In July 2017, the funding by Amdocs was announced to be cut and in the following weeks the core team created their own UK-based company, "New Vector Limited",[12] which was mainly built to support the development of Matrix and Riot, which was later renamed to Element.”
Its still the same people wether they are technically under the Amdocs umbrella or not.
Paranoia about Amdocs having funded Matrix from 2014-2017 is utterly unwarranted, and often seems to be rooted in some pretty unpleasant prejudices. Plus both the spec and implementations are all liberally licensed open source - it should be painfully obvious to anyone who actually bothers to look at the protocol that there is no cloak and dagger, however much some folks might wish there to be :|
“The initial project was created inside Amdocs, while building a chat tool called "Amdocs Unified Communications”
Are you contradicting the wikipedia article? I have no inside knowledge so if there are inaccuracies on wikipedia it would be great if you could correct them.
As an insider, what do you think was Amdoc’s reason for building a whole new chat protocol? Why would they pay big money for decentralization? Why wasn’t Slack or SIP+XMPP good enough?
This is true; I created it. With a team, including myself, who had been acquired into Amdocs and operated as an independent unit. As I already said.
> As an insider, what do you think was Amdocs’ reason for building a whole new chat protocol?
Our pitch to Amdocs was that RCS was not fit for purpose, and XMPP was building on top of outdated primitives which didn’t reflect the synced multi-device group-chat experience of comms app which were becoming standard at the time in 2014. To be clear: the idea of Matrix was our idea; Amdocs deserves significant credit for going along with it and funding it in the early days.
> Why would they pay big money for decentralization?
They didn’t pay big money - they funded a ~15 person team for a few years. They supported decentralisation because if you’re building something which could replace the phone network, it needs to be an open protocol which anyone can independently implement, run, and verify. Including conspiracy theorists on HN.
> Why wasn’t Slack or SIP+XMPP good enough?
Because Slack is an unencrypted proprietary centralised chat vendor, not a communication protocol.
SIP+XMPP was a horrifically flimsy approach, which duplicated functionality and risk of bugs, while limited by both protocols (eg lack of e2ee and group calling in SIP; lack of synced conversation history in XMPP at the time).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ataHCdCS_N0
Furthermore, 6 Israelis working for Amdocs were deported in 2002 for spying on the US. That’s not just a conspiracy theory. Its a seriously concerning fact.
I remember Matrix being heavily used by the French government anyway. I’m pretty sure you they did check that it’s not spyware.
“The vulnerabilities we exploit differ in their nature (insecure by design, protocol confusion, lack of domain separation, implementation bugs) and are distributed broadly across the different subprotocols and libraries that make up the cryptographic core of Matrix.”
Of course, you are welcome to pick up any and all CVEs and claim they are evidence of a grand conspiracy if you wish. :|
And just to be clear, I was super excited when I first got on Matrix. It really has the correct vision for how decentralized communications should work and I hope that vision wins, which is why I was so bummed when I heard about the connection to Amdocs.