Don't assume too much from the headline, folks. They're not saying everything has to be rewritten by 2026. They're saying new product lines serving critical infrastructure should be written in memory-safe languages, and existing ones should have a memory safety roadmap.
If you're about to post about how you think that's unreasonable, I think you should explain why.
Those two in white have such similar facial features that they could almost be siblings.
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You could always test the waters by writing up a few of your workarounds in Lemmy posts, and seeing how much interaction they draw. If they're well-received, the effort of building and maintaining a blog might be worthwhile.
Coke has an exception built into the law that effectively makes them the only country in the US that can access them
TIL Coca-Cola is a country in the US.
You can’t know with certainty on Signal that the client and the server are actually keeping your messages encrypted at rest, you have to trust them.
This is untrue. By design, messages are never decrypted on servers when end-to-end encryption is in use. They would have to break the encryption first, because they don't have the keys.
Some advantages are listed in this /c/Technology comment:
Room membership and various other room state events are not currently end-to-end encrypted, which means a nosy admin on a participating homeserver could peek at them. (They're still not visible on the wire, though, nor on homeservers whose users haven't been invited.)
I don't know if Signal is actually much better here, since I haven't looked at their protocol. They hyped their Sealed Sender feature as a solution to some of this, but it can't really protect from nosy server admins who are able to alter the code, and they fundamentally cannot hide network-level meta-data like who is talking with whom. There's a brief and pretty accessible description of why in the video accompanying this paper.
I don't have a list of Matrix events that remain unencrypted in encrypted rooms. You could read the spec to find them if you're motivated enough to slog through it, but be warned that network protocol specs tend to be long and boring. :) Unfortunately, the few easy-to-digest blog posts about it that I've encountered have been both alarmist and inaccurate on important points (one widely circulated one was so bad that the author even retracted it), so not very useful for getting an objective view of the issue.
However, the maintainers have publicly acknowledged the issue as something they want to fix, both in online forums and in bug reports like this one:
Could someone smarter than me explain Matrix to me?
I wouldn't assume that I'm smarter, but I do have more than a little experience here, so I'll try to answer your questions. :)
It's a real-time messaging platform. The most common use for it is text chat, both in groups (like Discord or IRC) and person-to-person (like mobile phone text/SMS). It supports other uses as well, like voice chat, video conference, and screen sharing, although much of that is newer and gradually showing up in clients.
What would be the utility for someone, who cares about privacy and currently uses Signal and email for communication?
Compared to Signal:
Compared to email:
What advantage would it give me over other services?
We already covered Signal, and there are too many other services to compare every difference in all of them, but here are some more common advantages:
Is Matrix anything good already, or is it something with potential that’s still fully in development?
Until recently: Ever since cross-signing and encryption-by-default arrived a couple years ago, it has been somewhere between "still rough" and "pretty good", depending on one's needs and habits. I have been using it with friends and small groups for about five years, and although encrypted chats have sometimes been temperamental, they have worked pretty well most of the time. When frustrating glitches have turned up, we sorted them out and continued to use it. This has been worthwhile because Matrix offers a combination of features that is important to us and doesn't exist anywhere else. I haven't recommended it to extended family members yet, because not everyone cares as much about privacy or has the patience for troubleshooting in order to get it. However...
Recently: The frequency of glitches has dropped dramatically. Most of the encryption errors have disappeared, and the remaining ones look likely to be solved by the "Invisible Encryption" measures in Matrix 2.0. Likewise with things like sign-in lag and client set-up.
If you're considering whether it's time to try it, I suggest waiting until Matrix 2.0 features are formally released in the clients and servers you want to use, which should be very soon for the official ones. I wouldn't be surprised if I could confidently recommend it to family members in the coming year.
How tech savvy does one need to be to use Matrix?
If you just want to chat, not very. Even one or two of my friends who can barely use email got up and running pretty quickly with a little guidance. Someone who can get started using Lemmy by themselves can probably handle it on their own.
If you want to host your own server, moderately tech savvy.
Matrix Spec Change. It's how the Matrix protocol evolves, similar to the RFCs (requests for comments) used by Internet Engineering Task Force protocols.
You shouldn’t crap on people being honest about the problems that have existed,
I haven't "crapped on" anyone. I just pointed out that a comment, which was an absolute declaration in present tense, is misleading, poorly informed, and needlessly quarrelsome. Because it is. And the author then tried to justify it by putting words ("has always been") in someone else's mouth. None of that is honest. It was arguing in bad faith, and it's important to call that sort of thing out, because letting it go is how misinformation spreads.
If they had instead just presented their view as historical experience to help inform about track record, I wouldn't have taken issue with it.
Too much in the open source community is people saying this is great!
Perhaps, although that's common around proprietary software as well.
Great is subjective. Matrix has struggled with some problems that rightly frustrated people, but it also has accomplished some things that no other messaging platform has. By that measure, it is a great project. And the announcement we're all discussing here demonstrates that it is getting better. Just as barkingspiders said.
rolling their own crypto
No, it uses well-known, well-proven, standard crypto.
It also uses double-ratchet key management, much like what Signal does.
The reference server is a bit heavy if you're federating with large public rooms, but lighter alternative servers are available.
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I sometimes report such posts when I think of it.
I don't think corporate news satisfies Rule 2 just because the corporation happens to do something with technology. (Practically every corporation does things with technology, after all.) I expect posts here to be about the technology itself.
So you were aware that this announcement includes fixes for the encryption issues, yet you decided to post a comment complaining about them anyway, ignoring the point of this post and giving readers the false impression that the issues are unaddressed.
And you did it just to contradict someone who finds the project useful.
That's not helpful to anyone. Quite the opposite, I'd say.
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This is /c/technology, not /c/stocks.
Looks like someone didn't read the article. See part 4: Invisible Encryption. (Also note the Conclusion paragraph that explains the new functionality is only just starting to appear in clients.)
Your account info says you joined Lemmy a couple of years ago. Could that have something to do with it? Could be that there are simply fewer of us here than wherever you were before.
Also, if Reddit is one of your haunts, keep in mind that a lot of communities there partially dispersed a little over a year ago, and not everyone has reappeared in the same place (or at all).
I don't remember the artist's name. I'm pretty sure the article was a text post, probably a blog. Not a youtube video.
Some years ago, an artist who was not a mega-star but was on all the major music services published an article detailing how well each one paid. I'm now kicking myself for not bookmarking it. I clearly remember Spotify being among the worst, if not the worst.
This comment from PaulG.x caught my eye: