Tails

#3 Updated by sajolida 2016-06-14 04:07:23

Assignee:
Target version:

While working on Feature #11306, intrigeri did something quite minimal and I
followed him. I also spotted some possible structural improvements in
Bug #11423 related to things that you are pointing out here (merging
/support/talk and /support/chat).

> * Link to some providers with open registration (if any are left…)

I don’t think that Tails should be the one to maintain such a list. But,
yes, it would be good to have external links for that.

> * Link to some general instructions for XMPP in Pidgin? Perhaps we
> have to write our own in the Pidgin docs (sounds like quite some
> work, though)?

Right, we should point to /doc/anonymous_internet/pidgin from
/support/chat. Then Pidgin’s upstream doc is linked from
/doc/anonymous_internet/pidgin but yes, we should check how good it is.

Any volunteer?

#7 Updated by anonym 2017-08-26 12:30:45

These were the concepts necessary to join our chat room that jaster didn’t know, or that was unclear in some way:

• Register for an account on any XMPP server
• Find and install an XMPP client (which wasn’t so easy on MacOS). In the end we settled for Tor Messenger, which actually is supported on Mac + Win + Linux so it could be reasonable choice to recommend, perhaps even instead of Pidgin since it means they’ll connect through Tor.
• XMPP addresses looks like email addresses but XMPP concepts are fairly different in practice
• No password for the tails-dev chat was surprising
• Lots of inconsistencies between clients. Prime example: chat room addresses, like room@conference.server.com; in some XMPP clients there’s a single field (expecting -notation), in some two (room and server are split). Since we currently present it as room + server, users of clients that use the one field version will know that a "" has to be added.
• jaster also imagine that the room + conference server info we provide would work like in IRC, i.e. you connect to the conference server and then you can join channels there, like ours.

When trying to get an account we also found this list of public servers that (supposedly) are open for registration :

• https://list.jabber.at
• https://www.cryptoparty.in/connect/contact/jabber

#10 Updated by sajolida 2017-09-06 09:37:25

I was approached by another contributor who couldn’t figure out how to connect there to attend our monthly meetings.

I find it quite revealing to learn that two people who have both been contributing to Tails for more than a year (namely jaster and pablonatalino) were prevented to attended our meetings because of a technical barrier (I don’t know if they’ve been holding this in secret until now of if they got interested in our meetings just now). I bet these two people are way more technical than, for example, what we could expect from Tails users who might need to join us on our support channel.

In other words, for me it confirmes something I have been thinking for a while without daring saying it out loud: XMPP is for the geek elite and we should definitely work on this as part of Bug #14516.

#12 Updated by Anonymous 2018-01-17 14:59:44

We could link to this very echaustive list of Jabber services: https://list.jabber.at/ (I arrived there from xmpp.org).

#14 Updated by emmapeel 2019-02-13 22:21:53

Users mail to frontdesk also because they need information about how to join our XMPP support channel.

(I thought we changed to XMPP to have an easy way of having an account for users setup in Pidgin by default, with the tails channel also….)

There is no information about usage of Pidgin on our docs, and no mention of our support channel there. Maybe we could add a link to https://riseup.net/en/chat ?

The piding section on XMPP is rather empty: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Pidgin#HowdoIuseAIMMSNYahooGoogleTalkJabberXMPPICQoranyotherprotocol

#15 Updated by intrigeri 2019-02-14 07:07:09

> There is […] no mention of our support channel there.

FTR https://tails.boum.org/support/ does mention the support chat room.