Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

> We are not rolling our own. Whether we host it ourselves or pay for a service, we’re getting something off the shelf that best meets our needs.

I sincerely hope it’s not Slack and some restricted search archive platform. Moving away from IRC to a newer system could provide long lived archives to users. But if privacy is very important, then a “no archive” option would be fine (similar to IRC). Anything in between, like “search the last 10000 messages”, would be a disaster for active channels with many members.

> It needs to be accessible to the greater Mozilla community. We are evaluating products, not protocols.

I’m sure whichever the chosen product is, it’s going to be based on HTTP to allow “schools, colleges or corporate networks” to be able to connect. It seems weird that we’re dumping everything on to HTTPS, and one day in the future there would be a world where only port 443 would be open and all the mess, and the holiness, would flow through it, and it alone. In the name of securing networks, we seem to have gone to an illusion of security by moving to one port for almost all communications.

> We aren’t picking an outlier; whatever stack we choose needs to be a modern, proven service that seems to have a solid provenance and a good life ahead of it. We’re not moving from one idiosyncratic outlier stack to another idiosyncratic outlier stack.

I still hope it doesn’t come down to Slack or Hipchat or some commercial offering. Maybe host a Matrix instance? Or Mattermost? Or Rocket.chat?

Everything being encapsulated in HTTPS is the result of waiting so long to be secure by default that the base network abstractions had ossified too much to realistically change.

TLS would have made sense as well but if you're already at that point you might as well bump up yet another abstraction layer because the programming ecosystem is bigger and it frees you from being tied to one security abstraction forever e.g. now you can use QUIC.

Matrix shows how thorough the switch to HTTP has become. Like with DoH, what makes Matrix most attractive is the ability to implement solutions using pre-existing web application stacks, like Node.js. It's a sort of path dependency where the easiest way to implement a simple solution starts with a very complex, mostly superfluous foundation.

The fact that port 80 and 443 are less likely to be blocked is a distant, secondary factor. Frankly, I've never been on a network that blocked other outbound ports. And I've definitely never seen a network where hosted services could only ever receive traffic on port 80 or 443. Rather, I think it's more (if not entirely) a matter of people justifying the use of web stacks to implement services which cry out for simpler solutions.

On anecdata point.

I have several (all government) clients who cannot access port 8080 from their office network. We now have a bunch of aELB rules that forward a specific path prefix to port 8080 internally. I have not yet been accused of intentionally circumventing their firewall. But I live in hope...

Don't forget that if it works over http(s), it's a lot easier to build a web interface for, and that's a big win for ease of use!

You could run IRC server on whichever port you like and many servers do, the biggest benefit of matrix is that it's decentralized and easy for non technical people to engage in, no need for znc bouncers and things like that.

> Frankly, I've never been on a network that blocked other outbound ports.

That's just down to who you've worked for. I've worked for two companies, both well-known brands, both operating in the consumer space (nothing secret/shady), where most outbound ports were blocked.

In one case it certainly was possible to get them unblocked for access to specific hosts or endpoints but you'd have to go through an approval process that took about a week. I never had a request refused but it certainly could slow progress, although I got into the habit of trying to get all of us to anticipate what we might need and front-load such requests.

At one time in a past life, I was running SSH on port 80, then using a SOCKS proxy to escape the madness of the network I was on.

We put our FOSS community on Mattermost - it's awesome!

It lacks administration features - kicking, banning, etc.

Has to self script, it's all packed in a PostgreSQL database - you can do anything you want!!

Near immediate down-vote? Right, forgot that admin of IRC was no cost at all.

Mattermost costs $60/yr in hosting and only a few hours a month in admin work - same as our email group and our old Slack (or whichever solution)

Hipchat is dead so you don't need to worry about that.

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