Miscellaneous

Earlier today, the XSF advanced XEP-0262 from Experimental to Draft in our standards process. This specification defines how to use ZRTP with Jingle for end-to-end encryption of audio and video sessions, thus supplementing the existing SRTP method defined in XEP-0167. Special thanks to the Jitsi team for providing implementation feedback. [Read More]

FYI, if you’re a fan of Strophe.js and/or libstrophe then you need to make sure to update your bookmarks as the site has moved. You can now find all of the Strophe goodness at strophe.im. UPDATE: The hsxmpp project has moved too, the new site is http://חנוך.se/hsxmpp/. [Read More]

As you might recall from our Brussels trip report a few months ago, the XMPP community has a bit of work to do on internationalization. It’s not that XMPP messages or addresses can’t include non-ASCII characters, because we’ve had that capability since 1999. The problem comes from our dependence on a technology called stringprep (RFC 3454), which we use to compare JabberIDs for tasks like authentication and authorization of users and servers. Because stringprep is being deprecated by the IETF for internationalized domain names, various application technologies that use stringprep for identifiers other than domain names (e.g., usernames and passwords) need to develop a new approach to comparing protocol strings. [Read More]

A reminder from Ludovic Bocquet that May 19th, 2011 is Open Discussion Day. From their wiki page: Since 2006, on May 19^th^, we celebrate the Open Discussion Day, a day to promote open communication systems and protocols. Imagine an internet where it is only possible to send emails to people who used the same email provider as you, or only view websites that are hosted on your internet provider’s servers. Naturally, these barriers go against the principles of the internet, and thankfully those days are long gone. Well… nearly. [Read More]

The RFC Editor has announced that RFC 6120 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core), RFC 6121 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Instant Messaging and Presence) and RFC 6122 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Address Format) are now official RFC documents produced by the IETF! This is a huge milestone for the XSF because it means that the core specifications for XMPP have been updated to incorporate years of implementation and deployment experience with our technologies. The basic building blocks for creating XMPP-enabled applications are more stable and more clearly defined than ever, giving developers a solid foundation for open-source projects, commercial products, and real-time services on the Internet. [Read More]

Just over a year ago, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) approved formation of a new XMPP Working Group to work on revisions to the core XMPP specifications and related tasks. The first fruit of this initiative is a working group last call on draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis, the core definition of XMPP. Officially this “WGLC” was two weeks long and therefore has already ended, but it will probably be extended for a week or two, so please review this (long!) specification and send your comments to the xmpp@ietf.org discussion list as soon as possible. [Read More]

The XSF’s Infrastructure Team has installed an issue tracker for use by the XMPP Standards Foundation. Because the core work of the XSF is the development of protocol specifications, we will use the “Spec Issues” project in the issue tracker to keep track of bug reports and feature requests related to our core specification series (XEPs) and related documentation such as XML schemas and data registries. Anyone can submit issues for consideration, and those tickets will be handled by the XSF’s Technical Review Team, the XMPP Council, the XEP Editor, and other responsible parties (we’re still working out the details about how we will track this feedback and incorporate it into our specifications). [Read More]

Earlier today a member of the XMPP developer community noticed that he could log into Facebook chat using a standard XMPP client. The news has since been confirmed by Facebook. This is great news for XMPP, and great news for open standards in general. Although Facebook has not yet enabled federation with the rest of the public XMPP network, I’d imagine it is only a matter of time until that happens (after all, Google Talk launched in August 2005 but didn’t federate until early 2006). [Read More]

Hey everyone! Less than 3 weeks left until the XMPP Summit #8 comes to Brussels. This year, we’ve got something new! Nokia has generously offered to sponsor a mobile XMPP developer challenge. What does that mean? Starting from NOW, you can start writing a mobile application for ANY Nokia platform (Maemo / S60v3 / S60v5 …). The requirements are: The program must be FREELY available; OpenSource is preferred. The application needs to be demoed on a Nokia Phone (we have demo devices on location) on the XMPP Summit (Monday). If you are not attending the Summit, find someone who is, and can demo / explain the app, and collect the prize. Limit of 1 application per attendee. Substantially new code, as decreed on the day by the judges. (If you have questions, the judges will give guidance, but the final decision will be made on the day) Judges aren’t eligible. And of course: The application needs to use XMPP in some way. The judges are: Jack Moffitt (XSF Board Chairman); Kevin Smith (XSF Council Chairman); Kristian Luoma (Nokia) [Read More]

Since 2006 the XMPP Standards Foundation has been offering free digital certificates to administrators of XMPP servers as a way of encouraging encryption of point-to-point “hops” on the XMPP network. This program has been successful in several ways: Thousands of XMPP deployments currently use certificates issued by the XMPP ICA. Popular XMPP clients and servers have fixed bugs in their code related to certificate handling. The XMPP community has gained practical experience with stronger encryption. Since the beginning, the XSF has functioned as an “intermediate certification authority” or “ICA”, where the root CA is StartCom. In collaboration with our friends at StartCom, we recently decided that StartCom will directly offer Class 1 certificates through its normal process at http://www.startssl.com/ instead of running a specialized service only for XMPP servers at xmpp.net. This lowers the administrative burden both for the XSF (we will no longer need to manually approve certain certificate requests) and for StartCom (they will be able to use the same code for issuing both web server certificates and IM server certificates). [Read More]