Miscellaneous

The XMPP Standards Foundation has advanced the Server Dialback protocol specification (XEP-0220) to a status of Draft. Although this protocol was originally defined in RFC 3920, it was moved to XEP-0220 in 2007 when work began on the updated XMPP RFCs, and the documentation has been continually improved since then. [Read More]

Today the XMPP Council advanced XEP-0288 from Experimental to Draft in the XSF’s standards process. This specification decreases the number of sockets necessary for server-to-server connections and also removes some of the practical barriers to connection multiplexing in the Server Dialback protocol. [Read More]

The Prosody dev team has been quite busy - here is the details from their mailing list announcement: We are proud to present you with the release of Prosody 0.9.0. Prosody is a lightweight XMPP server, written in Lua. We focus on simplicity, ease-of-use and efficiency - which is why you can find Prosody running just about anywhere from embedded systems all the way up to large-scale services. For a full run-down of the release, in colour, please see our blog post: http://blog.prosody.im/prosody-0-9-0-released/ [Read More]

With support for audio and video calls, Jitsi has long had one of the richest Jingle implementations. Now the project has added even more on top of that: Multiparty Video Conferencing. One of the most prominent new features in the 2.0 release is Multiparty Video Conferencing. Such conferences can work in an ad-hoc mode where one of the clients relays video to everyone else, or in cases that require scalability, Jitsi can use the Jitsi Videobridge: an RTP relaying server controlled over XMPP. That control happens through COLIBRI, a new XMPP extension that the Jitsi community developed for the purpose and that we hope to see submitted as a XEP in the following weeks. [Read More]

Some implementations of the XMPP Server Dialback protocol have not been checking dialback responses to ensure that validated results are correlated with requests. Please see https://xmpp.org/resources/security-notices/server-dialback/ for detailed information about this important security notice. [Read More]

Identity and Privacy are a growing concern on the Internet nowadays, and there have been different attempts to solve this. One of the most recent ones is BrowserID. The XSF believes however, that building upon the strengths of XMPP would be a great way forward for the BrowserID concept, due to its inherent federation, proven Internet-wide scalability, and decentralised architecture. This is why the XSF has decided to support projects that demonstrate the use of XMPP for BrowserID purposes. In order to do this, the first step is to get a Request for Proposals designed, so that the XSF can establish criteria to decide which projects to support financially. [Read More]

Microsoft has announced that it is adding support for XMPP to its Windows Live APIs, enabling any application or IM network to interoperate with Windows Live Messenger. Details are available at liveside.net and dev.live.com. [Read More]

Skype has added support for XMPP to its latest Windows beta, according to Phil Wolff of Skype Journal. Janko Roettgers provides further analysis at GigaOM. This is yet another demonstration of the power of open standards. [Read More]

Jingle (XEP-0166 and XEP-0167) is the voice and media signalling protocol developed by Google, Collabora, Yate, Tandberg and Jabber Inc (the latter two now part of Cisco), and standardized within the XSF. Seen by many as key for an open-standard consumer VOIP system to compete with Skype and others, the specifications moved from Experimental to Draft status two years ago, and have been implemented in a large number of clients, including desktop and mobile handset environments. [Read More]

The XSF has issued a Last Call on XEP-0262, which describes implementation considerations related to audio codecs for use in Jingle RTP sessions, and recommends PCMU and PCMA (G.711) as mandatory-to-implement technologies to provide a baseline for interoperability. If you have feedback, please post to the jingle@xmpp.org or standards@xmpp.org discussion list before July 8, 2011. [Read More]