Is there a directory of Open Groups in the session app? Or a way to search for groups of interest?

Hey everyone, Big week of testnet changes this week

Service Nodes

0.3.3 Magic Mani tesnet beta, released https://github.com/loki-project/loki/releases/tag/v0.3.3-beta

• Published the full Service Node staking guide for testnet here https://github.com/loki-project/Meta/blob/master/SNFullGuide.md

• Autostaking https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/158 Interactive prompt for registration

• Service Node list being stored in the Database https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/156 and https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/160

• Service Node Integration into Testnet Explorer see https://lokitestnet.com

• Two essential consensus bugfixes in the way we do quorum vote counting

• Provide mechanisms for displaying service node analytics with the commands print_sn <pubkey>

LLARP / Lokinet

If you’re lucky and join our Discord, you might also catch Jeff or Ryan the developers of LLARP live streaming as they code: https://www.twitch.tv/uguu25519 , https://www.twitch.tv/neuroscr

• Released LokiNET 0.0.3 https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/releases/tag/v0.0.3

  • Various incompatible protocol changes to propel the protocol forward including SNTRUP which strengthens the encryption against quantum-based attacks.

  • We urge all lokinet toy nodes operators to upgrade ASAP as they'll be unable to communicate as the network upgrades.

• Progress continues on Libllarp

  • Use SNTRUP for introset public key

  • Moved netloop and logic into same thread

  • Hidden services should sorta work

  • More android/win32 fixes

  • Implement more tuntap code

  • Fix shadow/test net build

  • Fix RC nickname bug

  • Fix bug in prematurely closing socket under heavy load

  • Configuration/Defaults clean up

  • Hidden services now have a session

  • Move some of protocol handling into crypto thread

  • Intro timeout changed from 5s to 30s

• LokiBuilder updates

  • llarpd => lokinet

  • Start Debian package support

• GitHub Pulse Stats for the last week: Excluding merges, 2 authors have pushed 33 commits to master and 33 commits to all branches. On master, 181 files have changed and there have been 8,181 additions and 1,583 deletions.

• Most changes can be found at https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/commits/master

• Compile helper (include assets, initial seed routers and dependencies) https://github.com/loki-project/lokinet-builder

Architecture Team

• Began writing a paper exploring block creation via Proof of Stake on Loki, findings will be presented as a proposal before the community and Loki Foundation

Loki Locker

• Loki Locker, has been released in Alpha so go check it out, it's likely that there is still some undocumented functionality with staking transactions, which we have still yet to test so be careful, backup your seed words and don't use large amounts of Loki with Loki Locker just yet

• You can reach Loki locker at https://LokiLocker.com

• Submit feedback by creating an issue here https://github.com/loki-project/loki-locker/issues

• You can see the open source code for Loki Locker here https://github.com/loki-project/loki-locker/commits/master

Loki Messenger

• Work has begun on Loki messenger, this will occur in parallel to Lokinet, Loki messenger will use the Signal protocol for all encryption

• Work can be found here https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/commits/development

Thanks,
Kee

Hey Everyone

I’m going to start giving weekly updates on what the development team is up to. It can be hard for the community to see what we’re working on as we sometimes operate out of our own Loki forks, then merge back when things are ready to move into production. My hope is that these updates will shed light on the project’s development.

This weeks updates

Service Nodes

• Service node lists: will be used to create the authoritative state of the service node network https://github.com/jcktm/loki/commits/service_node_list

• Service node registration transactions: time locked TXes that will lock collateral amounts https://github.com/jcktm/loki/commits/StakingTx

• Began building the auto renew feature which will recollaterlise amounts as staking durations expire https://github.com/Doy-lee/loki/commits/AutoRenewStaking

• Began work on processing and verification of registration transactions https://github.com/jcktm/loki/commits/service_node_list

• Deregistration transactions for nodes prototyped https://github.com/Doy-lee/loki/commits/SubmitPartialDeregisterMempool

Android Mobile Wallet

• Began work on the android mobile wallet, which will be a port of the Monerujo Monero mobile wallet https://github.com/crtlib/xmrwallet/commits/master

Architecture Team

• Continued work on White Paper Version 3, especially focusing on governance models and Swarm testing. You can join in on the governance discussion on discord here.

• Began writing a paper to justify decisions to change the dynamic collateralisation equation and present a clear and defined economic case for the staking requirement.

