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   ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Oct-2025 21:07:22 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

   "The modern Firebase Cloud Messaging is actually still XMPP-based to this day, though. Of course, it has been separated from Google Talk now."

   man, what??

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Oct-2025 11:50:42 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

     @david_chisnall yeah, it makes a sort of sense! ejabberd is magical

   • Embed this notice
     David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) (david_chisnall@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Oct-2025 11:50:43 JST David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

     in reply to

     @whitequark

     Not surprising. XMPP is a pretty nice protocol as a control-plane messaging system. eJabberd is increasingly optimised for this kind of use (and even talks MQTT as an alternative!). It's only chat where XMPP is not a good choice.

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 09:16:52 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • : j@fabrica:~/src; :t_blink:
     • David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

     @david_chisnall @josephholsten Oh wow I did not realize just how sketchy the Signal situation is. I really don't like that at all.

   • Embed this notice
     David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) (david_chisnall@infosec.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 09:16:53 JST David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

     in reply to

     • : j@fabrica:~/src; :t_blink:

     @josephholsten @whitequark

     XMPP was great for what we thought we were designing: email with low-latency delivery and better security for communicating between people using servers run by trustworthy people. The threat landscape has changed a lot since then and XMPP does not provide the privacy guarantees that should be table stakes for a modern chat protocol, and cannot without a complete ground-up redesign.

     Signal is currently the least bad alternative, but the centralised control is a problem. Signal can threaten to pull out of a country and then do it because the Foundation has too much control over the network. In particular, their use of AGPL for the code means that they (who require a CLA that lets them relicense the code and so are not bound by it) are the only people who can distribute their app via the Apple App Store, so if they decide to remove it from a country then every iOS user is suddenly unable to access the network.

     It’s definitely possible to build a more robust protocol than Signal, but it has a bunch of hard research problems (a few people have tried and I haven’t had a chance to look at the details of what they’ve done).

   • Embed this notice
     : j@fabrica:~/src; :t_blink: (josephholsten@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 09:16:54 JST : j@fabrica:~/src; :t_blink:

     in reply to

     • David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

     @david_chisnall @whitequark Is there a good choice?

     Or are you saying this like “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried”

     Knowing only IRC, XMPP & SMS at the protocol level, I know my opinions aren’t contemporary.

   • Embed this notice
     David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) (david_chisnall@infosec.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 11:08:48 JST David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

     in reply to

     • : j@fabrica:~/src; :t_blink:

     @whitequark @josephholsten

     It's yet another case study in my 'people who choose AGPL to control their ecosystem, not to enable user freedom' gallery.

     It's a shame because Signal really is the least bad of the options at the moment. In particular, a modern chat system that wants to provide any kind of privacy needs to care about a passive adversary correlating messages arriving and leaving a server, and that's really hard to prevent if you don't have a very large anonymity set per server, so federation is very hard. DHT-based things can work, but hit CAP theorem problems.

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     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 11:08:48 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • : j@fabrica:~/src; :t_blink:
     • David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

     @david_chisnall @josephholsten mm yeah, personally I consider AGPL a regressive force on the whole for this reason and related ones.