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Comment by tmikaeld | Hacker News Reader

Good news!

Now if only they can figure out how to make Riot usable with Encryption enabled without pulling your hair out every time you enter a room or chat with non-matching keys.

While Riot has a lot of features, it is also not easy for new users.

I've tried to convert at least 10 persons and none of them use it any more, citing not being able to figure out how to use it or simply not having the time to waste figuring it out.

It needs to be intuitive out of the box, how to contact people, how to find a room, how to chat.

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Have you tried since we relaunched encryption and turned it on by default 2 weeks ago? The UX has completely been rewritten and it should now be transparent - see https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing....

edit: To be clear, we no longer nag whenever there's an unverified login present - and unverified logins should increasingly be a thing of the past anyway given we now have cross-signing and so let users verify their own sessions at login.

I have and it's now at the point where I can recommend it to my family :) (with e2e, the UX otherwise I found fine)

edit: also, congratulations, really hope matrix can get the market share it deserves

thanks :D

Wait... Naive question: shouldn't you, especially in this case, still nag the account owner about his own unverified sessions? What if a bad-actor homeserver slides in a new session to snoop around?

BTW: I absolutely love the cross-signing move and riot/matrix in general! :) Thanks for your great work on this!

AFAIK as more and more chats become encrypted (as it is the default for private rooms) then a rogue server operator wont to be able to snoop because they can't decrypt the messages unless you go through the verification process. And this aside, there are are few unobtrusive, but noticeable icons letting you know that you have an unverified session.

We do nag, in that all the green shields will suddenly go bright red. But we don't block the user from being able to send messages until they've resolved the problem.

It's possible we'll reintroduce this once cross-signing has been fully adopted though; it's tricky because we need to distinguish between encrypted rooms where you simply don't care if random users have unverified slides... versus ones where it's a disaster if an unverified session slides in. Finding the right UX for that is tough, but we think the current balance is an improvement.

Alrighty, thanks for your answer :)

That is really a tough UX problem... Maybe a room could have a "sensitive content" flag that is enabled by default for one-on-one chats and can be manually enabled for group chats.

Can I bump two phones together to exchange keys (using NFC or similar)? That would be the killer feature for us when we do conferences - perhaps more relevant to the Before Covid times of course.

You could, but we chose to do QR codes first as it's a bit more intentional and slightly harder to MITM.

Makes sense - that's also the method WeChat uses for many things including associating users.

I have logged in in the past couple of weeks. While setting up the encryption keys, the UI just hung there for a minute or two with almost no indication what was happening or how far things had progressed. I patiently waited through the process, but am not sure a casual user would know to wait for so long.

You must have hit us in the traffic spike on the matrix.org homeserver after we enabled e2ee by default - sorry. Keeping the matrix.org server scaling with the amount of traffic is a pain in the ass currently, but we're about to land horizontal scaling (at last) in the coming weeks which means others won't have to hang around. Thanks for being patient with it though. On the plus side, setup should be much lighter/faster for new users than existing ones.

I haven't, this should make a large difference!

Nice to see this finally happen :-)

Recent update is a huge leap forward, but still, no one understands, why they have to save/remember 3 passwords.

Only my closest family would listen me explaining that there's encryption but there's also authentication, yet only because I force that info upon them while standing over their shoulder, making sure they write down all the recovery keys.

Select few graduated to password managers and know to back the bases up.

It's a struggle, mainly because I'm the only one who cares in this particular social circle, and thus people don't see my concerns as normal.

There aren't three passwords; there are two: an account password and a recovery passphrase/key. It's the same as (say) macOS - where you have a login password to get into your computer, and a recovery key for FileVault in case of disasters.

However, the feedback is overwhelmingly that we need to iterate on the recovery passphrase - either making it a generated key (like macOS does), or going the whole hog and replacing the login password entirely with the cryptographic recovery one.

Turns out the UX on this stuff is tough.

I'm used to a single pw system, where on account creation the system generates a recovery key, that I can save or not.

That is what's actually happening behind the scenes (though note that the "recovery key" is actually incredibly important since it gives you access to your key backups -- which is something you absolutely want to enable if you're an ordinary user). The problem is that by default Matrix tries to back the "recovery key" up to the homeserver you're using, encrypted with a second passphrase -- hence why you get two passphrases. You can opt-out of it, but I think the UX is the wrong way around -- it should be an opt-in thing and that would make it clearer that the recovery key is what's important and that the passphrase is only needed if you want to upload it to your homeserver.

There is an open issue on this topic[1].

[1]: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/8751

This hasn't helped. There's no way I could recommend Riot to anybody but my most techy friends. As soon as we get the message to "Re-request encryption keys from your other devices" they would be done with it. This is still a problem within the last 2 weeks.

well, if you’re seeing undecryptable messages at this point then it’s a bug. please submit bug reports from both sender and receiver so we can jump on it; we are triaging and chasing down each & all to avoid precisely this.

Very good. I'll keep my eye out and report as needed

Now that's good news! The old UI code was horrible

I'm using the latest. It's still horrible.

you might need to provide a more detailed bug report than that...

I mean, Matrix is great. I love it. But I would not be able to push Riot to my non-telecom-geek friends - the GUI is just so far from the experience you are used to with Whatsapp or Telegram. Messages that aren't deciphered? Scroll resetting mid-way? Click on reply and the GUI is stuck?

They've been working on that for quite a while and just had a major update to Riot (Web/X on Android/iOS) -- E2EE is now on by default. Have you tried the latest version? Most of the issues with key verification have been resolved (and now having users you haven't verified isn't as big of a scary warning as it was in the past -- in fact, I believe the default is that there isn't a warning unless there is a device present which a verified user hasn't signed). Also now there are per-account identities which are used to sign devices (the ever-elusive "cross-signing" feature), so you only need to verify a user once.

Security/crypto usability has a tragedy of the commons type underinvestment problem. No one does it well. You can have beautiful designs but it's pretty much impossible to monetize them because crypto exists at such a fundamental level, so nothing ever evolves. Exempli gratia, ~10 years of blockchain apps/investment have passed and I still use vim to hand edit my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file.

For me the main issue is the battery usage of Riot fdroid which is way too high (i don't know if the google play version have the same issue). Last time i tried it was using more than 50% of my battery just by sitting in the background.

is this on Riot or RiotX on Android? All dev in the last year has been on RiotX, which should be an unrecognisably better app and will shortly replace Riot on Android (hopefully end of June).

Completely unrelated but are there any plans for setting a explicit content filter for riot? At the moment on RiotX you only need to scroll down 7 times in the room directory on matrix.org to see rooms dedicated to sexual content. I think it would be beneficial for broader mass adoption.

Yup. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos... is the sort of direction this work is going; meanwhile we manually try to keep the matrix.org public directory uncontroversial.

Sorry, i missed you comment. It's both for riot and riotx. Reading at opened issues on riotx though it seems that the approach to solve this would be to add server side events

No offense, but this comment is outdated since the recent UX overhaul. You should check it out sometime.

The UX overhaul was two weeks ago, I don't check Riot website daily.

I was hoping not to come off as unreasonable. Just wanted to make it clear to everyone that things have changed while being terse.

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