beep boop

  • 3 Posts
  • 1.23K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.world•Password managers are less secure than promisedEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    Yes of course you CAN make it safe in theory, but unless you run the web interface locally or on your own server, you cant be certain that the javascript delivered to you from the hoster hasnt been modified. Its like having autoupdates on but you have zero control over when or how the updates take place, because every time you open the page it could be different code from the last time.

    So as long as you trust the encryption algorithm (which in elements case you definetly can, because it is OSS)

    How do you know that the code on elements github repo is actually the same code that you get delivered from your homeserver that is hosting the web client? Your homeserver can just modify the web clients code however it wants and deliver a backdoored or faulty version to you. Which means you dont just have to trust the open source code, but also the admin who is managing the homeserver and also the hosting provider.

    Is this really so hard to understand? Literally the entire client is delivered on demand from a remote server, obviously that is insecure if you dont control that server.

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.world•Password managers are less secure than promisedEnglish
    5·
    5 days ago

    Bro i have my bank details, all my private 2FA, work 2FA, health insurance access, my families master passwords, steam access, and more in there. Its literally the most important piece of software that can exist in this day and age. No im not taking chances with that. The only thing you can do with my physical wallet if you rob me is buy something up to 20€ beyond which you need the cards pin. Everything else i can just deactivate by calling the relevant parties.

    But on another note, websites have never really been resistant to MITM attacks. So you dont just have to trust the hoster but also everything in between you and them.

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.world•Give your Matrix account a Discord UI with CommetEnglish
    12·
    9 days ago

    Ok so terminology wise:

    • Discord Server = Matrix Space
    • Discord DM = Matrix Chat (these usually exist separately from Spaces/Servers)
    • Discord chat room = Matrix Room
    • Discord video/voice channels = Matrix Video Room (these still have an optional text chat FYI)

    If you just want to create something resembling a discord server, you first create a Space.
    You can decide if it should be public or private (public = anyone with the address can join / private = invite only)

    Then you add rooms to it, normal rooms for text channels and video rooms for voice/video channels. During the creation of each of these rooms (or after) you decide if they should be visible to all space members, or be invite only (think mod channels).

    Afterwards just invite people to the Space and they will be able to join the rooms you set up.

    There are 3 predefined permission levels: Default, Moderator, Admin but you can also define numeric power levels for more fine grained control over what people can do. You can set permissions for users on the Space level and on the room level separately. So you can give someone mod powers for the entire Space or only for a single room. You can also set the default power level very low (think Guest/Applicant) so that people can only join the space itself and nothing else (or only a guest room) until an admin or mod changes their power level to something higher (think member) that allows them to join other rooms.

    Some more details:

    All of the different types of rooms can exist completely separate from Servers/Spaces or be part of them. The only purpose of Spaces is to create a sort of umbrella that these can all be grouped under. New people can then join the Space and automatically get access to all the rooms that the Space/Server admin wants them to have access to.

    So in practice you will have a bunch of personal DMs or group chats that exist on their own, basically like any other instant messenger like Signal or WhatsApp. And then if you have a larger community that requires some more structure you can create a Space, to which you then add whatever rooms you need.

    There is a lot of flexibility to this however. Unlike with discord, all rooms exist completely on their own, they arent actually fundamentally tied to a space. So you can detach a room from a space and attach it to another. You can also add preexisting rooms to a new Space. So if you have a group chat with your gaming buddies, but at some point decide you want to expand your group and want to create a Space with multiple rooms, you can just add your original group chat to the newly created space.

    So in a way you should think of Spaces not in the same way as Discord servers, but just as an arbitrary grouping of chats and voice channels that also allows you to set access restrictions for all of those chats in a single place.

    Sometimes things get confusing. This is the permissions settings page of Space i just created. So why does it say

    Give one or multiple users in this room more privileges

    Thats because Spaces are actually rooms too, just fancy ones that can have sub rooms. This is bad UI design and should say “space” instead of “room” but thats just where matrix is at right now. Clients like commet will be what solves this for people by giving them a UI with a more familiar terminology.