XSF Discussion - 2018-03-12

moin

Hm, no MUCs in clients.json

What?

support MUCs, I assume

Yes

Do we have a field for that?

Dave Cridland, I heard you had some (internal? non-public?) client which does reactions. Would you care to give feedback to this? https://github.com/jabbercat/jabbercat/issues/80

Ge0rG, no

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16567009

Tobias: HN is probably downgrading / shadowkilling upvotes from direct links, it's better to go from the main page.

HN users probably know it and can go back to the mainpage to upvote

Maybe.

Nice good job

Don't even care about the content but having xmpp on the front page of HN is always an achievement

Dave Cridland: Did I see you saying something along the lines of email stagnating around the time everyone switched to gmail?

"Markdown-like syntax" in that article. This is going to come back to bite us at some point

pep.: that also came on the ML recently, with the suggestion to call 393 and 394 "markdown" and "markup" respectively

Yeah I've seen that one and your comment :)

I had to resist the urge to counter-propose "markleft" and "markright"

I think that 0394 qualifies for markleft, because it's based on tags starting with <, and 0393 is markright because it specifies > as a quoting character.

jonasw, SamWhited: ^

I’ll slap you

Ge0rG: :D

jonasw: luckily I didn't attend CLT

yeah

we still need that slapping-into-face-over-plain-TCP/IP

;)

jonasw: over XMPP

<slap/>

*fry*

wait, that doesn't work on here…

http://www.sydneyjanebaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/0tsVo2k.gif

Damn, with Sam on the Council I will probably not get this through Council against the authors wishes.

-xep poke

Zash: Presence Obtained via Kinesthetic Excitation (POKE) (Humorous, Active, 2004-04-01) See: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0132.html

SamWhited: I'm actually glad you didn't try to fry me :D

> How do you use emoji reactions in a mission-critical way? 🤣

Who are you calling a rectangle?!

fry: not sure if demonstration on how to do that or quote and laughter.

jonasw, what's your stance on swapping the names of xep39(3|4)?

flow, I said that I’m going to change the name of 394 anyways, so I don’t really care

I’m not sure either styling or markup really applies

jonasw, what shall be the new name of xep394?

swapping the names seems like a bad idea though

not sure

XEP-0394: Not Sure

seems legit

That appears to be confusing

jonasw: "markleft"

Ge0rG, no.

Text Style Annotations

You are thinking too 2D

maybe Markup Annotation or something which carries the notion that it’s not directly inside the message

Markforward!

jonasw: you don't really care, and "markleft" and "markright" are great memory hooks

Ge0rG, they’re also bad for people with right/left weakness :P

Mark Here

Mark Tawin

intended typo?

I'm just going to say 'yes'

I don’t see the joke then :)

jonasw: don't get all ableism on me

What about Mark Zuckerberg?

I've heard he is pretty rich

rich text formatting with zuck-up!

haha the irony is excellent, that slack-bait-and-switch hn thread a guy 'I'm writing an open source client...' -> follows link -> 'The app will be open-sourced at some point, so you don't have to worry about it being abandoned.'

lolwat

I fell for that once with minecraft, never again

i don’t like that "we’ll open source that at some point"

Minetest!

yea minetest is excellent :)

people who don’t open source right away usually won’t lose their reasons not to later on

Syndace might be an exception, still wary on that one ;-) (jk)

ah I can link directly to the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16567285

jonasw, Haha nice one :D

multi-protocol client. suuure

> There will also be an affordable premium plan for things like having more than 5 accounts. The base functionality will always be free.

> Open-Source

nope

but he's fixing the walled garden problem jonasw

deak

*yeah

he even says so...

:)

multi-protocol messengers have always been the best

Ceterum Censeo Pidgin Delendam Esse.

especially ones written in pure C

they never have security issues

moparisthebest, you should renick to "multiprotocolisthebest"

IN PURE C

holy smokes

=)

I thought we were past this stage

C is nice. In small doses.

I dislike 100mb javascript monstrosities too, but the solution to me doesn't seem to be 'rewrite everything in "pure C"'

yeah

using something inherently memory-unsafe in 2018 seems like a super stupid thing to do.

especially if network interfaced

I’d go along with C++. that has at least the option of writing mostly compile-time checked memory-safe code.

> eul is a registered company, and all binaries are signed. Your data is safe.

I’ll... just ... stop reading that site now

mainly the irony of being linked from that thread and 'solving the walled garden problem' was the best part :)

he was plugging eul in earlier threads as well.

Slack doesn't give me much grief using the Slack client, although it's annoying, but Discord...someone makes a nice open source Discord transport and they will be my friend.

someone make a nice XMPP client.

Kev wow you need a lots of effort to be your friend

Ge0rG: I'm working on that.

https://securelist.com/somebodys-watching-when-cameras-are-more-than-just-smart/84309/ Botnet control by Samsung using XMPP~

Ge0rG, I’m working on that.

