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UPDATE: I just got a call from a VP at Google who apologised for the bad communication around this and explained the situation, which related to some extremely

UPDATE: I just got a call from a VP at Google who apologised for the bad communication around this and explained the situation, which related to some extremely abusive content which was accessible on the default matrix.org homeserver. We don't want to go into specifics, but suffice it to say that it's not related to WallStreet Bets or anything like that, but instead is the sort of thing that causes you to get locked up for life. We spent today doing an audit by revisiting recent issues reported to abuse@matrix.org, which had already identified and acted on the content in question. We also took the opportunity to explain how Element and Matrix fit together, what decentralisation is, and the steps we take to mitigate abuse on the servers we run. As a result, it looks like the app has just been reinstated while I was typing this message: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app. Thanks everyone for your patience and support while we sorted this out (and huge thanks to the overall Element team who spent their Saturdays on the audit).

cbradford 6y ago
Very happy for you guys. But do take this as a shot across the bow, if and when it serves Google's agenda to shut you down they will. You have a great service, don't let Google control you and be beholden to them.
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  We have put all of our eggs in the iOS and Android basket. It looks like this year we’ll see a few Linux phone come to market... can’t come soon enough
  - girvo 6y ago
    While it’s old now, the Nokia N9 proved to me a long time ago that the Linux phone idea has true merit. Harmattan was a brilliant UI!
    - alfiedotwtf 6y ago
      I think you mean the N900, which I'd still be on if it did all the bands in my area. You're right though... probably the best Linux phone so far in terms of UI (I think the Ubuntu phone was too complex)
      - girvo 6y ago
        No, I mean the N9 :) https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile/Nokia_N9 https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile/Nokia_N9 I loved the N900 to, of course, but as a phone the N9 running MeeGo v1.2 Harmattan was superior day to day (for me anyway).
  - xster 6y ago
    Ironically if they put the app on Huawei's AppGallery, it would have been up the whole time on a very non trivial amount of phones outside China where the AppGallery is preloaded before and after the Google ban.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
But I can visit sites and do things in chrome that will get me locked up for life as well yet it's still on my phone.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  Element, the matrix protocol, and matrix.org are all tightly linked together. Matrix.org is the default server in Element. With them so interconnected, I understand why matrix.org issues would affect Element.
  - shakna 6y ago
    Not that tightly linked. Whilst the Element client does offer Matrix.org as a signup/login as the first page you see, you're also just one single click from signup/login to any of the other servers. Nothing about that page really feels locked or branded to matrix.org. I don't see how that makes Element responsible for matrix.org content. Thunderbird offers getting an email address via gandi.net in their new account page. Does that mean that Mozilla is suddenly responsible for all emails (like spam) coming out of gandi?
    - jpetso 6y ago
      New Vector leadership holding key decision-making positions on both Element and Matrix.org could be seen as a distinguishing factor. It feels subjectively like more entanglement than the Mozilla/Gandi combo.
      - Arathorn 6y ago
        We’ve very consciously tried to separate The Matrix.org Foundation from Element (previously known as New Vector), despite both Matrix and Element being created by the same leadership (myself, my co-founder Amandine, and the rest of the core Matrix team). To be clear: we started Matrix in 2014 as a pure R&D project, and then created Element (then NV) in 2017 to keep the core team employed to work on it fulltime. However, the non-profit Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation) was set up in 2018 with myself and Amandine deliberately in a minority control position (2 of 5 directors, called Guardians) specifically to address this concern - to protect Matrix from Element’s commercial activity, in case we ever went rogue. As it happens, The Foundation farms out hosting and admin of the matrix.org homeserver to Element (which makes sense, given the Foundation doesn’t have employees and Element was already running the server), but if Element ever went evil, i am very confident that the Foundation Guardians would kick in and make a course correction.
idclip 6y ago
Sounds like CP ... cp is a real issue when it comes to crypto.
- ripdog 6y ago
  If it was encrypted, it wouldn't have been discovered in the first place. At least, not by google app reviewers.
  - meibo 6y ago
    You can take screenshots of encrypted content and the whole aspect of encryption is basically defeated if the channel itself is open to the public. This might not have been the case here, but there are people that infiltrate channels like this on purpose to report them to authorities and Google(?).
- kuschku 6y ago
  I’ve had to deal with a situation once where a user received spam containing links to CP via a major IRC network. Weeks of paperwork and trouble, caused by a few seconds of work for the spammer. Spammers abuse this imbalance of work to easily take down services, many of which won’t ever come back online (I certainly won’t ever host free IRC bouncers again, it’s definitely not worth it). This is what truly destroyed the open, federated web: humans being disgusting animals.
