ZeroSpam

We will talk about Spam in the context of XMPP.

Holger (i.a. ejabberd developer and admin of the XMPP provider conversations.im and the instance of Freie Universität Berlin) and Ge0rG (i.a. author of the spam manifesto https://github.com/JabberSPAM/jabber-spam-fighting-manifesto, heavy user of the Prosody module mod_firewall and developer of the XMPP client yaxim) will give talks. MattJ (i.a. author of mod_firewall and Snikket) will join the meetup.

Afterwards, we will discuss the three types of spam: registration spam, presence subscription spam and spam messages (directly or via public group chats).

When? Wednesday, 2021-03-10 18:00 CET (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where? Online, via our channel (xmpp:berlin-meetup@conference.conversations.im?join). A Jitsi Meet video conference will be announced there some minutes before the meeting starts.

See you then!

#jabber #xmpp #spam #chat #freesoftware #prosody #yaxim #jabberspam #snikket #meetup #berlin #community

It's more than two years ago that I started using the social network #Movim after a tip from an acquaintance. I had left G+ and never wanted to use a centralized social media platform again. I tried the Fediverse (Mastodon and Friendica), Diaspora and Movim but eventually I kept using Movim and Mastodon. The secret of Movim is tranquillity. After logging in for the first time the news stream is empty, much like Diaspora, and it only gets filled with post from people that you follow, communities that you subscribe to and rss feeds. This in combination with an easy to use chat option that gives access to whole #XMPP network makes Movim very powerful.

It's also incredibly easy to create a community in Movim, although I think community isn't the most appropriate description here. It's more a blog from one or more persons where other users can subscribe to, like and comment in a linear fashion.

I recently introduced my wife to Movim and the first thing that surprised her is that, contrary to FB, the news stream contained articles worth reading instead of ads and other bs. She also liked the fact that she could use any XMPP-client for chat. Time will tell if she'll keep using it but her initial enthusiasm was very encouraging. (Less encouraging was that her employee laptop denied access to Movim via Chrome while it was okay to access FB and the likes).

Although, I'm pretty psyched about Movim I would like to see some features. First, coming back to the tranquillity, when in the news stream on the right side five posts of other Movim users appear. I suppose that this is meant for discovery and that's great but in some of the posts I'm less interested but I can't block or hide these posts.

Also there is no way to block or hide a person entirely. This may become a problem since Movim appears to be becoming more and more popular and with that the interaction between people grows exponentially.

Currently I'm lazily using the European server of Movim but I (or anyone else) can deploy a self-hosted instance and I'm tempted to experiment with that. I'll probably get back to that.

Finally, I want to thank Timothée Jaussoin and other contributors for developing Movim and making it available to all of us. It's awesome. And if you read this please consider donating to the Movim project.

Link to my initial thoughts about Movim: https://homehack.nl/movim-floss-alternative-for-hangouts/

In February 2021, this month, starts the year of the ox. At Berlin XMPP meetup, we will celebrate the new year with an introductionary talk about "XEP-0373: OpenPGP for XMPP" and "XEP-0374: OpenPGP for XMPP Instant Messaging" and the panel of experts:

• DebXWoody (implementor of OX in Profanity)
• defanor (implementor of OX in rexmpp)
• Florian (co-author of the OX standards)
• lovetox (implementor of OX for Gajim)
• Paul (implementor of OX in Smack)

When? Wednesday, 2021-02-10 18:00 CET (always 2ⁿᵈ Wednesday of every month)

Where? Online, via our MUC (xmpp:berlin-meetup@conference.conversations.im?join). A Jitsi video conference will be announced there.

See you then!

#yearoftheox #openpgp #xmpp #ox #jabber #encryption #e2ee #privacy #omemo #🐂️ #berlin #meetup #community #profanity #rexmpp #gajim #smack

After a conversation here on Movim yesterday I again watched the famous speech of Eben Moglen on that Friday night in 2010 at the ISOC-NY. That speech has influenced me greatly. It was the first time that I realised that client-server infrastructure of the internet is a huge problem. This very infrastructure ensured that all the data were aggregated and used (or abused) by the ones that owned the servers. At the same time the clients were being deprived of power. And that with the accumulation of servers in a data centre and he virtualisation of the servers (cloud) these owners were getting even more powerful.

