But why? Matrix is tiny and no threat to Google services.
I'd personally expect three letter agencies to be involved here. The US government has been aggressively going after encrypted communication for years, with extreme tactics like personal intimidation and secret courts. Read this story about a secure email provider if you doubt it. [1]
This doesn't work so well with EU based companies, even though they have been pushing EU governments to do the same. (There recently was a leak that the encryption ban currently discussed in the EU parliament has some roots in Five Eyes efforts and that governments were pressured by the US to support it. Published by FAZ or Sueddeutsche, I'm trying to find the article...)
I also doubt that iMessage and What's App gaining "backdoors" to their encryption is purely motivated by user experience.
At a time where a lot of people want to switch communication platforms, nipping any such efforts early might well be viewed as important.
"Abusive content" is a convenient excuse that can be arbitrarily applied.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-the-...
There is an absolutely unprecedented shift going on as we speak, one of those groundswell events that have the potential to shift usage habits of hundreds of millions of people.
We got a taste just recently with the shift away from WhatsApp based on a TOS update. Imagine arguing last year that ten million users would jump ship based on a TOS change?
Matrix, and services of its ilk, are absolutely an existential threat to Google in the next 20 years.
Don’t forget that Google has all the threat intel you could possibly imagine from their existing analytics platforms. They will see the shift coming before anyone.
I can absolutely see them acting now to try to disrupt the initial rumblings of a seismic event that has the potential to go totally viral and popular sentiment shifts against megacorps.
Killing them gets exponentially harder over the next 6 months if there were a successful campaign across the internet to switch to these services, and 2021 is very close to seeing a very significant grassroots campaign like that truly take off. Certainly the time has never been better and the populace never been more primed to make the move out of the walled gardens.
How is Matrix a threat to Google?
In their world view, every single minute per day spent looking at screens that don’t have Google ad targeting is a minute that a competitor is stealing value from Google.
A matrix user identity will eventually compete with a google account.
When google accounts are considered as important as myspace accounts, then much of their surveillance loses relevance.
Conjecture on my part: it's a threat to the ad spend Google gets from Facebook.
https://www.fastcompany.com/4032442/its-still-pi-day-so-we-d...
And yet...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo...
An NSL would be handled a lot differently than removing an app from a single app store for sexual content. Every indication so far points to it being a mistake by Google.
From less than a week ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/googles-bots-decide-...
But if you always discount such events as coincidences, you risk remaining blind to emerging patterns.
You can view child porn on Chrome, or receive it by email, or download it by Torrent. Yet I don't see anyone banning web browsers, email clients, and Bittorrent client.
The point is that this is well explained by something other than conspiracy.
Ideally you could set up reproducible builds and make sure that the version in the default F-Droid repo stays up-to-date, but reproducible builds may not be practical for you right now (I'm not sure). Barring that, as you mentioned in the blog post, setting up your own F-Droid repo with self-signed APKs is a good option.
I haven't yet played with Matrix nearly as much as I would like, but I love the vision. Thanks for your efforts!
Also nice plug for F-Droid; they're doing good work as well.
That's great to hear as well.
What's more, this incident is evidence that we need more decentralization, not less. In instances where decentralization is either already working or is up for consideration, we should encourage it, not try to eradicate it.
"Publishing signed binaries from elsewhere (e.g. the upstream developer) is now possible after verifying that they match ones built using a recipe. Publishing only takes place if there is a proper match."
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/96l0at/sync_for_re...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/6dwv1f/boost_for_r...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5fqrr8/now_for_red...
?
1. I install synapse (a matrix server) on my own machine. I install Element on my own phone. I connect one to another, and via the server to other servers.
2. I install a client that connects to reddit. Same reddit as everyone else. Same reddit as the reddit website.
There is a rather significant difference, isn't there?
EDIT addressing the 'hate speech' part, you are correct. If one reddit client is banned, all should be banned. But that is not true for communication apps, like Element.
Except of course Google's own applications. Gmail, Hangouts/Meet/whatever-it-currently-is, Chrome.
Luckily it's not possible to display illegal content with Google's own apps /s
I remember when my nephew got groomed on Google Plus, I was way to naive to think that this would not be occurring in Google's walled gardens. But in there, it turned out to be quasi-public.
Perhaps one day they will make this argument to justify having to spy on everything you do with their software.
That is genuinely horrifying and I'm so sorry for him and your family.
And what about Chrome or Web Browser? Or they going to have built in Filter for website? Although without the reach of Google Search Engine having a filter or not makes no difference anyway.
But it is great they are doing it, the more the better. People were extremely supportive on HN not long ago about banning speeches they dont like on Internet. Hopefully they finally learned something here. They opened the Pandora Box and there is nothing anyone could do until the Pendulum swing to its limit before swinging back.
For all the chaos, the Internet continues to be surprisingly consistent with one set of rules for BigTech and friends and another set of rules for the rest.
EDIT: this ties in to the conversation I had on different platform recently, that it's getting arduous to make people understand that an app is not necessarily the same as the system behind it. Choosing an email client used to be a thing (Thunderbird, The Bat!, Outlook Express, mutt, etc; to name some across contrasting needs) not even too long ago. I despise that we came to a world where even the tech moderation fails to understand an app != protocol.
That is also why I was rather sad when Microsoft announced that they won't develop their own browser engines any more. I disliked IE as much as anybody else, but what I did like was the competition. With Edge switching to Blink, essentially becoming yet another partially-degooged Chrome, part of that competition is gone.
Now it sends half of your data to Google and the other half to Microsoft. That's an improvement, they decentralized spyware.