Any when you complain about it, Matrix accuses you of acting in the interests of the attackers.
I've quit it entirely. They have a real victim complex and don't understand that people have legitimate complaints about them.
I've quit it entirely. They have a real victim complex and don't understand that people have legitimate complaints about them.
My issue with possession of CSAM is that its statutory without mens rea. That means if my client gets an image without my knowledge or approval, I'm still blamed for it. And blame is a bloody felony. Some jurisdictions call for absurd punishments of 10y prison per image.
There are a few rooms I'm in. They are heavily moderated and narrow discussion. One is an speech-to-text from OpenMHZ police scanner for my area. But I also discourage usage - I'm highly technical, and I fear average users would get in over their heads and have a very bad time.
Can you be more specific about this? I've met several of the devs and they seem open to bug reports, and the Tor blog is always being updated with notes about various fixes that have been implemented...
Previously, every Tor Browser was "windows".
The claim I've heard was that there were JavaScript attacks that could uncover what OS you were using. Patching those would be 'too hard'. So now TBB just gives up OS. Seems not very good to voluntarily give up bits of PII.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wlNemFwbwE is where I was made aware of this problem. I verified it on my infrastructure too.
Then again, I'd also assume Cloudflare just de facto hellbans all Tor exit node IPs, so...
Tor had a thin layer of user-agent spoofing: it would always claim to be Windows (I presume) in the User-Agent header. But the real user-agent (which is still spoofed, but platform-specifically) was easily accessible from Javascript without even fingerprinting, since they never spoofed the navigator.userAgent variable in the same way. It could also be detected from other fingerprints such as TLS.
They removed the header-only user-agent spoofing so that the User-Agent header now reports the same value as navigator.userAgent, which is one of three distinct values based on your OS type. The rationale is simple: having these different didn't work. It was a failure. It didn't hide any information. And it tripped fingerprint checks on some websites. So they stopped doing that.
Certain people are trying to make this into a huge uproar for some reason. As far as I'm concerned, it's a coordinated disinformation campaign to discourage the use of Tor. The developers probably get spammed about this particular change a lot, because of the disinformation campaign, which explains the hostile response.
Nor were there any developer statements about this change. From an outsider (user) perspective, this smells like a coverup or an insider threat ala XZ situation.
And for software that people sometimes rely on safeguarding their lives with, well, yeah, addressing these significant changes in the open is how you avoid due scrutiny. And I think scrutinizing the lack of communication is a rather damning problem, especially here.
Hell, I was told I was a some sort of bad person for being unhappy with room joins taking hours or even days.
After exhausting all other options, they have improved their software a lot (it's still not perfect, but definitely usable), but their poor attitude has soured their reputation, and made it really difficult to be enthusiastic about Matrix.
I think there is a some sort of catch-22 going on. Matrix Foundation can't fund the replacement of Synapse with a better-designed server, because hosting matrix.org consumes all the money. And it consumes so much money because it runs Synapse, which uses computing resources in a very inefficient manner.
And the Foundation might have a some sort of conflict-of-interest, since it is closely interwoven with the New Vector company, which business case is being able to make Synapse work despite its flaws.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/04/Dont-sign-a-CLA-2.html
It didn't then, and now that the situation is dire for Dendrite (with no funding and no official effort being put into it), I have little hope things are going to improve.
And it is what great about the matrix.org vs other open source app such as Telegram/Signal/Wire.... The protocol was designed to be open. If you don't like the client, write one, if you don't like the server, write another. Just follow the API specification. Being it is REST it is much easier to decipher than IMAP/SMTP. And port 443 works every where! Even on proxied Internet!!
Although it is possible for two room operators to kick each other on different servers at the same moment, which probably does lead to state desync. They'd have to do it at the same moment. In Matrix, it tries to still sync things that happened 6 months ago...
Yeah I hate the name too.
Made a lil' tutorial as well: https://blog.webb.page/2025-04-25-enter-the-matrix.txt
Now if I could get Element X working that'd be awesome but I've settled for regular Element for now.
This should not be remotely controversial.
Obviously the Matrix team is very aware of the very real legitimate problem of the CSAM spammer, and all the very real legitimate complaints about it, and we have tackled it as transparently as we can, with very limited resources.
I am incredibly disappointed that someone I previously respected and considered a constructive member of the open source community reacted like this to a simple request to not feed the trolls.
that, a thousand times. Combined with a severe lack of objectivity. If you can't see the flaws and can't be critical of your own product, what room/hope is there for improvement? Matrix is a never ending story of over-promises under-delivered, taking feedback in bad faith, and, yeah, playing the victim.
I'm amazed that Matrix did manage to capture so much attention for so long while at it. There were there at the right time but with the wrong tech/product/abstraction/competences, sucked all the air out of the "federated personal instant messaging that you can host yourself"-room, and I am still sour that they possibly contributed to the current sad sate of affairs and worst case of consolidation there has ever been in this space (there was a time when WhatsApp wasn't so ubiquitous, facebook messenger, skype, … sucked, GTalk had some amount of interop, and we had a shot at not having our instant messaging in walled gardens).