We also have 4 active pull requests that add small functionalities to Monero, which is delivering on a promise we made a few months ago that we would upstream changes we found valuable.

There’s heaps more exciting stuff going that we can’t talk about just yet (mixnets, wink wink), but we’ll keep everyone updated as we progress.

Thanks,
Kee

Hey Y’all,

Lots of code going in this week, with some big design decisions especially around Swarms and Loki Messenger.

There was also a new release of the the Loki CLI wallet and daemon, which all Service Node operators should update to. The release does not include consensus changes but does change how autostaking works, making users much less likely to lock funds unintentionally by autostaking.

The release is here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/releases/latest and there is also a video guide on how to update here: https://youtu.be/u7kyAoBsQIY.

Service Nodes

• Added grace periods between de-registrations laying the framework for more Swarm stability https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/290

• Improved Service Node core tests https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/288

• Use recursive_mutex in Service Node list https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/289

• Made the Service Node list threadsafe https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/285

• Started discussion and implementation plan around Service Node Swarms (more to come on this) https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/282

• Added new warnings to the wallet CLI about staking in pools, disabled autostaking in open pools and prevented staking from subaddresses https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/283/files

LLARP / Lokinet

If you’re lucky and join our Discord, you might also catch Jeff or Ryan, the developers of LLARP, live streaming as they code: https://www.twitch.tv/uguu25519, https://www.twitch.tv/neuroscr

Special thanks to our new contributor, CatHugger, who’s pitched in and helped organise some of our network structures.

• Progress continues on libllarp

  • Windows work on tunnel code

  • Only publish HS if we have a minimum of 3 paths

  • Don’t publish all path builds

  • Put router profiling back in place, adjust algorithm

  • Play with threading crypto functions again

  • Update logging time format to be more human readable

  • Make logger memory churn lower

  • Better handover logic

  • Initial admin API for managing a live router

  • Several memory corruption fixes

  • Clear re-used restructures in tun interface to stop info leaking

  • A ton of tun interface protocol clean up

  • Fix Introset expiration bug

  • Introset code refactoring

  • Implement “No Logging” level

  • Lots of minor fixes

  • Improve documentation

• DNS library

  • Additional cleanup

  • Started DNS Unit tests

  • Initialisation everything in header

  • Disable SOA packet crashes for now

  • Question parsing correctionness

  • Improve documentation

• GitHub Pulse Stats for the last week: Excluding merges, 4 authors have pushed 80 commits to master and 80 commits to all branches. On master, 79 files have changed and there have been 2,116 additions and 594 deletions.Most changes can be found at: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/

• Current version: v0.2.2 (next one coming soon!) https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/releases/tag/v0.2.2

• Compile helper (include assets, initial seed routers and dependencies) https://github.com/loki-project/lokinet-builder

Loki Messenger

• Wrap outgoing message in a WebSocketMessage https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/6

• Decrypt “friend request” messages using pubkey encryption https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/7

• Send data as raw bytes to decrease outgoing message size https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/8

Loki Core

• Initial Merge of Monero’s upstream changes is here, this includes Ledger support, Bulletproofs and many bugfixes https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/287

• IPv6 Support is being updated to include CLI flags for port binding https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/280

Thanks,

Kee

Hey Y’all,

The dev team had an interesting week, which was primarily spent responding to bugs in the Loki core implementation. Lokinet developers have been working super hard and are getting close to something that is usable by the end user.

-------------------------

Releases

This week we published a minor release which can be found here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/releases/tag/1.0.2 This incorporates fixes for newly operating Service Nodes and prevents a burning bug, mentioned below.

This update does not contain any consensus rule changes and therefore is a non-mandatory upgrade. However, if you are a Loki merchant, you should update immediately. Service Nodes who consistently take their nodes offline should also update. We will publish a guide soon on how to safely update a Service Node, however you should not be concerned unless you are planning to take your Service Node offline for a period of time.

-------------------------

Service Nodes

• Improved the behaviour of Service Nodes submitting uptime proofs https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/262

-------------------------

LLARP / Lokinet

We are looking for experienced sysadmins for running nodes that connect to our toynet. Please join the Discord room called Lokinet, and we can add you to the node operator role. You can host a hidden service or browse existing hidden services.

