Notices by Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca), page 4
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Saturday, 08-Apr-2023 09:52:11 EDT
Hubert ChathiThe other day, on the radio, they were talking about the power outages in Quebec and Eastern Ontario. The commentator was saying that in Quebec, most houses are heated with electric heat since they have pretty cheap electricity there, so if the power goes out, they lose their heat and they'll get cold. And I was thinking, "Sure, but the gas furnaces that we have here still need electricity to run, so if we lose electricity, we'll get cold too." Somebody obviously hasn't been watching enough @Technology Connections videos.
Yes, I agree. I would have liked to be able to use an unaltered MLS for Matrix, but haven't figured out a way to do it. Of course, just because I can't figure it out, doesn't mean it isn't possible, and if anyone has any brilliant ideas, I'd be happy to hear them.
I don't think I ever said that the servers need to have any knowledge of the group membership. All I said was that "the application has a way to allow clients to determine the membership of the group in the face of concurrent changes to the group membership." Whether it's done client-side or server-side, it shouldn't matter.
If you're using a system where you can just use MLS's notion of membership, then you can just use that and ignore that part of my proposal. But if you're in a decentralised situation where membership changes can come from anywhere and need to be merged together, then you may need something outside of MLS to manage that. (Consider: Alice bans Bob from the room in one branch, and Bob invites Carol in another branch. When the branches get merged, should Carol be in the room or not?) MLS doesn't include any way of resolving those types of conflicts.
Also, MLS isn't a complete membership system; for example, it doesn't define any permissions, and deliberately leaves that up to the application. For example, if Alice sends a commit that removes Bob from the tree, is that a valid operation? MLS leaves it up to the application to decide if that should be accepted.
I don't know about the timelines, but there's already talk amongst people in the MLS WG about working on a new version of MLS.
I don't think it's possible to use an unmodified MLS in a decentralised case. Even if you could create a strict ordering, would have to end up completely discarding some updates, which is less than ideal.
Yes, good question. That's why I'm saying that I'm integrating a "variant of it" with Matrix. I've made some modifications (brief notes at gitlab.matrix.org/matrix-org/m…) to make it work in a decentralised system. There is more than one group working on approaches to decentralising MLS, and hopefully the next version of MLS will support a decentralised mode.
Messaging Layer Security (MLS) has been accepted by the IETF for publication as a standard. MLS is and #EndToEndEncryption method designed for group messaging. I've been working on integrating a variant of it with @Matrix.org (keep an eye out for demos coming soon). I've sat in on some of the IETF meetings, and the (not yet published) RFC may even contain some words that I've strung together. Congratulations to everyone who worked on it!
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Nov-2022 16:35:43 EDT
Hubert ChathiI recently bought a new keyboard. My (20-year old) Kinesis was dying, so I needed something new. I opted for a split keyboard, this time, so that I could angle and tilt it however I wanted. I got a cantor remix https://github.com/nilokr/cantor-remix, pre-built by https://shop.beekeeb.com/ (because I don't trust my soldering yet). It takes a bit to get used to only having 36 keys, but it's quite doable. I hope to do a longer writeup on my blog at some point, but the summary is that there are some things that I wish were different, but overall, I'm liking it.
On the plus side, it's taken less than 40 hours for the progress bar to make it past the half-way mark. On the minus side, the progress bar hasn't moved for the last little while, and is no longer giving a time estimate.
Well, at least trying to run "cc" has prompted it to try to install the command-line developer tools, which is all I wanted anyways. I just hope that estimated 80-hour download time is wrong.