4 Nov
2019
4 Nov
'19
1:54 p.m.
Hi all -- we just send a monthly "key developments" report to the
OpenTechFund, see below. Delta Chat currently has a number of people
receiving money for implementing the "OTF Organization and Integration"
proposal which was accepted a few months ago. Hope it's useful here
as summarizing background info :)
cheers, holger
hello otf-active,
key points from developments with and around Delta Chat in October 2019:
- Our move-to-Rust is nearing completion. Around a hundred PRs have been
merged in the last month:
https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core-rust/pulse/monthly
Apart from continuous bugfixing and stabilization we also introduced
a "TLS-strict" mode that will fail SMTP/IMAP connections if they are not
properly secured. This is all much earlier than what we anticipated
in our original proposal. However, we are still working hard on ensuring
stability and fixing regressions as soon as they are discovered and understood.
- Delta/iOS is progressing steadily, with around 30 merged pull requests
in October. Roughly every week there are new testflight releases now,
with encouraging and helpful user feedback.
- Delta/Android saw also around 30 merged pull requests containing
streamlinings and fixes related to Android 9 and API-level
28, and also several bugs fixed with 64-bit versions which are
now required for uploads to the play store. Roughly every week there
are new dev-releases which continously improve things based on feedback
from early adopters.
- We setup new infrastructure and CI workflows for a new Download page
which makes access to dev and stable releases easier which in turn helps
communication with early-testers, i.e. it eases the bug reporting, fix- and
try-again workflows. We have automatic PR-based Desktop release building
working for Win/Lin/OSX, for now.
The Download page and the Delta Chat website itself is now hosted at a VM
we control ourselves instead of the "Netlify" cloud service. We are
documenting
our setup steps here: https://github.com/deltachat/sysadmin/
This also means that right now, the Delta Chat website is not blocked
in Russia anymore.
- Needfinding interviews with organizers, activists and journalists
from eastern Europe, Taiwan and Hongkong, are currently conducted and
are expected to be completed soon. Our main interview topic is
"multi-tool" and "multi-device" usage as we'd like to
understand
better how users integrate messaging apps with other apps,
and on which devices. We focus on "asymmetric" scenarios, where users in
mobility (on
field trips during rallies, elections or missions for documentation of human rights
violations)
communicate with a central office. We probe specific needs for these situations
such as burner accounts, location streaming, offline data collection etc. We analyze
laptop vs mobile usage, attachment management for group chats and so on.
- We did a first public sysadmin session, at /ETC in Athens,
see here for our blog post about it:
https://delta.chat/en/2019-10-16-etc-workshop
- We participated in the OpenPGPSummit 2019 in Berlin where implementors
from Enigmail, Thunderbird, OpenKeyChain, Protonmail, Schleuder, KMail,
Mailpile and several others were present, and sketched a new
"OpenPGP Crypto-Refresh RFC" effort to break the deadlock around RFC4880bis,
and discussed future Thunderbird PGP integration issues, among many other
interesting topics.
At the beginning of the summit we presented the refined state of rPGP,
the only full-rust implementation of OpenPGP. rPGP was already
independently security-reviewed, see current status here:
https://github.com/rpgp/rpgp
There also is now an early "wasm" built which met interest from several
implementors who currently use openpgp.js.
- After OpenPGPSummit we continued with two days of Autocrypt
sessions. Resulting from these discussions, there is now
a new RFC on "protected headers" going to be submitted to IETF today.
This RFC captures what Delta Chat, Enigmail, K9 etc. already do today
to avoid leaking the Subject, and is now heading for wider standardization.
If you are curious here is the pre-submission work going on life:
https://github.com/autocrypt/protected-headers/blob/master/draft-protected-…
Moreover, there are early plans for kicking off "Autocrypt Level 2"
specification discussions early in 2020.
cheers,
holger