> I've seen this as a common trend on any India-related discussion. Does anyone have any ideas as to why?
My theory is the rise of Hindunationationalism, and nationalism in general in India, which leads to the feeling of needing to defend ones country against any perceived attacks. Combine this with a huge country and rising levels of English proficency and you will get that type of comments on English speaking online boards.
It's sadly a bit worse than religious nationalism.
It's start with that common religious nationalist myth:
'We are the best/greatest in the world, because god made us So (baked just right).'
Then continue with a that bit that separate it from Cesarism (and Stalinisme):
'But we aren't the greatest country in the world, we aren't at our rightful place: ahead of our ennemies'.
Then you have different follow-up. A Maoist 'we should improve and work hard, especially you, to make up for it', Or a more fascist/whiny approach 'its because of those pesky I internal traitors (usually Jews, sometimes communists, it seems to be Muslims in India currently)'.
The issue is that India nationalism is moving from a somehow Maoist mythos (except with more competent leadership, which isn't hard tbh) to a victim hood, whiney myth that imho lead to at best reactionary thinking, at worst fascism (I don't think they're there at all, I don't think they can their society is too much... Indian? to be really fascist, but I can see castes becoming a real thing again.)
In general, I think nationalism is like being proud of something you don't control and don't have any impact on, so a bit dumb, but Human. I'm OK with it, mostly. But add paranoid victimhood to nationalism and you have the dumbest ideology in the world.
Also combined with the fact that many people in the west genuinely do look down on India. Not necessarily in an overtly racist way, but thinking it's still the India of the 1950s, rather than a country which can build supersonic jet fighters and land probes on the moon.
Further combined with the fact that in some rural parts of the country, life actually has not changed that much from the 1950s.
Yep, and I find it so very American to leave that tid bit out of their complaint and then it getting upvoted because muh evil EU? when its really the US goverment screwing their abroad citizens in this case.
No, you don't need a single authentication provider, you can use more or less what you want/need and there is nothing for it mandatory in the protocol.
What currently is kinda centralized is an identity matching service, but even that is completly optional and will bec replaced by something more federated at some point.
I am very thankfull that the sites exists and does those architecture deep dives, ever since Ian and Andre? left anandtech it has lacked in that territory and this site is a good replacement.
But there are already many laws in many countries that distinguish. For example airlines where for example to count as a EU Airline more than 50% must be owned by EU citizens.
The whole issue with XMPP is that yes, in theory you could do e2ee accross multiple servers and devices but only if all the servers support the right extensions and the clients support them properly.
This is not a problem with XMPP, but any open ecosystem. There's no way to force third-party developers to implement stuff, especially when they are open-source volunteers working in their free time.
XMPP does have this feature parity issue, though there is a good selection of modern active XMPP clients across platforms with important features like end-to-end encryption and calls. But you're right - there's no way to stop people trying to use clients like Pidgin, which have been essentially frozen in time for a decade.
Matrix is newer, so has less diversity, and lots of resources to put into the Element clients. However there certainly is exactly the same problem growing in the Matrix ecosystem too - there are many features supported by Element that are not (yet?) implemented in popular alternative clients such as FluffyChat.
The best you can do is ensure that when two clients communicate without the same set of features, that you degrade gracefully and securely (e.g. the worst case I can imagine would be E2EE that silently becomes unencrypted if not supported by your contact - thankfully that's not how it's done) to the best common feature set between the two.
In Matrix you "can't" select between multiple extensions.
The protocol defines one way of doing things, so either you have that feature or you don't have it.
There is no choice between two ways of doing things.
Yes I know, since Matrix there is now an extension that defines a selection of extensions to try to overcome this
That just means that some servers may have it built in (all of the maintained ones that I'm aware of do), but that you can still claim compliance if you support a general plugin system and delegate your multi-user chat implementation to an external plugin (because of the way it's designed it doesn't necessarily have to live on the same server or in process with the XMPP server). That seems like a fine implementation detail to mention and not a problem…
You can say that..but it was a problem. It was not trivial, despite what the spec says or what is claimed now. If it was, more people would have used it.
I don't know what you mean "is a problem"; what's a problem, setting up groupchat? Everything uses multi-user chat and it's built in to all the servers I know of (but can generally be run as a standalone server if you prefer, which is what this means)? You can just enable it in your config and it just works on at least Ejabberd and Prosody, probably others.
The whole issue with XMPP is that users are brainwashed to demand e2ee even without fully understanding what it means and what unavoidable downsides in UX true e2ee brings.
Most users would have the same level of security as with e2ee by simply running their own server. E2ee mostly helps against service owner you don't trust, so just be your own service owner and have nicely syncing history and server side search.
For single-user XMPP servers, this is true, but on the other hand, not everyone is able to run their own server.
I will say, that even though I kind of like the architecture of XMPP better, the Matrix people have put in tremendous amounts of work to overcome the UX problems with e2ee, in particular the multidevice problem (where I have a laptop and a phone logged into the same account and try to participate in the same encrypted conversation from both).
I totally agree, though I run my own Matrix server and still find value in e2ee because I don't really trust AWS (or maybe my ability to secure AWS).
I suppose I could run the service on a machine in my house, but that's not going to be good for uptime, the NAT screws things up, etc. Plus, even that could be hacked if I fuck something up.
If you run a legal operation, you don't have to worry about hosting company admins logging into your database. That can be done only on police inquiry.
On photos/documents, you are in a tiniest of minorities: ~99% of all smartphone users store photos in unencrypted cloud services like Google Photos and use Google Docs and MS Office 365.
(But but chats are surely the holy cow and must be encrypted - strictly demand those same users, paradoxically)
And no modern server stores passwords in plain text, and keys are not stored on servers at all.
> ...but only if all the servers support the right extensions...
That is only for OMEMO (OpenPGP and OTR require nothing of the server) and you can easily check a potential server for the things that OMEMO depends on by doing a normal server compliance check here:
My theory is the rise of Hindunationationalism, and nationalism in general in India, which leads to the feeling of needing to defend ones country against any perceived attacks. Combine this with a huge country and rising levels of English proficency and you will get that type of comments on English speaking online boards.