I wasn't the only one that was influenced by this speech of Eben. It also marked the beginning of the development of Diaspora. As it happens some of the initial developers of Diaspora were present at that Friday night at ISOC-NY and it inspired them to build the Diaspora software.

A lot has changed the last ten years, and I will get to that, but what hasn't changed is the client-server infrastructure, the source of evil. If anything the power of ones that own the servers like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and even Twitter has increased greatly. And as a consequence the ones working on the client side have become even more powerless. Snowden (2013) and Cambridge Analytica (2016) are just a few examples that demonstrate that this abuse of the 'architecture of the catastrophe' took directions that we (or I) couldn't have envisioned.

On the plus side since 2010 a lot of developments have started to halt this catastrophe. Some were more successful than other but it's undeniable that if someone is looking for a free (as in freedom) alternative right now a lot more options are available than 10 years ago. Also these options seem to be sustainable and rather successful. The #Fediverse with Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, Funkwhale, Pixelfed, Lemmy and others has made great progress since the introduction of the #ActivityPub protocol. #XMPP has made great progress with the introduction of advanced clients like Conversations, Movim and Gajim.

It appears that #Freedombox hasn't lived up to it's expectations. The development of Freedombox was initiated by Eben and allows to set up a simple private server in your home. The last time I checked even Diaspora was not supported by Freedombox making social networking with it impossible. Luckily other initiatives have taken flight such as #Yunohost. They make it easy to self-host a server and install software for blog, chat, social networking, online storage and file sharing. Yunohost and others bring the dream of Eben closer of a peer-to-peer network instead of a client-server network.

Another noteworthy development is Scuttlebutt, a client-based peer-to-peer application for encrypted social network. Just install the app on your PC or phone (Manyverse) and communicate directly with others that installed the app.

Or Briar, a client for messaging that uses Bluetooth, WiFi and the Tor network to communicate. The need to host your own server has been replaced by simply installing an app that doesn't rely on a central server. Even if the internet is down the information keeps flowing over WiFi and Bluetooth.

Although we still live in the catastrophe that Eben spoke about there are more possibilities to escape and it appears that more and more people are discovering this. With every scandal, every update of the term of service a wave of new users appears on the networks that I mentioned above and that's something to be grateful about but it should also motivate us to keep fighting for a free (as in freedom) internet.

It's been six months since the last #release, and for the 0.18 – Oterma one there's a lot to show!

So let's dive in this list of exciting features and changes that you will find in this new release.

Notifications

0.18 is coming with quite some changes regarding how the notifications are handled and displayed within Movim. This also came with lots of bug fixes to ensure that the counters are up-to-date everywhere across the UI and between all the devices.

One of the first notable changes you will find is how the global chat counter is behaving. This counter is now displaying the total number of unread discussions and not the total number of unread chat messages anymore.

Related to this change, an update on the chatrooms bookmark specifications is now allowing you to save a per-chatroom notification configuration. With this new feature you'll be able to choose, for each chatroom, if you want to “always be notified” for each new messages, “only when you're mentioned”, or “never”.

Movim can now use sound to notify you of a new incoming message, if you allow it to (see the configuration panel).

Stickers, drawing and emojis

We also improved some existing chat features. Some work has been done by Christine Ho on the Draw widget. The drawn lines are now smoother, even on large resolution pictures. The feature has also been extended to allow you to draw on existing pictures you upload from your device.

Christine Ho also improved the existing emoji picker to add useful search bar, you can find it when trying to add a reaction bellow a message.

A new pack of fresh meme stickers was also added to the stickers panel.

And finally, the Movim emojis support has been updated to Unicode 12.0, bringing a pack of new emojis in.

Video conferencing

A big part of the time spent on this release was focused on the video-conference features. The related code was heavily reworked to ensure a smooth compatibility with the #Conversations Android client, it's still not perfect but works already quite well.

This was especially because of the integration of XEP-0215: External Service Discovery in the project. Allowing the web browser to easily perform STUN/TURN discovery (it's a way to discover alternative routes on the Internet for the video and audio feeds to be streamed on) using the #XMPP server services.

The call flow was also split to conveniently allow audio-only calls.

