<story><title>Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/03/open-source-devs-racing-build-better-versions-slack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ex3ndr</author><text>We are actually trying to make open protocol in &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;actor.im&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;actor.im&lt;/a&gt; with federation with &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matrix.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matrix.org&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that only Actor and Matrix understand importance of federation.</text></item><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>A hundred different chat systems mentioned here. &lt;i&gt;None&lt;/i&gt; of them compatible with one another. Well, I guess a couple of them have IRC gateways, but you have to actually set those up.&lt;p&gt;Gee, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it be nice if you could pick and choose your UI? Pick and choose your &amp;quot;integrations&amp;quot;, your &amp;quot;plugins&amp;quot;, your client, etc without having to lose your entire userbase, history, contacts?&lt;p&gt;Some sort of &lt;i&gt;open&lt;/i&gt; protocol.&lt;p&gt;Urgh, I&amp;#x27;ve been working on this lately and the entire field is depressing. Between one side that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the legitimate need for open protocols, and another side that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand why IRC isn&amp;#x27;t the end-all-be-all of group chat (and why UX matters), it&amp;#x27;s just people talking past each other.&lt;p&gt;Every new attempt at making &amp;quot;the slack killer&amp;quot; makes this problem worse, because it comes with its own protocol. Its own users. Etc.&lt;p&gt;PS: If somebody has free time to work on an open source multi-protocol group chat gateway, email me, I have something started.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>e12e</author><text>Thank you for mentioning actor - I must have missed it the last time various open (federated) solutions were discussed.&lt;p&gt;It looks like an interesting platform, but I was a bit surprised by what I found at:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.actor.im&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;encryption&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.actor.im&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;encryption&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;MTProto v2 Rev3 enables encryption support to replace or enchanse TLS one.&amp;quot; So far so good - here&amp;#x27;s someone that&amp;#x27;s built on top of NaCl and built a legacy-free encryption system on top of well tested, known primitives, I thought.&lt;p&gt;But: &amp;quot;Actor encrypts message with US encryption and then again encrypt with Russian encryption that in result guarantee absolute encryption streight&amp;quot; (sic).&lt;p&gt;Uh. This sounds like applying a &amp;quot;political&amp;quot; reasoning to layering security: AES might be backdoored by NSA, GOST(?) might be backdoored by the FSB -- but using both, only double-agents will be able to foil our encryption!&lt;p&gt;While the truth is probably that you&amp;#x27;re know vulnerable to buffer overflows or other more mundane software errors in the now double-sized encryption code -- and get none of the (potential) benefits of a clean, modern architecture on top of just NaCl?&lt;p&gt;In addition, it appears you &lt;i&gt;also use&lt;/i&gt; curve25591, possibly an implementation derived from NaCl:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.actor.im&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;securing-server&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.actor.im&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;securing-server&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For secure communications Actor Server have to be configured with Curve25519 keys. To generate them, use actor-cli util:&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;So that&amp;#x27;s three codebases worth of bugs, rather than one. Any plan to simplify this part?</text></comment>
<story><title>Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/03/open-source-devs-racing-build-better-versions-slack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ex3ndr</author><text>We are actually trying to make open protocol in &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;actor.im&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;actor.im&lt;/a&gt; with federation with &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matrix.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matrix.org&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that only Actor and Matrix understand importance of federation.</text></item><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>A hundred different chat systems mentioned here. &lt;i&gt;None&lt;/i&gt; of them compatible with one another. Well, I guess a couple of them have IRC gateways, but you have to actually set those up.&lt;p&gt;Gee, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it be nice if you could pick and choose your UI? Pick and choose your &amp;quot;integrations&amp;quot;, your &amp;quot;plugins&amp;quot;, your client, etc without having to lose your entire userbase, history, contacts?&lt;p&gt;Some sort of &lt;i&gt;open&lt;/i&gt; protocol.&lt;p&gt;Urgh, I&amp;#x27;ve been working on this lately and the entire field is depressing. Between one side that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the legitimate need for open protocols, and another side that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand why IRC isn&amp;#x27;t the end-all-be-all of group chat (and why UX matters), it&amp;#x27;s just people talking past each other.&lt;p&gt;Every new attempt at making &amp;quot;the slack killer&amp;quot; makes this problem worse, because it comes with its own protocol. Its own users. Etc.&lt;p&gt;PS: If somebody has free time to work on an open source multi-protocol group chat gateway, email me, I have something started.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dorfsmay</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s been some effort towards integration between SIP and XMPP:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc7247&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc7247&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>