Re: A new collaborative editing package (maybe tangent)

[Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>]

> On Dec 31, 2023, at 7:32 PM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
> This is potentially very useful, but we should choose the design
> we are aiming for, not just drift into it.
> 
> Since there are no shared documents,
> what do these collab servers communicate about?

Edits made by each user (essentially insertions and deletions).

> Why do they need to communicate at all?

So you can see what I inserted in the the shared document, and vice versa.

> What job do they do?

These locally running servers connect to each other and send user’s edits to each other, so everybody get’s each other’s edit, and the document they edit are kept in sync.

> What sort of encryption do they use?

The servers use webrtc for communication, which uses DTLS for encryption. But as I said, collab-mode is not secure right now, adding authentication and access control is on the TODO list.

> This would not be good to promote if it does not offer privacy.
> 
> What formats can documents be stored in?  Does it handle any format
> Emacs can look at?

Since the servers only send edits, the document itself is stored in Emacs.

> What external programs does this depend on?

The collab-mode server is written in Rust and runs locally; editor-specific frontend will be written in each editors scripting language. The signaling server used to establish connection between two servers is also written in Rust; it needs to run on a public-facing server.

Yuan