX cybercriminal network and the Matrix protocol are entirely unrelated. Europol states:

The Matrix protocol (matrix.org) is by no means connected to the Matrix secured communication service that was targeted in OTF Continental.

A statement from the Dutch police confirms that this is unrelated: "Matrix is ​​also the name of a company and communications protocol of the same name, which has nothing to do with the crypto communications service Matrix."

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib (m.org) says

Don't forget that Matrix will be in full force @ FOSDEM:

• The CfP for the Matrix Devroom closes on Sunday, December 1
• We already have quite a few volunteers to help us with the booth, but we're always looking for more hands! People who sign up before December 15 are entitled to a limited edition t-shirt :)
• Two organizations have already shown their commitment to the community by offering to sponsor the Fringe Event right before FOSDEM. Pizzas and drinks will be covered, but if other organizations want to sponsor too we can work on more opportunities together!

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib (m.org) announces

We want to know everything about the bugs you squashed, the features you developed, and the docs you wrote. And even better, not only do we want to know about it, we want you to tell the Matrix community about it during our FOSDEM Fringe event, or even to tell the world about it in our FOSDEM Devroom!

Our Call for Proposals is still open for the DevRoom until December 1, so don't miss your chance to advertise your project!

But we're not limiting our presence to a DevRoom, we will also organize a fringe event before FOSDEM and have a booth during the wole event. Want to grab a limited edition T-shirt? Now's your chance to sign-up and help us staff the booth. All details are in our blog post.

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The Matrix.org Foundation and community are very happy to announce that this year, they will be in full force at FOSDEM, with a community event right before the conference, a booth to welcome everyone during the conference, and a dev room to explore topics in depth!

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Matrix at FOSDEM 2025

Thib (m.org) says

We're happy to announce that this year again we will have a DevRoom at FOSDEM!

We have half a day to talk about all the great projects we have been working on as a community. Our devroom should be on Sunday afternoon, even if it's not completely set in stone for now.

You can submit a talk following one of the two formats:

• 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for topics that can be covered briefly
• 50 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for more complex subjects which need more focus

Be quick, the Call for Proposals ends on December 1st and we can't extend it. FOSDEM organizers will close all DevRooms CfPs, and we can't bypass it!

Find all the dates & details on our Call for Proposals

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Hello everyone,

The Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host a Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom in person next year again at FOSDEM! Half a day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix.

We encourage people working on the Matrix protocol or building on it in an open source project to submit a proposal! Note that companies are welcome to talk about the Matrix details of their open source projects, but marketing talks are not welcome.

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4220: Local call rejection (m.call.reject_locally)
• MSC4218: Improving performance of profile changes

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2409: Proposal to send EDUs to appservices (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

Steady progress across a range of MSCs this week. I'm particularly excited to see MSC2409 to reach FCP given its widespread use. Perhaps MSC4203: Sending to-device events to appservices is next?

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🔗Dept of Social Good 🙆

spaetz says

The German Data Protection Officer is creating a catalogue of criteria to assess messengers. They still take feedback till Nov 15. List of criteria is available in German and English.

Toot: https://social.bund.de/@bfdi/113306169664247379

English criterion pdf link is: https://www.bfdi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/Konsultationsverfahren/3_Messengerdienste/Katalog-SMA-Front-End.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR says

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4213: Remove server_name parameter
• MSC4211: WebXDC on Matrix

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4170: 403 error responses for profile APIs

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3060: Room labels
• MSC4214: Embedding Widgets in Messages

🔗Spec Updates

Matrix 1.12 went out last week! This release contains a few Trust & Safety improvements, bug fixes for authenticated media, an ability to mark rooms as unread, and several other quality of life features. Check it out, and get an early preview for what the next release might look like 👀

If there's something you'd like the Spec Core Team to take a look at, let us know in our office room: #sct-office:matrix.org

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🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Devon Dmytro announces

This week we released v1.116.0rc2. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Guests can now use the new media endpoints to download media, as described by MSC4189
• Add initial implementation of delayed events as proposed by MSC4140
• Add implementation of restricting who can overwrite a state event as proposed by MSC3757
• Add an asynchronous Admin API endpoint to redact all of a user's events, and an endpoint to check on the status of that redaction task

...and a whole lot more. Check out the release notes for the full set of changes! Thank you to all our contributors for helping to make Synapse the best it can be. As always, feel free to stop by #synapse:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.

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