this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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WhatsApp and Signal messages at risk of surveillance following EncroChat ruling, court hears | Computer Weekly (www.computerweekly.com)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

we already had XMPP available and well developed.

XMPP as defined where?

For privacy, I guess OMEMO is the current gold standard regarding XMPP; however, agreeing on a feature set between clients apart from the most basic stuff wasn't always easy (and I guess it still isn't).

Also, I guess XML has fallen out of style for this kind of use case. Matrix is just JSON over REST, which I guess is kind of nice nowadays?

XML kind of suffers the jack of all trades curse. If you just have two sides exchanging messages using a well-defined protocol, why go for something that offers schema definition, DTD, XSL transformation? These come with costs, and if you don't use them, why XML in the first place?

All of this combined with the fact that the communication model of XMPP and Matrix is different - XMPP closer to email where a server relays messages between clients while in Matrix, everything is a synchronized (?) room, even direct messages between two participants - would have required bending or extending the spec so much that it wouldn't have been XMPP in the original spirit anyways. So instead, a new protocol was designed that incorporated a lot of lessons learned in the decade before it.

You're free to continue using XMPP, after all, bridges exist.