It's C++ and it's Qt and I hope this could be the year of XMPP on the desktop ;)

> the entire Hanwha smart camera cloud is a Jabber server. It has so-called rooms, with cameras of one type in each room. An attacker could register an arbitrary account on the Jabber server and gain access to all rooms on that server. Sound security design. I'm on the look for a "web cam" style camera I can point to the great view I have in the new home

lol

Kev: Haven't you heard? The desktop is obsolete!

Better someone build an XMPP Discord-kind-of-client

should probably take a look at discord at some point

Much like Slack.

Except you can't have multiple accounts

I never used slack

Much like Discord.

ELOOP

Someone wanna take one for the team and look at all these things and tell us what their point is?

I use both extensively.

Kev, wanna agree on how to handle Emoji Reactions and do a field test?

Zash: They both do things that are useful and XMPP doesn't do, to my eyes.

jonasw: Reference.

Last argument I heard for Discord was “it’s possible to do an audio conference at any moment, so we should migrate that in the eventuality we may want to do one someday”.

but there are many details

Kev, it would be nice to know which kind of things we are missing then

Kev, https://github.com/jabbercat/jabbercat/issues/80

That's the easy answer for live messages. For non-live messages we need the server archive to understand references.

I then proceeded to close this biboumi tab to never come back there.

Kev: Things.

Kev, I argue that Message Attaching is more well-suited for emoji reactions, but feel free to weigh in if you disagree. I consider that one of the more irrelevant details though.

Kev: All I hear are repeats of my Skype hating days. "XMPP just can't replace Skype" - said by peolpe who use it exactly as you would IRC

jonasw: I *think* that References simply supersedes Message Attaching, once it's fleshed out.

Kev, it does too much

Zash: I think you can give me a little mileage in having an understanding of XMPP if I think some of the things Slack does that I use are hard to currently do in XMPP :)

but I argue that in the linked thing already

And Reactions that Jonas is talking about is one useful example.

Other things are what I'm hoping to build on top of MIX once we've got MIX usefully out there.

I've abandoned MIX by now.

I'm also in favor of Message Attaching over References for reactions, because what jonasw said

I could live with a reference containing the message ID and a type='reaction', though

Kev, also, my beef with references would be that it uses codepoint ranges into body but doesn’t handle multiple languages. that’s not relevant to reactions, but I expect some breakage originating from that.

however, neither XEP provides an element to put the actual reaction into

(and thus namespace bumps for things irrelevant to reactions)

Ge0rG, I’d just put that as a sibling into the <message/> ✏

jonasw: my point is: we need a separate reactions XEP anyway

yeah, that’s true

hm, actually, I might post some aggregated feedback on references, I am finding quite a few things I dislike about it when reading it

jonasw: Give it a week or so, Edwin's sending out a major update imminently.

Kev, oh-kay

Kev, no wait, I’m going to send out that feedback anyways. From how I see things working usually, the major update will be delayed for some reason and then my feedback is lost, because I’ll forget about it

Or send it anyway and Edwin can integrate it, either way.

also, maybe it can be incorporated into that update :)

yeah

Are you just considering Reactions emoji-only things?

<reaction>meh</reaction>

Seve/SouL: no, but emoji will be the recommended way to react.

Seve/SouL: the challenge is to determine how many codepoints correspond to one emoji

A bunch

<{reaction}meh/>

Why do you need to count the codepoints in an emoji? They're the reaction, not the source

Did someone suggest shoving semantics into <body>? Otherwise there shouldn't be any need for codepoint counting.

I did not.

I only want to shove fallback into <body/> :)

Kev: in case somebody wants to limit reactions to "at most one emoji"

so you can't write a novel in there.

For this one thing, I think not having a fallback is actually sensible Jonas.

where is +notify specified? Is it only that single sentence in xep163?

flow: might be a bit in 60 too

9.2, 60.

Kev, why?

Spam?

hmm then xep163 is misleading, it tells me that appending +notify will make me receive all notifications related to the protocol that precedes the suffix

Zash, if in response to the Reactions thing: people are doing that already anyways

Isn't half the point of these to compress eg a ton of 👍 replies?

whereas xep60 tells that that I will only receive notifications about the node whose NodeID is the prefix

No the obvious solution here is to write a message with only 'm', which triggers a bot to say "$name says +1". Now you got twice the spam.

(This what actually went on in those Skype channels)

(not to mention that if we don’t have a body on the message, it will be omitted from many archives.)

(or may not be carbon-copied or something)

flow: How are the nodes named in 163?