And the screen-sharing feature was integrated on the video-side. Useful when you want to quickly show a document or a presentation during your call!

Video-conferencing is hard. For this release we made quite a lot of work to improve the user experience but we are still not totally satisfied with the result. Some more work will be needed in the upcoming releases to really deliver the best we can offer for that feature.

And a many other things…

Chat and chatrooms

The interfaces between the chat and chatrooms (header bar, drawer menu) are now unified to display general information the same way. A little gallery was added which displays recently sent and received pictures.

The pictures handling in chat messages has been improved. Movim is now trying to resolve picture URLs, even if they were sent using a client that doesn't embed pictures in messages.

The scrolling behavior in chat was greatly improved and simplified, a little "go to bottom" button was also added.

Movim now handles the XEP-0319: Last User Interaction and can therefore be more precise to tell you the last time your contacts were seen active.

Post publication

Movim was already automatically saving your draft posts while you were writing, but since this version it actually displays when a draft has been saved. The post publication panel was also slightly redesigned to be clearer and more accessible.

Performance

On the technical side, a PresenceBuffer system was added to handle wave of presences coming from the network and mass insert them in the SQL DB. This reduces by a factor of 10 to 100 the number of requests that are done to the database during those "spikes" of incoming presences from the network. This little feature greatly improves logins speed and shortens the time it takes to join a new chatroom.

Favicon

The favico.js library, that was handling the little counter in the browser tab icons had been removed and rewritten using only vanilla JavaScript, keeping only the required bits which also made it way smaller. This was actually the last (external) JavaScript dependency coming with Movim.

XMPP Authentication

Regarding the authentication process, Movim now supports XEP-0368: SRV records for XMPP over TLS to directly connect to XMPP using an encrypted socket (better than the historical STARTTLS negociation system that is still used as a fallback mechanism). Regarding the IP resolution Movim now uses the Happy Eyeballs mechanism to resolve the server IP on IPv4 or IPv6.

Android application

Finally, the official Android app gained nice features thanks to the improved integration of Movim on your phone.

The notification handler has been reworked to handle newer Android versions, conversations are now stacked properly.

From any application you can now share a URL to Movim directly and publish it in a Post. In the future we are planning to add more sharing capabilities like this one (share to contacts or chatrooms for example).

Related to the video-conferencing improvements, audio and video calls are now launched in a separate task to allow you to switch back easily to your chat or publications while having your call. This makes it close to the experience you can already have on desktop.

Finally some work was done in #Movim and on the Android app to improve the general performance, especially regarding the touch features and general responsiveness.

To conclude…

As always you can test all those features on our official pod, or deploy them in a few steps on your own server :)

We always need some funding to help us promoting Movim and covering project costs, feel free to help on our Patreon.

And stay tuned for the upcoming releases, it seems that there are some interesting features already planned ;)

That's all folks!

And also here

Recommend Movim and share your experience ;-)

(No registrations recquired).

#Movim, #XMPP, #Recommendations

Thanks to the awesome work of Singpolyma there is now a bridge between the #XMPP and the #SIP networks. Both standards are able to exchange information to setup audio calls.

A few things were fixed in Movim to do so (mostly related to the format of the account identifiers used for the protocol bridge system) but now everything seems to work fine. You can find the tool at this address: git.singpolyma.net/cheogram-sip. It is still in heavy development but it progressing quite rapidly.

Here is the same call from Movim and the #Linphone SIP client. Calls are also working with the Conversations client as well.

More than a simple tech demo, this can bring quite a lot of useful possibilities. SIP is widely deployed especially in telephony. Calling a remote IP phone directly from your XMPP account could be really convenient.

Using a simple movim.eu account nowadays you can already connect to several other networks, such as IRC or Telegram and group everything in one UI. Having SIP on top really brings the whole experience to another level.

Have fun with Movim and movim.eu and don't forget to support the project by sharing links around!

The movim.eu #XMPP server now supports connections through #WebSockets.

This means that if you're using a #web client like conversejs, you'll be able to connect directly using your movim.eu account.

If you are a #Movim user. Nothing changes as Movim is using standard good ol' TCP/TLS connections to login 😉

The clients that wants to connect to movim.eu using WebSockets will normally automatically discovers the endpoint (using the related XEPs). If not, it is available manualy at wss://movim.eu/xmpp.

