The XMPP Newsletter, 4 January 2019

Happy 2019 and welcome to the XMPP newsletter.

If you have an article, tutorial or blog post you'd like us to include in the newsletter, please submit it on the XMPP wiki.

News

Today is Jabber's 20th anniversary! Jabber would later be standardized and renamed to XMPP.

If you'd like a trip down memory lane, have a look at this 2001 Linux Magazine interview with Jeremie Miller or the original Slashdot release announcement by him on 4 January 1999.

Linux Journal has published an article Lessons in Vendor Lock-in: Messaging, reflecting on the last 20 years of instant messaging and the fact that vendor lock-in is still as relevant an issue as ever.

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The Prosody team has written a blog post welcoming 2019 where they look back at the progress made in 2018 and forward towards what can be expected in 2019. It also contains a community survey to help the developers guide their effort for the future.

Tumblr started blocking adult content on December 17th, which caused many users to complain of false positives and prompted some to look for alternatives. In response Timothée Jaussoin wrote a blog post suggesting that Tumblr users migrate to Movim. The post was subsequently discussed on Hacker News and was on its front page for a while.

Logitech's Harmony Hub home automation device uses XMPP and they apparently inadvertently allowed local access to customers. When a 3rd party cyber security firm found multiple vulnerabilities, Logitech made a firmware update that disabled XMPP access thereby angering many users who had added extra functionality via XMPP. In response Logitech has created a new XMPP beta program that will give users access to the local controls that were removed and they plan to release an official firmware update with XMPP controls this month.

Howtos

Announcements

ProcessOne have announced that they will shut down their free XMPP servers oneteam.im and talkr.im.

Videos

In episode S3E08 of Matrix Live, developer Half-Shot talks about bridging Matrix and XMPP with matrix-appservice-purple.

Recent Events

Maxime Buquet wrote a short summary of the XMPP meetup held at the recent Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, Germany.

Upcoming Events

The Brussels UX sprint will be held on Wednesday the 30th of January.

The 23rd XMPP Summit will be held on January 31st & February 1st in Brussels.

Software releases

Servers

Ejabberd versions 18.12 and 18.12.1 which add support for XML compression in message archive storage and converting bookmarks from private XML to PEP.

Openfire version 4.3.0 beta

Jackal version 0.4.0 which adds cluster mode support.

Clients

BeagleIM version 1.1. A new lightweight XMPP client for MacOS.

ChatSecure version 4.3.6

Bridges