- heatedsubject 6y ago
  CP is a very touchy subject. But if we really wanted to solve the problem we shouldn't focus on someone accidentally seeing (and thus caching) CP on their device. CP should be removed at the source, by doing everything we can to take care of kids and preventing abuse and related photography. And CP trading rings should be busted. But individual pedophiles should be helped with their mental health issues before they act and become pederasts. The subject is so toxic that nobody dares go to a therapist with their issues. There was a recent documentary about it: https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/bb3cd43c-169a-48db-9fd6-e4cbae0d8e1b/silence https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/bb3cd43c-169a-48db-9fd6-e4cbae0d... Coming back to crypto. Who cares if the images are shared using crypto or on paper or on usb sticks? Once you find a pederast, law enforcement should convince (without torture or similar tricks, offering therapy and help will probably be more effective) them to help expose their network. Same with any activity that is using encrypted communications: https://edri.org/files/encryption/workarounds_edriposition_20170912.pdf https://edri.org/files/encryption/workarounds_edriposition_2...
mswann 6y ago
Thank you for all your efforts. The way you appear to have handled google's unjustifiable action is really impressive. Clearly that's one of the main reasons to be optimistic that matrix has a bright future - if I was in charge it certainly wouldn't. Due to incidents like this I simply ditched google completely. (OK, to be honest I sometimes watch videos on yt but without having an account.)
Jabbles 6y ago
Did your abuse team email the site that you removed from your home page, explaining your policies and telling them exactly why it was removed? Did the VP offer any explanation as to why you had not received any communcation from Google?
sitzkrieg 6y ago
this is still a joke you have to post on hn and hope to get high enough up to nastygram someone over 'my app connectsto the internet like yours' level of shit
- ttt0 6y ago
  Exactly. I'm happy that the app was reinstated, but this solves nothing in the long run.
einpoklum 6y ago
> extremely abusive content This phrasing suggests it was probably not even illegal to publish. What if this content had been something that Google finds politically or commercially disfavorable to its interests, rather than something we would all think is intolerable? What if it _is_ like that?
- hedora 6y ago
  To the extent Google can lock you up for life for being inconvenient for their business model, I suppose it could have been innocuous content. Oh, wait. We’re still a decade away from that particular dystopia, so I’ll guess kiddie porn or actual planning of terrorist attacks.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    > so I’ll guess kiddie porn or actual planning of terrorist attacks. It seems you guess wrong. The Element guy did not mention any illegality, which is what makes me suspicious.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    Wait, if CP and terrorist attacks are posted in the open, then what FBI wants to read in e2ee traffic?
drummer 6y ago
Why the lack of transparency about exactly what content triggered this response?
mxuribe 6y ago
Challenges - like this google fiasco - really test the merit of a person and org...and you @Arathorn and the rest of the Element team as well as the Matrix org/Foundation team have shown to be really great stewards and leaders for Matrix, as well as great actors for open source and internet-at-large software. Kudos to you and the teams for the great job at managing this challenge (that never should have been created by Google in the first place)!! I've been a fanboy of matrix since the beginning (both the protocol and the teams building it), and it is behavior like yours and the related teams (incljuding all contributors!) that keep me as a fanboy for both the protocol stack and the software. Keep on truckin'!!! :-)
- jhabdas 6y ago
  > Kudos to you and the teams for the great job at managing this challenge (that never should have been created by Google in the first place)!! You're suggesting the challenge was created by Google and that so and so managed to navigate it successfully by obeying Google. But we don't even know what the issue was. And if the issue isn't available to the general public through transparency or something like an FOIA request what is really being celebrated is the power of a corporation to control free speech over a protocol intended to wrest control of free speech back into the hands of people in the first place. Limiting access to information such that it cannot be independently verified is far more sinister and nefarious — not to mention consitutionally unsound — than the threat of the bad actor sharing the info in the first place. In the wake of the temporary Parler shutdown all of us need to be paying close attention to how we receive information. These things cannot be left up to anecdotal stories which delve into little to no detail.
jhabdas 6y ago
> We don't want to go into specifics This kind of language is very wishy-washy and leaves everything to the imagination. 9/10 times the issue is terrorism or CP. So which of the two was it? And why aren't you comfortable enough to share that reason with your prospective users?
- brmgb 6y ago
  Why should the details of the Matrix.org server moderation be of significance to Element users? We are talking about a decentralized and optionally end to end encrypted chat client. Anyway, Matrix.org is hosted by a foundation with an independent board. You can ask them if you want but given your post you already know full well why they are not sharing. No one is going to do a press release to say they were involuntary hosting CP or helping terrorists. What good would come out of it?

