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I'm testing Element and Matrix at American Airlines. There are big players with clout that take issue to instability such as this. How can I rely on my company
by brettwilcox 6y ago
I'm testing Element and Matrix at American Airlines.
There are big players with clout that take issue to instability such as this. How can I rely on my company using Element when it gets pulled? Not cool Google...
To the element team, reach out to me if you can't get the support you are looking for.
- yorwba 6y agoReach out how? You have no public contact information in your HN profile.
- brettwilcox 6y agoWe've already had conversations and I reached out personally.
- markvdb 6y agoThis comment alone should be reason enough for the company behind Element to sue Google.
- justaj 6y agoThere are debug version apks available here: https://buildkite.com/matrix-dot-org/element-android/builds/latest?branch=develop&state=passed https://buildkite.com/matrix-dot-org/element-android/builds/... Click on "Assemble GPlay Debug version" (or "Assemble FDroid Debug version" if you don't have Google Play Services), then click on "Artifacts" and then choose your apk from there.
- dewey 6y agoHow is that a solution to the problem? Of course there's other ways to install software, just like you could build your own iOS app and sideload it with a certificate. If an app is gone from the store it's basically dead.
- justaj 6y agoIf I were to test the implementation of an app in my enterprise, then it would benefit me to cut down on the unnecessary dependencies. Being dependent on the Google Play Store has shown to be a liability in the past because there were moments where it became a single point of failure (as demonstrated in this thread)
- volta83 6y agoCan't you just use a web app or any other matrix client if this happens? If Google were to "ban" slack from their store, their browsers, etc. then you would be quite in trouble. But with matrix, just pick a different client and move on.
- brettwilcox 6y agoYes, I'm doing a custom react client integration. AA has to prepare for black swan events from every angle and this is a perfect example of one. When you have 100,000+ employees, it's not trivial to just switch up communication platforms.
- volta83 6y agoLet each user pick among any of the multiple clients available. Don't design your system / process to only support one client.
- brettwilcox 6y agoIt puts too much pressure on Helpdesk to provide the support needed when you don't have a common path.
- jancsika 6y agoThis reality should be yelled by a death metal band singer 24/7 at every FOSS developer.
- hutzlibu 6y agoI laughed hard ... but actually no. That should be yelled at every FOSS evangelist, those people who claim everywhere that no one needs Windows, because Linux has everything Windows has, just better, etc. We FOSS developers are free to do what we want. Most of us develope mainly for pleasure, not to ease the workload of some corporate helpdesk.
- Arathorn 6y agoSorry for this :((
- walrus01 6y agoGoogle may be able to control the Element app on the play store, but at least for the server side there's no way to do that with synapse (the official matrix protocol server side implementation), which is fully open source and distributed directly from the developers.
- brettwilcox 6y agoThey are also working on a Go version called Dendrite - https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite The Matrix team is doing a LOT of cool stuff. :)
- absorber 6y agoYes, but IMO the Matrix team should _really_ focus on Dendrite since Synapse is extremely resource hungry and prevents a lot of people (including me) from running their own servers.
- feanaro 6y agoIt's not that resource hungry anymore. Hovering stably around 500M RSS and 8% CPU for me right now. That's with ~25 users and a lot of federated, public rooms, some of them quite large.
- absorber 6y agoWhat CPU are you running it on and how many cores are being used? Are you also in really large rooms like Techlore and Matrix HQ? Because I think I'm in all of the largest rooms (and a lot of the smaller ones)
- pimeys 6y agoI'm running my instance with lots of bridges in a 3-core 4GB server, paying about eight euros a month for it. Synapse runs just fine, but I'll probably switch to the Rust impl when it's done. If you want to go cheaper and have only 300-400 Mbps of bandwidth, I've heard lots of good things about this provider: https://contabo.com/en/vps/ https://contabo.com/en/vps/
- eeZah7Ux 6y agoThat's why XMPP has been adopted for military and industrial use.
- acatsdream 6y agoYou can use FDroid though.
- qwertox 6y agoHow are you going to explain that to your manager?
- foolmeonce 6y agoHow does your manager explain to you that you must agree to TOS from Google to install apps necessary for your job? In the explanation to a company I see nothing wrong. In the tendency to make employees agree to arbitrary ToSes, I see massive liability that should be dealt with using a massive class action lawsuit against some behemoth. I actually think federated protocols are a get out of jail card for employers since making your job related to owning a car is reasonable, to owning a specific brand of car is not.
- cmorgan31 6y agoHello employee, We have a new corporate policy that removes your access to anything related to O365 by Date. The only way to remediate this issue is to install InTune and the corresponding corporate security office's profile so it can enforce our policy on the device. If you qualify for our corporate device program, we will cover the cost of the device and data plan. Sincerely, CTO Honestly, it's very common at the largest public corporations and most corporate r&d groups in the US. It's not like we don't already do black box development or have strict vpn only enforcement rules. I wonder how risk assessment sees these kind of federated protocols because in theory you are right about it reducing liability if they run the system.
- xnyan 6y agoYou’re lucky if you work a place that even sends you an email when they make unilateral changes to the software that’s running on employer-owned hardware. Everywhere I’ve been has a management engine running with highest privileges that does whatever it wants, this used to be true only in industries like finance and healthcare but now it’s standard. Maybe places like google are different, I would not know but I’d be surprised to learn that there’s any publicly traded company that does not exercise total control of their machines.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoBig players with clout can commission their own closed access app. The C levels just need to take a $0.5M hit among themselves.
- ensignavenger 6y agoHow can you rely on the app/play store for any app? This suspension has nothing to do with element, it could have been any app.
- tormeh 6y agoThere are alternative clients: https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/ FluffyChat would be the main contender.