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Xmpp

Mastodon + XMPP + SIP

This is an idea. I haven’t looked at actually doing it yet, but I might.

Mastodon needs complimentary instant messaging and I’ve been thinking about how this might be achieved. XMPP and SIP are great federated protocols and it’s possible to use the same domain used for Mastodon for these through SRV records.

Authentication for XMPP and SIP is based on passwords. Mastodon could be extended to write out password hashes to a database to have one password for each service per device. You could then have those servers query the database and check password hashes. I’m not sure what the security properties of this would be compared to OAuth, but I think it’s similar just without the in-band setup.

FOSDEM 2016

FOSDEM 2016 starts tomorrow and I will be attending. I’ve not got off to a brilliant start with my flight being cancelled, though SAS have now rebooked me onto a later flight and I’m going to arrive in time for the start tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, I am going to miss the Friday beer event.

On the Saturday, the real-time communications devroom will be happening, and I am one of the devroom admins that helped to organise this. There will be a full day of talks and demonstrations about real-time communications using open standards and free software. I’m rather excited about this.

Streaming APRS data over XMPP

I’ve recently started playing with radios again and I’ve been looking mainly at packet radio. APRS is a system which uses amateur radio to transmit position reports, weather reports, and messages between users. There is an Internet backbone for APRS called APRS-IS that can be used to access a filtered feed of APRS broadcasts. I thought it would be nice if such a feed were also available via XMPP so set about building a gateway.

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