cbradford 6y ago

Very happy for you guys. But do take this as a shot across the bow, if and when it serves Google's agenda to shut you down they will. You have a great service, don't let Google control you and be beholden to them.

alfiedotwtf 6y ago
We have put all of our eggs in the iOS and Android basket. It looks like this year we’ll see a few Linux phone come to market... can’t come soon enough
- girvo 6y ago
  While it’s old now, the Nokia N9 proved to me a long time ago that the Linux phone idea has true merit. Harmattan was a brilliant UI!
  - alfiedotwtf 6y ago
    I think you mean the N900, which I'd still be on if it did all the bands in my area. You're right though... probably the best Linux phone so far in terms of UI (I think the Ubuntu phone was too complex)
    - girvo 6y ago
      No, I mean the N9 :) https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile/Nokia_N9 https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile/Nokia_N9 I loved the N900 to, of course, but as a phone the N9 running MeeGo v1.2 Harmattan was superior day to day (for me anyway).
- xster 6y ago
  Ironically if they put the app on Huawei's AppGallery, it would have been up the whole time on a very non trivial amount of phones outside China where the AppGallery is preloaded before and after the Google ban.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

But I can visit sites and do things in chrome that will get me locked up for life as well yet it's still on my phone.

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
Element, the matrix protocol, and matrix.org are all tightly linked together. Matrix.org is the default server in Element. With them so interconnected, I understand why matrix.org issues would affect Element.
- shakna 6y ago
  Not that tightly linked. Whilst the Element client does offer Matrix.org as a signup/login as the first page you see, you're also just one single click from signup/login to any of the other servers. Nothing about that page really feels locked or branded to matrix.org. I don't see how that makes Element responsible for matrix.org content. Thunderbird offers getting an email address via gandi.net in their new account page. Does that mean that Mozilla is suddenly responsible for all emails (like spam) coming out of gandi?
  - jpetso 6y ago
    New Vector leadership holding key decision-making positions on both Element and Matrix.org could be seen as a distinguishing factor. It feels subjectively like more entanglement than the Mozilla/Gandi combo.
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      We’ve very consciously tried to separate The Matrix.org Foundation from Element (previously known as New Vector), despite both Matrix and Element being created by the same leadership (myself, my co-founder Amandine, and the rest of the core Matrix team). To be clear: we started Matrix in 2014 as a pure R&D project, and then created Element (then NV) in 2017 to keep the core team employed to work on it fulltime. However, the non-profit Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation) was set up in 2018 with myself and Amandine deliberately in a minority control position (2 of 5 directors, called Guardians) specifically to address this concern - to protect Matrix from Element’s commercial activity, in case we ever went rogue. As it happens, The Foundation farms out hosting and admin of the matrix.org homeserver to Element (which makes sense, given the Foundation doesn’t have employees and Element was already running the server), but if Element ever went evil, i am very confident that the Foundation Guardians would kick in and make a course correction.

idclip 6y ago

Sounds like CP ... cp is a real issue when it comes to crypto.

ripdog 6y ago
If it was encrypted, it wouldn't have been discovered in the first place. At least, not by google app reviewers.
- meibo 6y ago
  You can take screenshots of encrypted content and the whole aspect of encryption is basically defeated if the channel itself is open to the public. This might not have been the case here, but there are people that infiltrate channels like this on purpose to report them to authorities and Google(?).
kuschku 6y ago
I’ve had to deal with a situation once where a user received spam containing links to CP via a major IRC network. Weeks of paperwork and trouble, caused by a few seconds of work for the spammer. Spammers abuse this imbalance of work to easily take down services, many of which won’t ever come back online (I certainly won’t ever host free IRC bouncers again, it’s definitely not worth it). This is what truly destroyed the open, federated web: humans being disgusting animals.
heatedsubject 6y ago
CP is a very touchy subject. But if we really wanted to solve the problem we shouldn't focus on someone accidentally seeing (and thus caching) CP on their device. CP should be removed at the source, by doing everything we can to take care of kids and preventing abuse and related photography. And CP trading rings should be busted. But individual pedophiles should be helped with their mental health issues before they act and become pederasts. The subject is so toxic that nobody dares go to a therapist with their issues. There was a recent documentary about it: https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/bb3cd43c-169a-48db-9fd6-e4cbae0d8e1b/silence https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/bb3cd43c-169a-48db-9fd6-e4cbae0d... Coming back to crypto. Who cares if the images are shared using crypto or on paper or on usb sticks? Once you find a pederast, law enforcement should convince (without torture or similar tricks, offering therapy and help will probably be more effective) them to help expose their network. Same with any activity that is using encrypted communications: https://edri.org/files/encryption/workarounds_edriposition_20170912.pdf https://edri.org/files/encryption/workarounds_edriposition_2...

