I may have miss it, but: - will Freetalk be compatible with FMS? - what about the WoT node plugin, will it be usable from external apps also?
Thanks. On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 19:52, Matthew Toseland <toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> wrote: > CHANGES SINCE 0.7 > > Lots of work has been done on Freenet since 0.7 was released. The main > highlights in code already shipped and available are sdiz's new datastore > (which should greatly improve CPU usage and I/O), lots of debugging, > profiling and optimisation, and two major improvements to routing: > friend-of-a-friend routing and turning off location swapping on opennet. > These two should improve data retention and performance significantly. We > have also implemented empirical measurements of network performance, which > have proved useful although they give a rather noisy signal. And there are > two major projects which have not yet been deployed, which are discussed > below: the db4o branch, and the new Freetalk plugin. Other changes include > better bandwidth limiting. The conference in July came up with many good > ideas; some of these are already in 0.8, some will be postponed to later > versions, but it was great to meet up with everyone and make sure we're all > on the same page, including the theoreticians. All this, plus some small > further changes and a lot of debugging, should make for a 0.8.0 some time in > the next few months which will be a major improvement on 0.7.0, and will have > taken much less than the nearly 3 years it took to reach 0.7.0! > > FINANCES > > We currently have $6863.24., including $4820 remaining from Google. This is > shown live (updated hourly) on the web site. Emu costs around ?80/month, I > cost around ?1440/month; the weak pound obviously helps matters, but when I > started work on Freenet I only cost $1250/mo; now I cost nearly twice that > (in a few months time I might be prepared to take a small pay cut, but it > won't cover the difference). This makes keeping going from individual > donations difficult, and over the last 18 months we've largely continued from > large donations from individuals or companies - Google's and John Gilmore's > being the biggest. Hopefully shipping 0.8 (or 0.8 alpha 1) combined with an > urgent appeal for funds will generate us some more publicity and more cash, > and more volunteers, but it's an open question whether we will make enough to > keep going for more than a few months. > > DB4O STATUS > > The db4o branch is an attempt to put most of the client layer into a > lightweight object database, so that we have no more hours of reloading the > pending requests from the datastore after a restart, faster startups, and > vastly less memory usage for large download queues. It has achieved most of > these goals already, but it has taken far longer than anticipated, and this > is why I haven't been working much on the mainstream stable Freenet over the > last 5 months. However it should be ready soon: I will post a new jar for > wider testing soon, and with a few more weeks of work it should be ready to > merge. > > FREETALK (FORUMS IN FREENET) AND WEB INTERFACE USABILITY > > Chat is essential for any community, especially an anonymous one; without a > good anonymous chat system, the chances of new users continuing to use > Freenet are low IMHO. We had Frost, but an unknown person has effectively > destroyed Frost with denial of service attacks (made possible by Frost's weak > design). FMS is the chat system currently used most widely on Freenet, and > its architecture should be immune to the attacks on Frost, but FMS has some > serious problems: It is written in C++, so is difficult to bundle with > Freenet, and cannot be an obvious part of the web interface or inlined in > freesites; it uses both a newsreader and a web browser, so is hard to use; > and it has had some exploitable bugs, and may still have them. I have stopped > using FMS because I don't have time to do a proper code review (and I'm not > sure I'm competent to do so), and nobody I trust has done one. So we clearly > need a new chat system. > > Thanks to the massive efforts of batosai, saces and especially xor/p0s, the > Freetalk plugin should be ready by the time we ship 0.8. This will be a menu > item on the web interface, just under Browse Freenet, and will be an > officially code reviewed and supported plugin. Hopefully its web interface > will also be embeddable in freesites, as a site forums system. Freemail may > also be added to the top level GUI, if and when it becomes sufficiently > stable and has a good web interface; we had a Summer of Code student working > on one but that didn't work out. > > There has been lots of discussion on making the user interface more friendly. > The main principle here is to make what you can do with Freenet more obvious, > and hide technical details in submenus. This of course means all the major > functions of Freenet must be bundled and