Zash, I feel you’ve got quite a trauma from skype.

jonasw: We need to update how archiving works in the world of references. And it's by archiving bare-JID.

jonasw: Mmmmmmmmyeah

Kev, xep163 doesn't really name nodes, its protocols like tune who do

Zash, so, I’ve seen people in MUCs already doing the "name\n> message\nemoji" thing.

but what if such protocols define multiple nodes? xep163 gives the impression that I'll get notifications for all of them by a single +notify

jonasw: right

that article is interesting "One of the main problems associated with the cloud architecture is that it is based on the XMPP protocol."

moparisthebest, which article?

MattJ: https://securelist.com/somebodys-watching-when-cameras-are-more-than-just-smart/84309/

xml:lang='*'

from the articel's "Message sent over XMPP using a test account created for research purposes" picture

Kev: the idea of splitting resources, as in the examples in MIX, have those ever been written up?

I don't remember if I've put anything about it into bind2 or not.

I didn't find it in XEP-0386. I did notice it being expired.

Kev: in any case, the paragraph confused us here

I really hope that those split resources are going to die soon.

sorry I got cut-off mid-type there it says "One of the main problems associated with the cloud architecture is that it is based on the XMPP protocol." but then proceeds to say the *real* problem

"An attacker could register an arbitrary account on the Jabber server and gain access to all rooms on that server."

which is addressed in the base spec, not even an extension, in fact arbitrary account registration could just be off...

moparisthebest: I think you are preaching to the choir

When designing a protocol, you have to anticipate on user and implementer stupidity, but this a level of stupidity I would not be able to anticipate....

What's the saying?

well sure, just pointing out how dumb it is, it's only seperated by 2 sentences, don't know why an otherwise smart reviewer would do that

If you design something idiot-proof, the universe will design a better idiot?

hargh. Did some kind of DST change happen anywhere in the world, recently?

Lots

It's the week of hell

yea EST did sunday morning

or EDT, whatever, flipped between them one way or the other :)

Its changed in the US but not in Europe aiui

It's

when’s the switch in Europe btw?

Still +1 here

Next week I think

https://depositphotos.com/33062973/stock-illustration-comic-curses-speech-bubble.html

My feeling is "last weekend in mars"

this time the last weekend is split between march and april, so I’m unsure

right, march 25th in DE

so probably the same in europe

whenever I think about how terrible timezones and DST are now, I just imagine how much more terrible it'll be when people live on other planets :)

jonasw: Yay EU-standardization

moparisthebest, star time 1520872849

I think all board members are in the same DST-change period, but council might not be. SamWhited, you're probably the only one this week with a different time. Don't be like Guus and miss a meeting.

ack; I forgot about that, thanks.

(afaik, both board and council fixed the time to London time, thus using its DST switchover date, whenever that might be).

jonasw, maybe but it won't be like that in the beginning, if people go to mars in the next 50 years or whatever it'll just be yet-another-far-harder-to-calculate-timezone, presumably

Well, you probably would've been an hour early, and not missed it by an hour, like I just did. :)

Zash: it is actually 'the last Sunday in March'.

that makes sense

It's really exciting what you can do with timezones (this is from 10 years ago) https://op-co.de/1984.html

am I the only one to find the opkode.com vs op-co.de distinction super confusing

Nope

I find it too.

I read about half of the opkode.com blogpost earlier thinking odd Ge0rG updated his website until I got to the 'author of converse.js' part

I don't know how to resolve this problem, besides of undeservedly bitching on JC

if you weren't both involved in XMPP it wouldn't be so bad :)

#OPCODEBOWL

we clearly need a dual to the death

duel even

Cleganebowl can go throw itself into the wall! Opcodebowl hype!!!

duel to death sounds like a bad idea

really bad

Ge0rG will lose

jc knows how to wield a sword.

I’ve seen things

but what a way to go out

https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc - we need the same for XMPP!

ah yea not bad, I like it

https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2018-m03/0075.html

so the same as https://github.com/moparisthebest/freespeech if the wordlist just consisted of 1024 emojis

Ge0rG, we already have it https://github.com/bluszcz/awesome-xmpp

and it lists 'Pidgin' under 'Clients'

I'm not saying it's perfect

awesome used to mean something

It's also missing a lot of stuff. Gajim isn't even listed :p

If it's about "awesome" clients that's going to be a short list…

Now it seems to just be some curated list of stuff.

not sure if you guys are being facetious or not - the 'awesome' thing is just a github thing for a repo that is just a big list of resources/information relating to something. It doesn't really quantify quality

It used to be a window manager!

I think some of my coworkers still use it as their window manager

But maybe that means it's just a list of window managers, most of which aren't actually "awesome"?

Zash, it still is!

It's reasonably popular still I think. I was never able to adapt to tiling first workflow

My window manager can do XMPP!

I use i3, but keep meaning to try awesome. No idea what the difference is.

=> awesome XMPP

i3 represent!