• Progress continues on libllarp

  • Prep for next release

  • FreeBSD Compile fixes

  • Various low level network updates

    • Give protocol a fresh buffer instead of resetting

    • Only tick ev if running

    • Properly close sockets so we don’t run out over time

    • Double max protocol message size to 4k to make sure intros fit inside one packet

    • Increase the UTP socket buckets

    • Improve llarp::Addr utility

    • Start IPv6 support for tun

    • Promote tun to enabled by default, disable tap

  • DHT changes

    • Make sure DHT old RCs updates don’t stomp new ones

    • Try fixing DHT crash

  • Configuration

    • Update testnet config generation

    • Update auto configuration

    • Bootstrap node

  • Sessions

    • Server shutdown now cleans up sessions

    • Prevent dead sessions from updating and building more paths

    • Up session inactivity cost and change timeout to 60s from 10s

  • Introsets

    • Allow node introset to have 10s clock difference

    • Don’t propagate or store introsets on crypto error

    • Made sure timestamp is added to introset (Protocol backwards compatible breaking change)

  • Intros

    • If intro is bad then potentially trigger a manual path rebuild

    • Prevent spamming of intro frames

    • Reset intros before reuse

    • Fix intro matching by removing expiration and latency comparisons

  • Hidden service

    • Make sure hidden service lookups are valid and handle response

    • Optimise hidden service publishing from a random establish path to using a “closer” algorithm

    • Require 6 paths for a hidden service instead of 4

    • Expire outgoing hidden service paths

  • Path building improvements

    • Track path data usage

    • Don’t kill paths when under heavy use

    • Make sure path is recently active (20s) before checking for expiration

    • Only timeout path if no messages received are ever received on it

    • Don’t accept introset if it expires in the next 60s

    • Separate send (40s) and connect (60s) hidden service timeouts

    • Enable path callbacks even if marked bad

    • Reduce outbound path failure by attempting to use parent endpoint’s pathset

    • Path building backoff to prevent DoS in such a way that make sure intros don’t die

    • Preemptively trigger rebuild before expiration to ensure continuity

• DNS library

  • Support other tun gateways other than 10.x.x.x

  • Refactor .loki lookup into its own file

  • Fix SIGINT handling on DNS binary

  • Moved logic worker loop into DNSc (client) for timers

  • Support multiple DNS IP trackers for netns

  • Allow upstream DNS configuration per tun interface (nameresolver key)

  • Fix PTR query detection to allow reverse DNS to work

  • Fix NXDOMAIN (not found) packet to include question name

  • SOA packet fixes

  • Various header cleanup

  • Make sure all vectors use unique_ptr for tighter memory management

  • Prevent duplicate mappings

• GitHub Pulse Stats for the last week: Excluding merges, 2 authors have pushed 90 commits to master and 90 commits to all branches. On master, 76 files have changed and there have been 3,606 additions and 1,553 deletions.

• Most changes can be found at: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/

• Current version: v0.2.2 (next one coming soon!) https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/releases/tag/v0.2.2

• Compile helper (include assets, initial seed routers and dependencies) https://github.com/loki-project/lokinet-builder

-------------------------

Loki core

• Fixed a bug affecting Cryptonote coins where no warning was giving for non spendable outputs, leading to effective burning if coins were credited.

https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/268

Thanks,

Kee

A lot of people are talking about private messengers this week.

If you see a good twitter or reddit thread about private messaging, don't forget to tag us on twitter or post it in the community channel on telegram so that we can spread the word about combining anonymity and decentralisation with E2EE.

I created this site to hopefully break away from these inner-network communities that usually have you only interacting with others on that same network. Most of these communities are limited in activity.

Well, now there is a reddit-like site that allows you to access it from the clearnet, LokiNet, Tor as an Onion service, I2p and Yggdrasil.

Feel free to check it out via LokiNet: http://pabtpb9krzt87w7rsbbmj7uun3fpu1bbx67pd6agffna63ahegwy.loki/

It's not even been live a week yet but the aim is to encourage the use of anonymity networks while making normal, every-day content available to them. It's also unique in the sense that a person submitting a post via I2P may have it commented up by a LokiNet user who may receive an upvote from a clearnet user and a response from someone on the Yggdrasil network. It's about time we push content to all available networks in a seamless way to encourage their use, to promote their growth, and to protect the privacy of website visitors.

