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