Matthew Toseland wrote:
Everything sounds great, and I really think that freetalk may make 0.8 a
real hit.
Thanks for your hard work.
BUILD 1240
Our last stable build, 1239, was in November. We have just released a new
one, 1240. This has many changes (opennet stuff, optimisations, all sorts
of stuff), which I list in the mail about it. One of the most important is
that there are several new seednodes, and many dead ones have been
removed. I have tested it 3 times today and it's bootstrapped fast each
time, although yesterday it bootstrapped very slowly one time.
NETWORK STATUS AND NETWORK STATISTICS
Evan Daniel has been doing some useful work analysing the network. Amongst
other things, he has discovered that: - The Guardian article, in December,
which was reprinted around the world, has more than doubled the size of
our network, although there is a slight downward trend now. This may be
due to seednodes issues and not having had a build since November. - We
have around 4500-7000 nodes online at any given time. - Over 5 days, we
have around 14000 non-transient nodes. - For nodes online at any one time,
roughly 37% are 24x7 nodes (96% uptime average), 33% are regular users
(56% average uptime), and 30% are occasional or newbie nodes (16% average
uptime).
EMU IS DEAD, LONG LIVE OSPREY
We have finally gotten rid of emu! Our faithful and powerful dedicated
server supplied at a discount by Bytemark is no more. We now have a
virtual machine called Osprey, which does most of the same job, for a much
lower cost, and has a much simplified setup so should be easier to
maintain. We have tried to outsource services, for example we use Google
Code for our downloads, but some things will have to stay under our direct
control for some time to come e.g. mailing lists and the bug tracker.
You may have some difficulty with the update scripts, if you use update.sh
/ update.cmd. If it doesn't work, try updating the script manually from
https://checksums.freenetproject.org/latest/update.cmd (or update.sh)
WOT, FREETALK, RELATED THINGS AND OTHER PLUGINS
Xor (also known as p0s) continues to work on the Web of Trust and Freetalk
plugins. These are approaching the point where we can make them loadable
from the plugins page, and then bundle them, enabled by default.
WoT is the backend system which implements a pseudonymous web of trust,
which functions in a similar way to that in FMS. You can create
identities, assign trust to other identities, announce your identity via
CAPTCHAs and so on. This is the Community menu, from which you can see
your identities and other people's, and the trust relationships between
them. WoT is used by Freetalk, FlogHelper, and probably soon by
distributed searching, real time chat and other things.
Freetalk is a spam-resistant chat system based on WoT. This is similar to
FMS, but it will eventually be bundled with Freenet, and will be a part of
it by default. You will be able to embed a Freetalk board on your
freesite. FlogHelper is a WoT-based plugin for writing a flog (freenet
blog), which is very easy to use, but uses WoT to manage identities. I
would have bundled FlogHelper months ago, but WoT isn't ready yet and
FlogHelper needs it.
WoT should be ready soon. Recently a major issue has been discovered with
the trust calculation algorithm, after that is fixed and some minor
issues, WoT will become a semi-official plugin, which will sadly require
flushing the existing testing web of trust, so sadly all old messages
and identities will go away. Freetalk needs more work, about 50% of the
bugs marked for 0.1 on the roadmap are fixed at the moment.
In build 1240, we pull in a new version of Library. This is a great
improvement over the old version, it is faster, it supports embedding a
search on a freesite, and has many bugs fixed. However searching for
common terms can still cause out of memory crashes.
There is another issue with Library: infinity0 spent last summer creating
a scalable index format for Library, which should make it a lot easier to
insert and maintain big indexes. We will soon change the spider to use
this new format, and in the process we expect to greatly improve
performance for writing indexes, so it doesn't take a week any more and is
done incrementally. I realise this has been promised before, but it is
important, so it will happen sooner or later, hopefully sooner.
Full Web of Trust-based distributed searching, with a focus on
filesharing, is on the distant horizon at the moment. infinity0 might be
able to do some work on it as part of his studies, we'll see. It won't be
in 0.8.0.
PRIORITIES AND RELEASES
We would like to get 0.8 out soon, or at least a beta of 0.8. Several
major issues: - The windows installer needs to be fixed on 64-bit. This is
being worked on. - Freetalk must be ready.
- Auto-configuration of memory limits in the installers, and asking the
user about
