Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of the Matrix open standard, told us: “This has nothing to do with the Matrix protocol; it’s just an unfortunate naming coincidence.”
The Register failed in their due diligence by not clarifying from the beginning that this is a different Matrix chat than the open standard. They amended the mistake with an update to the post (quoted here in OP), but that is placed at the end of an article that not everybody is going to read all the way through.
IMHO this needs a rewrite to make clear from the outset that the Matrix protocol and matrix.org are not affiliated with the criminal chat service. As it stands, even with the correction, it looks like character assassination of a perfectly legal open source project.
I mean, the journalism is fucking amateur at best. “Red pill” isn’t a verb that’s immediately understandable, and yes, I know they say in journalism school to use plenty of similies instead of repeating yourself, but loads of English speakers wouldn’t have a clue what they mean by “Plod”
Really makes me wonder why criminals won’t use the actual Matrix protocol instead of this one. They wouldn’t have to pay for its use.
Read the linked article; this was a different network using the same name.
yeaah I fucked up, I didn’t read far enough into the article hence why I deleted my comment a second after posting😬
That’s another poor mistake that I’m gonna try to not repeat
No worries, The Register hid the clarification about the two different networks way down at the end, so it’s an easy mistake. I honestly think they need to put that note at the beginning to avoid confusion.