code reviewed as plugins, and > accessible from Fproxy (experience suggests most users won't use them if > they're not obvious and two clicks away!). Real time chat among darknet peers > has also been discussed, with a more "social networking" feel for darknet, > since that's exactly what it is. Dieppe has built some mockups (especially > the first one): > http://doc-fr.freenetproject.org/Fproxy_mockup > http://amphibian.dyndns.org/freenet/browse-mockup/html/browse.html > http://amphibian.dyndns.org/freenet/mockup2/mockup2/html/browse.html > > TENTATIVE ROADMAP > > 0.8: > - ALREADY IMPLEMENTED: New compression algorithms, FOAF, no swap on opennet, > salted hash datastore, lots of minor refactoring, ... > - Merge the db4o branch. > - Some work on plugin dependancies, plugin updating. > - More work on searching: adjacent word matching, fix the spider, make it look > better, possibly make it embeddable in freesites and support adding indexes > from freesites. > - LOTS of debugging. Debug current network problems, debug bootstrapping > taking ages ... > - Hopefully bundle a working and reasonably easy to use Freetalk. > 0.9: > - Rest of the UI refactoring. > - Splitfile crypto randomization (greatly improves security for large > inserts). > - Tunnels. Greatly improve security, significant performance cost. > - Bloom filters. Greatly improve performance, significant security cost. > - BUT PUT THEM TOGETHER, and you get greatly improved security for the > paranoid at a slighty performance cost, improved security and current > performance or better for the moderately paranoid, and greatly improved > performance for the not so paranoid. > - Possibly some low level changes (e.g. streams, a proposal to greatly reduce > the bandwidth cost of padding). > 0.10: > - Passive requests: These are needed for efficient, large scale Web of Trust > (a vital component of Freetalk, but also probably useful for filesharing and > other things in future). They are also very helpful for other applications > such as streaming, and can save significant amounts of bandwidth for > downloads in many cases. > - Long-term requests: Closely related to passive requests. Needed to deal with > uptime issues, and some of the more serious steganographic transport plugins. > Uptime issues are especially important: other p2p networks also have to deal > with them, often not very well, and the problem will only get worse as more > and more people only have laptops. > - Possibly transport plugins: This would enable Freenet to pretend to be HTTP > traffic, or Skype(tm), or whatever. > 1.0 > - DEBUG DEBUG DEBUG DEBUG > > Post 1.0: > - Better support for sneakernet and other high latency transports. The main > remaining issue is how to assign locations on a low uptime / high latency > network. > - Content filters for *everything* - PDFs for example are quite feasible, and > strategically important, but a lot of work. > - Better darknet support - targeted swapping, better fragmented network > support, etc. > > SECURITY SUMMARY > > There are 3 main classes of attack on Freenet itself that are of particular > concern: harvesting nodes, statistical attacks to find out what your peers > are doing, and key-based searches where the attacker moves across the network > and slowly closes in on the source of some large content. All of them are > much harder if you use darknet mode and pick your Friends carefully. Right > now Freenet's security is nowhere near what it should be; if you have to > stake your freedom or worse on it, think carefully about the risks and the > alternatives (which are usually much easier to block). The features mentioned > for 0.9 should greatly improve security against these attacks. However, for > many purposes, especially if you use a darknet, Freenet is still better than > many of the alternatives. > > NEAR FUTURE/NEAR PAST > > On Saturday I released builds 1170, 1171, 1172 and 1173. 1170 included at > least a month's worth of work on trunk, all since 1166, which wasn't released > earlier as it was too unstable. 1173 was self-mandatory, meaning that every > node had to upgrade immediately, or lose connectivity. This has caused some > short term problems for the network; it was unavoidable, sorry folks. The > 1170 changes are quite significant: If you have a freesite, please reinsert > it (it will load significantly faster in most cases). Much of the recent > chaos (addressed to some degree in 1174 and 1175) may have been caused by my > being absent from trunk development, building db4o. That's nearly finished > and I'm spending some time on trunk at the moment. > > _______________________________________________ > Devl mailing list > Devl at freenetproject.org > http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl > -- __________________________________________________ GnuPG key: (0x48DBFA8A) Keyserver: pgpkeys.pca.dfn.de Fingerprint: 477D F057 1BD4 1AE7 8A54 8679 6690 E2EC 48DB FA8A __________________________________________________
