[JDEV] General Jabber Questions

[Michael Brown]

Schuyler, thanks for the excellent reply.

I don't quite follow the answer re the "Who is watching me" question though:

I understand that I can check each member of my roster to see if they are
subscribed to my presence, but what about people who are not on my roster.
If I have my account set to authorise everyone automatically, then after a
while  I won't have everyone who has added me to their contact list also
added to mine, therefore checking my "roster" would only return a subset of
people who are currently subscribed to my presence information.  I would
like a query that returned everyone.  Am I missing something?

Also I suspect that the encryption standard is moving too slowly.  There are
many clients currently being written, and as yet i am still to find on that
supports encryption.  Unless each client supports the same encryption
standard from day one, then it is going to end up as a an optional feature,
and hardly anyone will use it (like email) and once again each message will
be there in plain text for anyone with a packet sniffer to read.  It is bad
news just because of the insecure systems that the transports connect to -
not much we can do about that though.  So much for being able to rely on
jabber to send creditcard details etc for online shopping etc.  :(

The mod_filter sounds great.  I would like to be able to be "available" to
my workmates and "N/A" to friends and family sometimes when I am logged on
from work.

Thanks,

Michael.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Schuyler Heath" <sheath at jabber.org>
To: <jdev at jabber.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 30, 2000 7:38 PM
Subject: Re: [JDEV] General Jabber Questions


> Hi Michael,
>
> "Michael Brown" wrote:
> >
> > A few general questions that I have been wondering about for a while.
> > If this is documented somewhere and I have missed it, feel free to
> > point me in the right direction...
> >
> http://docs.jabber.org has a lot of info.
> >
> >
> > 1) Is there any support in the Jabber protocol to do a "Who is
> > watching me" query?  This would return a list of users who are
> > receiving your presence online (or who have subscribed to your
> > presence, even if they are not line at the time).  I think this would
> > be a great security feature, and something that ICQ has always been
> > lacking.
> >
> Yep.  But you don't need to do a special query, it's all in your roster.
> Look at http://docs.jabber.org/jpg/refiqroster.html (Roster) and http:
> file://docs.jabber.org/jpg/refitem.html (Roster items).  The
> 'subscription' attribute contains this info.
>
> >
> >
> > 2) Is there any way in the process of adding someone to your
> > roster/requesting a subscription to find out what their nickname is?
> > I know there is a nickname field in the vCard, but for most of the
> > clients I have seen you have to make up a nickname when you are adding
> > someone.  Is there an elegant way to handle this?
> >
> Clients should do a vCard lookup and use the nickname field as the
> default.  But some clients don't support vCard yet.
>
> >
> >
> > 3) Has anyone come up with a standard client-to-client encryption
> > standard that is recommended for each client to support?  I believe
> > encryption is left up to the client, but I am very worried that unless
> > this is coordinated it will result in the same insecure incompatible
> > mess that we currently have with email encryption systems.  I seem to
> > remember (from years ago) that the original vCard spec included a
> > field for a public key of some sort.  If we could use this to
> > implement a PGP (style) encryption method that would be very nice.
> > Maybe someone could point us to some standard Win32 libraries so that
> > we are all using the same method.
> >
> Not yet, but we are working on doing this and PGP is a definite
possibility.
> >
> >
> > 4) Is it possible to implement an "Invisible" mode like ICQ's?  Maybe
> > I am doing something wrong, but if I connect and just don't send an
> > Available to the server, I can still send messages fine but I don't
> > seem to receive any until I go back Available again.  Presumably the
> > server holds onto the message until it thinks you are ready to read
it...
> >
> Yes, use a jabber:iq:filter query (mod_filter).  But mod_filter is post
> 1.0 and not "officially" supported yet.
> This  allows you to create a set of rules, that are stored on the
> server, to filter/redirect presence and messages.  You could add a rule
> that will prevent your presence from being sent to a single user, a
> group, or all.  So 'invisibility' in Jabber is achieved by filtering
> presence, not a special status mode.  AFAIK, the only mod_filter
> documentation that exists right now are the comments in the source.
>
> Schuyler Heath
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> >
> >
> > Michael.
> >
>
>
>
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