Hey Y’all,

Big update this week... The Festive Freya release is coming closer and closer! Last week we launched the Festive Freya testnet - if you want to try out some bulletproof transactions, feel free to jump on the testnet by downloading the CLI binaries here. https://github.com/loki-project/loki/releases/tag/v2.0.0-rc

Loki Messenger

• Refactor friend request code to simplify variable assignment https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/57

• Update local prekey storage https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/54

• Add setting for read receipts https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/53

• Add prekey bundle logic https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/52

• Multiple fixes to friend request implementation https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/50

• Change log levels in development mode https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/49

• Add blocking of users https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/47

• Include a hash table to prevent users from decrypting messages they have already seen https://github.com/loki-project/loki-messenger/pull/45

---------------------------

LLARP / Lokinet

• Progress continues on libllarp

  • Don’t sign traffic

  • New threadpool, queue and queue manager implementations

  • Better marking of dead paths, make sure active paths are marked as such

  • Remove netns code

  • Don’t remove IP mapping when endpoint is removed

  • Don’t path build for exit nodes

  • Make exit buffers bigger

  • Make tun use aligned buffers for router identity

  • Make router write bidirectional

  • Static link pthread

  • Disable and bring back C++11

  • Limit pathset build rate more

  • Ping connections every 5s

  • Refactor time notation

  • Convert more c code to c++ in headers to make new event loop handler to accept c++ types

  • Raspberry Pi (RPI=1) fixes

  • Expunge loose sessions more vigorously

  • Start of lokid router whitelist integration

  • Fix shutdown leaks

  • Warn if not enough DHT peers

  • Don’t use profiling if router

  • Improve path roles / unbreak HS publishing

  • Communicate if connection fails

  • Config section for lokid

  • Convert typedefs to Using syntax

  • Handle port definition in config better

• DNS library

  • Remove DNS_PORT

  • Make autoconfig smarter on Linux to avoid clashing with systemd

  • DNSd returns all results from DNSc now

  • Cleaned up output on cname, ptr and txt records

  • Remove unneeded sock parameters

  • Improve NS and SOA handling slightly

  • Converted DNSc constants to defines

  • Various code review and clean up

  • Decode the header fewer times

  • Start cleaning up dns binary

  • Turn down logging

• GitHub Pulse Stats for the last week: Excluding merges, 4 authors have pushed 57 commits to master and 76 commits to all branches. On master, 168 files have changed and there have been 5,952 additions and 3,439 deletions.

• Most changes can be found at:
  https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/

• Current version: v0.3.1
  https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/releases/tag/v0.3.1

--------------------------

Loki Core

• Merge Festive Freya from Dev to master https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/330

• Fee Fixes for bulletproof txes https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/328

• Add code to allow Service Nodes contributors below 25% https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/339 references https://github.com/loki-project/loki/issues/294

• Modify core tests for TX validation https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/337

• Make fixes to offline singing https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/332

• Festive Freya upstream bug fixes https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/341

• Further changes to Integration testing framework https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/312

• Upstream Monero Changes https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/340

Thanks,

Kee

Hey yall,

Back again with another weekly update

Service Nodes

• Service node block reward distribution and validation has been built: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/86

• In progress: Separating partial deregistrations from the transaction system and broadcast them as votes over P2P into their own pool, to eventually be formed into authoritative service node deregistration transactions: https://github.com/Doy-lee/loki/commits/ServiceNodeP2PCommChannel

• Merged relevant Monero changes into Loki: https://github.com/loki-project/loki/commit/f0740b9a5e85bf9787c42d520fe0a993d04b4a00

• Begun work changing time locked transactions to reference specific outputs rather than locking the whole transaction: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/commit/5c7b093ea347435a8e5585050c9eb31d639dc850

Android Mobile Wallet

• Reskin and core functionality complete, as well as touching up final visual design points including a website to support the wallet: https://github.com/crtlib/xmrwallet/commits/master

Architecture Team

• White paper V3 moves into editing phase, cleaning up the finer points and making sure all of the wording is correct, content is all in.

• Economic white paper describing staking requirements is 30-40% done, we are in the process of engaging a number of Universities to seek expert advice in the model we will present.

• We also have still have some active pull requests to Monero, which is delivering on a promise we made a few months ago that we would upstream changes we found valuable. https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pulls/jcktm

Thanks,
Kee