northHave you ever said that we’re not getting you anywhere with these newsletters? I’m writing this from the departure lounge at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, where I can recommend their imitation fish and chips, but I can’t recommend their security line (seriously, get in line early).
I’m here to attend a conference hosted by a tech company you’ve never heard of and that makes a technology you’ve never used: Matrix. That’ll be important later.
Single points of failure are a big problem in the tech industry. Whether it was the chaos that ensued when cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike pushed a dodgy update to millions of users in July or the frustration that came with Netflix going down, we’re increasingly discovering just how dependent we are on a handful of companies.
Which brings us, in a transition as smooth as I am awake after two days of networking, to Disney.
Taking the Mickey
The House of Mouse has I’ve had enough of Slackthe company announced internally last week. This follows a data breach in July, orchestrated by a group In protest against the rise of AI-generated art, 44 million messages, 13,000 PDF files and even more spreadsheets were made public. It was a hugely embarrassing moment for the company and even worse for the point of failure: Slack.
The anarchic protests against AI could fill an entire issue of TechScape, so for now we’ll focus on the key message: Disney was using the chat platform Slack and now it’s not going to. The internal message announcing the change, discovered by the Wall Street Journal, doesn’t directly say “we’re switching because we’re not happy with Slack,” but it does say “when we have opportunities to take advantage of more integrated tools and platforms, we should do so.”
That news broke hours before I spoke to Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape, the co-founders of Matrix, which is designed to be the opposite of Slack in almost every way. Rather than being under the central control of a single company, Matrix’s messaging and Slack-like workplace productivity tool is distributed and decentralized, meaning it’s hacker-proof and impossible to take down.
Follow the white rabbit
While there are still ways that data could have leaked to the world via Matrix, the messaging service can leverage Disney’s troubles to highlight how it encrypts its data. The duo behind Matrix mentioned Disney three times in our conversation.
Hodgson and Le Pape are trying to get organizations to embrace Matrix, presenting it as a way for companies to reduce their reliance on single points of failure. Hodgson told me that the arrest of its founder, Pavel Durov, and the concerns it raised about what happened to the data his company held, is a lesson many need to learn.
And yet Matrix’s co-founders were candid about its chances of becoming the next Slack. “The problem is that many private sector companies don’t care at all that most of their conversations are unencrypted and stored by Microsoft,” Le Pape said of the world’s over-reliance on Teams. “It’s pretty incredible.”
After the newsletter promotion
Convenience over competence?
I would say that it is actually perfectly credible. The conference was… incredibly There have been many times when things have gone beyond my ability to comprehend the flights that are taking off as I look out the window at gate D06. And that is why, right now, we are on Slack or Teams instead of using Matrix.
At least the last 25 years of technological development have been about removing barriers and friction. We don’t always use the best products, but we do use the ones that are easiest to modify. Convenience is the most important thing when it comes to technology, and that’s what will keep companies using the established brands even after data breaches and other catastrophic problems.
I don’t know if we’ll ever change that approach. That’s why Bluesky, which like Matrix is decentralized and distributed, hasn’t yet reached the mainstream, while X continues its path to obsolescence. That’s why Linux, which is a more complete and powerful operating system compared to Apple and Microsoft’s offerings, remains a relatively niche interest. And that’s why I admire the Matrix team’s honesty about the challenges that lie ahead.
The broader TechScape
How to do? Teenagers without smartphones In fact What do you think about this? Four children from this very small minority weigh…
Elon Musk backtracked on its risky stance on Brazil and agreed to judges’ requests to remove controversial X accounts.
Cloud software company Salesforce hired a comedian Juan Mulaney to perform at its annual conference in Silicon Valley… and used the concert to “brutally humiliate” himself against AI and technology. The San Francisco Standard reports“Over the last three days, the most vague language ever devised has been used here,” Mulaney said at one point. “The fact that there are 45,000 ‘pioneers’ here could not devalue the title any more.”
Willpower The UK loses the AI raceGoogle risks falling behind due to lack of data centers, according to a report by the company.
Meta, Google, TikTok and others are conducting “broad surveillance” of their users by default, according to the US Department of Justice. Federal Trade Commission.
The announcements are coming to the AI search engine Perplexity.