The downside is that I only got it working in blocking mode, so my desktop was unusable

*highfive*

I should try i3 again - but I'm guessing even if it's great i'll never manage to get used to it coming from openbox

MattJ: Cool story bro

I'm happy with i3, in that I finally found a window manager that let switch virtual desktops separately on each monitor

And does tabs

I used to use a mix of open box and xfce-wm, but stopped when I switched to i3 full time.

I use KDE Plasma

What Zash said; that was the big draw for me as well.

Does it play nice with floating windows? What I always wanted was tiling for one monitor/virtual desktop and floating for others.

I've been trying to switch to LuaKit for browsing, so that i3 can do the window management instead of the browser

buuuut now I'm back with a ton of firefox tabs :(

I still use KDE since 2006 , been meaning to try i3 though

I got a coworker still using twm

jjrh: duno what qualifies as nice, but it lets you have floating windows if you want to

moparisthebest, noo, please don't leave me alone on this

I guess can I get the best of both worlds? Because some stuff like coding I want tiled but a lot of other stuff is better floating.

Because I tried one tiling wm - umm a haskell one forget the name - and it was like "yeah you can do floating but uh don't"

Seve/SouL: I've tried various things and never liked them, lxdm, gnome, xfce etc, i3 is much more different though, we'll see

i3 will respect whatever the free desktop attribute thing is that windows can set to say "I should be floating", so most tiny windows that should be floating already are in my experience

and you can write rules in the config

Can you set a workspace to be floating by default? Basically can I use i3 like I use openbox but have a few workspaces that are tiled?

Duno, floating is set per window usually

Probably doable with some config

I guess I should give it a go at some point.

With the workspace per monitor - will it just make double the workspaces when you lose a display (aka undock your laptop) because that would be super rad.

I'd recommend trying dwm too

Used it way back before laptops, it was very nice

but on laptops it's always ended with abrupt power failure due to no battery monitoring

might be better now, it's probably managed by systemd these days ..

My pain is I have 2 monitors and I undock my laptop and not only is my laptop not 1080p so that messes stuff up - but all the windows from the two screens get crammed into one virtual desktop

so if i3 treats each monitor as a workspace then it should play nice with switching from 2 to 1 monitors.

if your video drivers are sane enough, you'd just get all the workspaces moved onto the other monitor

That seems to be what mine does; I unplug my monitor and windows remain exactly the same on whatever workspace they were on (except maybe resized a bit)

The nicest thing is being able to move entire workspaces between monitors

IIRC no keybinding for it by default, but one can be set

Although I don't actually use a multi-monitor setup anymore; got an ultrawide and haven't looked back.

I've mostly got an xclock on the laptops monitor :)

and an xterm to mke the clock be the right shape

https://www.zash.se/upload/za9lYCrKESH1.png

Zash, that's the problem - I want my wm to be smart enough to instead put them on a virtual desktop so everything isn't crammed together.

So if I3 treats each monitor as a virtual desktop/workspace it should do the right thing.

Hm?

Like when I undock my laptop (which docked has 2 monitors) all the windows between two monitors go to one - which makes a big mess.

Yeah, not like most others where it's treated as a single large workspace that covers all monitors

Yeah exactly - so that's awesome if that's what i3 does :)

It is and it is

I'm using fluxbox for something like 14 years now, and recently switched from VMware to VirtualBox. The latter seems to get something wrong, so I never see the full screen overlay. 😐

I'd suggest you switch to openbox - I started on fluxbox but eventually switched.

depending how complex your config is it should be pretty painless.

I don't think anyone has been working on fluxbox for a long time.

Pretty complex.

Funny thing. I've met the fluxbox maintainer in real life, long before realizing that he's the maintainer, on a retro irc party, when those were a thing

Yeah - might take a bit of time then. Everything is XML config in openbox and I think they renamed a few things so it's not a 1-1 mapping unfortunately.

I shouldn't be complaining about xml too loudly in this channel

not complaining - just pointing out it's radically different than fluxbox configs :)

Ouch - looks like last release for openbox was 2010 :(

XML for config? Mmmmhm.

If I remember correctly the fluxbox configs were really brittle, one wrong space and everything breaks.

Ge0rG: might go ahead and and skip virtualbox and go directly to virt-manager/kvm

I wish I had

moparisthebest: Hm. Does it run macOS and Windows on a Linux host?

Ge0rG: windows for sure

Probably Mac? Haven't tried

jjrh: I used Notion (successor of Ion3) in the past, that one has full-blown support for floating vs. tiling workspaces and handles multiple displays like i3 does.

Interesting - thanks for that :)

jjrh: I also ended up with i3 though. It's the younger and easier project and way more popular these days. Compared to that, Notion feels a bit clumsy, with a somewhat complex Lua configuration; i3 has a straightforward key=value config file.

I see no `=` in `bindsym $mod+Tab move workspace to output right`

Well it's straightforward at least :-)

It's actually commands that take arguments, yes.