devchat notes for 30-Aug-2016

[Brian Warner]

Devchat notes for 30-Aug-2016

attendees: liz, daira, dawuud, zooko, meejah, warner

prepared agenda:
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/WeeklyMeeting#Agendafornextmeeting30-Aug-2016

Notes:

* warner landed a lot of Tor/I2P code in the last week. Client-side
  support is mostly done. Servers can be manually configured. "Static
  servers" can be defined locally (independent of the Introducer), and
  they can override the connection handlers (to cover Leif's use-case: a
  server that you can use directly, but everyone else uses through Tor)

* This means our next release will have both Magic Folders and
  Client-side Network Privacy as major features. To make the network
  privacy (aka "anonymity") complete, there are a couple of other
  tickets that need to be resolved first: #1942, #1010, probably #2490,
  maybe #2773. The release will block on these, to avoid giving folks
  half-baked protection.

* #2815 landed Tor/I2P config docs for clients and servers. Please read
  http://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/anonymity-configuration.html
  and let us know if they make sense.

* We're going to land #1010 soon, which is titled "anonymous mode", but
  current consensus is to name it "private mode", because "anonymous"
  carries too many inaccurate connotations. This is a tahoe.cfg flag,
  probably "[node] private = true" (or "private-IP" or "IP-privacy"),
  which acts as a safety check. When set, the node will refuse to launch
  if anything about its configuration would reveal your IP address to
  the outside world. We agreed on the constraints it should impose.

* Since static-server configuration landed, warner also wants to land
  multiple/no-introducers (#68), but wants to put it in "tahoe.cfg" next
  to the existing "introducer.furl=" key (e.g. "introducer.2.furl=").
  This is a departure from the previously-discussed scheme that involved
  a new config file named "private/connections.yaml" (which used to be
  shared with the #2788 connection-handler/static-server list, but then
  static servers were moved to "servers.yaml", and the #2788 handlers
  were moved to tahoe.cfg). Daira pointed out that
  new secret-bearing config files should go in private/ . Warner
  questioned the diagnostic/share-my-config-safely utility of treating
  NODEDIR/ as non-private, but agreed that it wouldn't be too bad to
  create private/introducers.txt or private/introducers.yaml

* we might be able to close #467 and/or #573, both of which involve
  controlling server selection independent of the Introducer

* Daira had a little bit of time to work on the cloud-backend rebase,
  but not enough to finish it.

* warner will try to land the remaining Tor/I2P client-side things, and
  #68, in the next week. If cloud-backend is done by then, we'll start
  the release process, probably with four weeks of beta (since the
  cloud-backend patches could be fairly disruptive). If it's not done by
  then, we'll start a shorter release process, maybe two weeks, since
  Tor/I2P/magic-folders don't significantly impact folks who don't
  enable those features.

* Daira will be in california in early november, so we're thinking of
  doing another Summit in San Francisco, probably the week of November
  7th. Warner will check the calendar and see if we can find some office
  space.

* We broke off early, and didn't have Science Hour. But warner and
  meejah talked for a while about git-over-tahoe and magic-wormhole
  Endpoints.

cheers,
 -Brian