France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

Why would you need to do that? Why not just give every message a timestamp, make sure they get sent, and sort the messages on the receiver side? If you're really concerned about message order, you could give every message a unique id, and send out the id of the previous message with every message, and improve your sort function accordingly.

See https://omemo.top/

But I also need an admin panel to lookup user ip addys from the past 36 hours, ability to assign moderator user roles who can see other user's ips, ban ip addys, subnets, hostnames and cidrs easily.

Love to have some other needed admin options and run this! A stun / turn server to hide other user's ip addys and such as well, interception of images posted so they are scanned, exif stripped and hosted temporarily rather than giving the hoster everyone's ip info.

Stuff like that.

I guess blocking users from joining the huge main matrix channels through our server would cut down on the ram / processing needed..

I wonder if something like https://access.watch could hook into this, or if it needs something all in it's own language or what. Looking forward to this system growing.

would love some kind of integration with openid connect though, since that would enable us to easier integrate with our AD. of course we could make that ourselves but we dont have the manpower right now.

Agreed that Riot itself uses way too much RAM though - but we have some massive improvements on the horizon there; by lazyloading user data on demand rather than preloading it up front, we can improve RAM usage by ~5x. This work is happening over the next month or two (modulo GDPR).

Meanwhile, you can always use a desktop client; Nheko, Fractal and Quaternion are all looking increasingly good :)

(It's also relevant because because we pay corporations with subsidies, tax cuts, tax evasion, research grants, public procurement, specialty laws favoring them, etc -- sometimes even more than we pay governments).

That actually was the estimated cost; it grew at least at 81,5M€. (there's also a story in the article about one of the components of that seemingly simple app being 37 months late)

4 paragraph summary: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/back-door.html

I think we are in agreement that Apple or Google could patch the app before it gets deployed. But AFAIK it has never been done yet, and if it ever happens, it would undermine all credibility of the platform. Of course a state actor wouldn't want to be the first to find out.

Signal actually doesn't know all your contacts - you can check the source code to confirm that it doesn't know about any contacts that you don't message using Signal, for example.

Signal also doesn't store most of the metadata that it could, so it really knows incredibly little about its users. It knows (for example) the last date that it was able to talk to a particular device, but they don't store historical data for that, so if you received a message on Signal today, they don't (anymore) know that they sent you a message yesterday, or last month.

Of course, that second part all runs server-side, so you do have to trust Signal when they describe their internal architecture. But to be frank, who do you trust more with that metadata: Moxie Marlinspike, or the government that is essentially the "sixth eye" in the Five Eyes alliance[0]?

[0] https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2018/02/05/french-...