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Rigorous Cross-Platform Validation of a Matrix Stack: Edge-Case Testing WebRTC, VPNs, and Push Notifications
Self-hosting your communication infrastructure shouldn’t mean accepting a subpar user experience. When organizations move away from Big Tech infrastructure—specifically by stripping Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) out of their Android fleets—the common wisdom is that they must sacrifice battery life and reliability in the name of privacy. We recently set out to prove that assumption…
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Beyond the Walled Garden: Why Matrix and Sovereign Infrastructure Outpace Signal in the Chat Control Era
For over a decade, enterprise security teams and civil society organizations have looked to Signal as the foundation for secure messaging technology also used in WhatsApp and Google RCS chats. In 2015, the threat model was defined by passive, over-the-air dragnet surveillance. Against that specific network-layer threat, Signal’s implementation of the Double Ratchet protocol over…
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Bypassing Google and Apple: Implementing True De-Googled Push Notifications with UnifiedPush and ntfy
When engineering a sovereign communication stack, the most difficult architectural hurdle is rarely the chat protocol itself. The true weakest link for metadata leakage is the push notification pipeline. Historically, mobile operating systems have forced developers into a centralized paradigm. If a message arrives on your private server, that server has to ping Google’s Firebase…