That's all folks!

Movim 0.18 is planned to be released soon.

In the meantime, let's have a look at one specific feature that is really useful when you integrate Movim with the Spectrum2 - Telegram bridge.

For those that are not aware, XMPP can connect to other chat networks using tools called "transport". One of the most used is called Spectrum2 and can connect to many other networks thanks to its libpurple support.

Telegram transport setup

What will we do here is:

• Setup telegram-purple in Spectrum2 on Debian
• Connect it to a XMPP server (here ejabberd)
• Adapt the transport to integrate with Movim

Setup Spectrum2 and telegram-purple

Here I will not detail the basic installation, the official Spectrum2 documentation is pretty complete.

Once the repository is setup, please install the base package and the libpurple module:

apt install spectrum2 spectrum2-backend-libpurple

For telegram-purple the README is also quite complete

Create a Telegram transport

Once all the packages are setup, we will create a transport configuration file. You can reuse the spectrum.cfg.example located in the /etc/spectrum2/transports/ as a base.

# nano /etc/spectrum2/transports/spectrum_telegram.cfg

This is basically the config file that I used for my own telegram.movim.eu transport:

[service]
server_mode = 0
user=spectrum

jid = telegram.movim.eu
password = spectrumpassword
server = 127.0.0.1
port = 5347
backend_host = 127.0.0.1

users_per_backend=10

backend=/usr/bin/spectrum2_libpurple_backend
protocol=prpl-telegram

web_directory=/home/movim/upload/spectrum
web_url=https://upload.movim.eu/spectrum

[identity]
name=Telegram Transport
type=telegram

[logging]
config = /etc/spectrum2/logging.cfg
backend_config = /etc/spectrum2/backend-logging.cfg

[database]
type = sqlite3

[registration]
enable_public_registration=1

When Spectrum2 will connect to the Telegram network, the stickers will be downloaded as files on the server. By default an ugly path is simply sent to the XMPP clients. We will turn it to a proper URL and let Movim to its magic.

To do that we need to configure the Web Storage module. You can also find more documentation about it there.

web_directory=/home/movim/upload/spectrum
web_url=https://upload.movim.eu/spectrum

It's pretty self explanatory. The downloaded stickers will be put in the web_directory directory. The second parameter, web_url, is basically telling Spectrum2 how to general its URL before sending them in the messages.

Configure ejabberd

Then we need to add a new service in our ejabberd.yml configuration file.

  -
    port: 5347
    module: ejabberd_service
    access: all
    ip: "127.0.0.1"
    global_routes: false
    hosts:
      "telegram.movim.eu":
        password: "spectrumpassword"

Once everything is setup, restart Spectrum2 and ejabberd. For Spectrum2 you can do it using spectrum2_manager or a dedicated systemd configuration file.

Configure our web server

We then need to expose those files to the web. A simple nginx configuration will handle it.

server {
    server_name upload.movim.eu;

    listen 443 ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

    …

    root /home/movim/upload;

    location /spectrum {
        alias /home/movim/movim/spectrum;
    }
}

Fix the nasty file rights with Incron

If you start to use your Telegram transport at this point you'll notice that the stickers URLs are returning a 403 Forbidden error.

Indeed, Spectrum2 is writting the files in the directory using it's own rights. And this can't be configured.

We will then use another useful tool called Incron. This tool works like CRON but instead of working on time events, it works on file events.

You can find a pretty complete documentation there.

apt install incron 
nano /etc/incron.allow # add your spectrum user there
sudo -su spectrum
incrontab -e

In the incrontab file well then change dynamicaly the rights of the files once they are wrote in the directory (check the documentation for more details).

/home/movim/upload/spectrum   IN_CLOSE_WRITE          chmod 664 $@/$#

Enjoy your nice Telegram stickers in Movim

In Movim, nothing more to do. With the version 0.18, Movim will try to resolve the incoming messages that contains a URL and see if it's a valid picture. Which is the case for Telegram stickers.

You can also note that it works for any other incoming picture URL, including those sent using Conversations or other XMPP clients.

That's all folks!

#telegram #xmpp #movim #transport #stickers #ejabberd #admin