The German Federal Office for Information Security clearly states that it is good security practice to update software as soon as possible when there are new fixes published by the software manufacturer. Similarly, the Cyber Resilience Act in section 56 states: “One of the most important measures for users to take in order to protect their products with digital elements from cyberattacks is to install the latest available security updates as soon as possible.”

I recently participated in discussions at Open Forum Europe’s EU Open Source Policy Summit, FOSDEM and Open UK’s State of Open conference. All of these discussions touched on how governments and open source vendors need to work together and, specifically, how public sector organisations can help fund open source development.

Since launching Synapse Pro to support nation-scale Matrix deployments, we’ve had a lot of questions asking how it differs from vanilla “community” AGPL Synapse. We held back a bit on the details because Synapse Pro is evolving rapidly with optimisations for scalability and availability in many different areas, so we wanted to wait before publishing quantified comparisons.

It feels as though 2024 was a year that highlighted the need for a new era of communications. To cite just a few examples, Russia intercepted German military discussions about providing Taurus missiles to Ukraine through a security lapse during a WebEx video conference call. A weakness exploited through a lack of interoperability between systems, and reliance on the unencrypted phone network to bridge the gap.

By now you’d assume most government organisations are aware of the risks associated with consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram being used in the workplace. Consumer apps, convenient for personal use, are completely unsuited for official communications. They lack the necessary security, auditability and management controls that public sector organisations require.

We’re incredibly proud to announce the launch of Synapse Pro, a new enterprise Matrix server from Element that delivers phenomenal efficiencies for large-scale Matrix deployments in the public sector. Synapse Pro is Element’s best practice Matrix homeserver for huge public sector deployments.

This week the FBI, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and partner agencies in New Zealand, Australia and Canada began advocating for the use of end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) communications. The move is in reaction to law enforcement backdoors in the public telephone network - including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile - being hijacked by Salt Typhoon; a cyberattack group believed to be operated by the Chinese government.

We’re excited to announce the release of ESS 24.10, the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) version of the Element Server Suite! This is an important milestone as it brings Element X to customers who require the six monthly LTS releases of ESS.

Hi all, Back in April 2020 I published a surprisingly popular guide of how to self-host a basic Matrix instance on Debian using Riot (as Element was called back then!), Synapse and Jitsi.

The Matrix Conference saw the official launch of Element X! That means Element X is now the mobile app that almost all Element users should be using for messaging; both in the workplace and for personal use. Some large customers that self-host are still using the classic mobile Element apps. Once those customers have migrated, Element X will simply become ‘Element’ and the classic mobile apps will be retired.