Tuesday 06/21/16

Attendees: warner, dawuud, meejah, liz, cypher, daira, zooko

Decentralized Web Summit was a blast, Tahoe lightning talk was well-received, many stickers were handed out. There were several related projects on display, and we can probably adopt ideas and code from them (web-based frontends, NAT-punching techniques, UI patterns).

We talked about immutable file encodings that would give us shorter filecaps: Daira's old RainHill / ElkPoint designs, warner and zooko's discussions from last week.

• warner is envious of the short filecaps provided by several projects we saw at the Decentralized Web Summit the other week. OTOH almost none of them were trying to provide confidentiality, which has a major impact on the design space.
• The bits in a filecap provide various properties: Confidentiality, Integrity/Identification, Location. Also "committment" (to a single plaintext, equivalent to protection against hash collisions), protection against server-side "roadblock" attacks (enabling server-side verification), enabling repair.
• Sometimes a single bit can do double-duty (Confidentiality and Integrity), but at the cost of other properties.
• "committment" is the most expensive, since the birthday bound requires 2*k*ln2(numfiles) bits to achieve a security parameter of "k", whereas most of the other properties only require 1*k.

meejah says the magic-folder branch is ready to land. warner will start testing it locally today. daira wants to rebase the cloud-backend branch and land it first, then re-rebase magic-folders. Either one landing would be justification for making a new Tahoe release. We might delay the release by a week to get both in, but if they're likely to take more time than that, we'd make two separate releases.

zooko reminded us that #1382 (servers of happiness) is really important, and should really go into the next release. The next step is for warner to learn the algorithm and re-implement it, as a way for him to be comfortable with the changes. Fortunately the specification is very detailed and really only admits one possible approach.

dawuud reminded us that we need to make progress on Tor integration, warner will re-read the tickets and try to remember what the next step should be.

We're dropping down to one meeting per week for a while (just Tuesdays now, not Tuesday and Friday). We had audio problems with 6/7 people on appear.in today, so we'll try Google Hangouts next week.

The Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News is published once a week by The Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation, President and Treasurer: Peter Secor . Scribes: Patrick "marlowe" McDonald , Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn , Editor Emeritus: .

Send your news stories to marlowe@antagonism.org - submission deadline: Monday night.