We have today officially launched our new XMPP (Jabber) server.
Register an account here:
https://jabber-signup.5july.net/
Our old XMPP (Jabber) server will be has been shut down.
If you used the old server, make sure to use a new password when you register on the new server.
Note that the new server has server address jabber.5july.net (the old one had .org in the end).
Security breach
The immediate reason for the switch to the new server is a security breach that occurred this morning. We think that usernames, hashed passwords, and possibly contacts have been leaked. We are still investigating, but bottom line is that there doesn’t seem to be any security patch for this vulnerability (for the version we are running, see below), which means that similar attacks could happen again. We will therefore shut down this server and start using a new one. We have sent an XMPP message about this to all users of our old server.
The switch to a new XMPP server has been in the works for some time already. Our old XMPP server ran on an older version of Prosody, and we had had problems updating to the newest version, possibly because the database had been corrupted after migrating from ejabberd to Prosody earlier on. After several attempts to update Prosody, we simply decided to start a new XMPP server running on the latest version. We tried migrating all accounts from the old to the new server, but without success. (If you noticed downtime in the last few weeks, this was the reason.) We therefore decided that we would have to ask all of you to register new accounts on the new server. Far from ideal, but doable.
Better XMPP compliance
The good news is that running the latest version of Prosody will make it possible to add various extensions that some of you have asked for. The Conversations’ XMPP compliance tester gives us a score of 80 percent currently, up from 60-something for the old server. We’ll implement more features over the next weeks.
