Weekly Dev Update #152

Hey y’all, 

This week we continued to work on stability fixes for Lokinet, in particular focusing on path handover issues. The Session team focused heavily on Android development, specifically squashing outstanding bugs so that we can move onto overhauling the conversation screen — as we previously did for iOS. The Oxen core team continued working on Service Node reward batching PR and began the process of making some upgrades to the Oxen storage server, which will enhance Session’s security.  

Oxen Core

• Check if SN has received ping from Lokinet before registration https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-core/pull/1457 

• [OxenMQ] Allow cancelling of timers https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-mq/pull/38, https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-mq/pull/39

• [Storage Server] HTTP server revamp to address memory leaks (no PR yet)

Lokinet 

This week in Lokinet we’ve been drilling down into recent code changes to identify connectivity issues that have been appearing since the 0.9.0 release. In what has become known internally as the 42-second bug, we sometimes see a temporary disconnection of precisely 42 seconds (okay, it’s actually 43 more often, but it’s close enough to 42, and 42 is special). We’re still not completely sure of what the fix is, but have definitively identified it as being related to path handover (i.e. how Lokinet transitions from one short-lived path to another, which normally happens every 10-20 minutes).  Work on squashing this bug (and a few minor related ones that have appeared while experimenting with this one) is ongoing this week.

• Make `lokinet-bootstrap --help` work again (it was lost in the 0.9.0 upgrade) https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1651

• 42s bug diagnostics and attempted fixes (no PR yet, ongoing work in https://github.com/majestrate/loki-network/tree/introset-spacing-2021-05-19)

• Ongoing work on revamping the low-level system interactions on macOS (not PR yet)

Session

Session Android 

• Improve open group notification spam when opening the app https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/554 https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/548 

• Open group invitation optimizations https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/547

• Translation updates https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/563

• Validate open group public keys to prevent issues with malformed keys https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/562

• Limit polling after long inactivity https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/561

• Add SHA-256 verification instructions https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/559

• Fix hardcoded strings https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/556

• Client-side nicknames https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/555

• Fix homescreen profile image refreshing https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/553

• Variable rate closed group polling https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/552

• Don’t auto delete empty open groups https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/549

• Use Maven central instead of Bintray https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/546

• Remove untranslated languages https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/545

• Remove unused resources and update translations https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/544

• Polling improvements https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/543

• Improved group creation error messages https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/542 

• Clean gradle files https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/541 

Session Desktop 

• Message fetching changes https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1652

• Hide shortened public key https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1656

• Remove unstable V2 file server notification https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1655

• Add signature verification instructions https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1651

• Switch to new V2 file server https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1646

• Message padding changes https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1643 , https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1644 , https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1640 

Session iOS

• Limit polling after long periods of inactivity https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/418 , https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/417 

• Update translations https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/416

• Fix tableView.endUpdates() Crash https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/412

Thanks,  

Kee