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.