mswann 6y ago

Thank you for all your efforts. The way you appear to have handled google's unjustifiable action is really impressive. Clearly that's one of the main reasons to be optimistic that matrix has a bright future - if I was in charge it certainly wouldn't. Due to incidents like this I simply ditched google completely. (OK, to be honest I sometimes watch videos on yt but without having an account.)

Jabbles 6y ago

Did your abuse team email the site that you removed from your home page, explaining your policies and telling them exactly why it was removed? Did the VP offer any explanation as to why you had not received any communcation from Google?

sitzkrieg 6y ago

this is still a joke you have to post on hn and hope to get high enough up to nastygram someone over 'my app connectsto the internet like yours' level of shit

ttt0 6y ago
Exactly. I'm happy that the app was reinstated, but this solves nothing in the long run.

einpoklum 6y ago

> extremely abusive content This phrasing suggests it was probably not even illegal to publish. What if this content had been something that Google finds politically or commercially disfavorable to its interests, rather than something we would all think is intolerable? What if it _is_ like that?

hedora 6y ago
To the extent Google can lock you up for life for being inconvenient for their business model, I suppose it could have been innocuous content. Oh, wait. We’re still a decade away from that particular dystopia, so I’ll guess kiddie porn or actual planning of terrorist attacks.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > so I’ll guess kiddie porn or actual planning of terrorist attacks. It seems you guess wrong. The Element guy did not mention any illegality, which is what makes me suspicious.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  Wait, if CP and terrorist attacks are posted in the open, then what FBI wants to read in e2ee traffic?

drummer 6y ago

Why the lack of transparency about exactly what content triggered this response?

mxuribe 6y ago

Challenges - like this google fiasco - really test the merit of a person and org...and you @Arathorn and the rest of the Element team as well as the Matrix org/Foundation team have shown to be really great stewards and leaders for Matrix, as well as great actors for open source and internet-at-large software. Kudos to you and the teams for the great job at managing this challenge (that never should have been created by Google in the first place)!! I've been a fanboy of matrix since the beginning (both the protocol and the teams building it), and it is behavior like yours and the related teams (incljuding all contributors!) that keep me as a fanboy for both the protocol stack and the software. Keep on truckin'!!! :-)

jhabdas 6y ago
> Kudos to you and the teams for the great job at managing this challenge (that never should have been created by Google in the first place)!! You're suggesting the challenge was created by Google and that so and so managed to navigate it successfully by obeying Google. But we don't even know what the issue was. And if the issue isn't available to the general public through transparency or something like an FOIA request what is really being celebrated is the power of a corporation to control free speech over a protocol intended to wrest control of free speech back into the hands of people in the first place. Limiting access to information such that it cannot be independently verified is far more sinister and nefarious — not to mention consitutionally unsound — than the threat of the bad actor sharing the info in the first place. In the wake of the temporary Parler shutdown all of us need to be paying close attention to how we receive information. These things cannot be left up to anecdotal stories which delve into little to no detail.

jhabdas 6y ago

> We don't want to go into specifics This kind of language is very wishy-washy and leaves everything to the imagination. 9/10 times the issue is terrorism or CP. So which of the two was it? And why aren't you comfortable enough to share that reason with your prospective users?

brmgb 6y ago
Why should the details of the Matrix.org server moderation be of significance to Element users? We are talking about a decentralized and optionally end to end encrypted chat client. Anyway, Matrix.org is hosted by a foundation with an independent board. You can ask them if you want but given your post you already know full well why they are not sharing. No one is going to do a press release to say they were involuntary hosting CP or helping terrorists. What good would come out of it?