Dev

This was a big week for the Session team; on Friday the Android team submitted their user configuration code for the final round of QA and the Desktop team submitted their user configuration code for a first round of QA. The Android team has patched the remaining bugs and Session Desktop has come through QA with only minimal changes required. This means the updated user config release is coming very soon. The Oxen core team continued working with our auditors who are in contact with the Ledger team trying to understand some specifics around the requirements for forked code (our Ledger wallet shares many similarities with Monero code). Once we have clarity here we should be able to move forward with Ledger integration quite aggressively. The Lokinet team continues working on libQUICinet, good progress was made this week and we can now communicate between two Service Nodes using QUIC. The Lokinet team also continues their focus on finding issues in liblokinet with a major packet sequencing issue found this week, which has now been fixed. 

Oxen Core

• Additional Ledger audit wrangling, getting a better understanding of the scope of the audit considering much of our code was inherited from Monero

• Research into different multi signature schemes to allow Service Nodes to jointly attest particular states

Session

Session Android

• Update visible timestamps to conform with iOS timestamp approach

• Ongoing user config message overhaul

Session iOS

• Update profile image management and add ability to remove profile image

• Ongoing user config message overhaul

• Merge user configuration message overhaul back into disappearing messages

Session Desktop

• Overhaul message quoting for better performance and consistency with other platforms

• Fix integration tests and merge into libsession user config message management code

• Ongoing user config message overhaul

Session Push notification server

• Refactor internal push notification code from Python to C++ to increase performance

• Launch new production push notification server 

• Integrate new push notification registration process into Android client 

Lokinet

• Make clients using strict-connect option explicitly connect to provided Service Node/s

• Continue work on configuration API

• Ongoing work on libQUICinet

Marketing

Hey guys. Last  week, our primary focus was developing some target audience profiles to guide strategic decision-making in up-coming marketing campaign, drafting a new version for the Session wikipedia page, applying for a grant with the Internet Society Fund, and prepping for another conference that we’re attending — this time in Chiang Mai, Thailand. A core element of a good marketing campaign is understanding who your target market is. The more deeply you understand them, the easier it is to deliver your marketing materials to them and to make sure that those marketing materials have impact. We’ve been gathering some first party data to develop some new target audience profiles, and we’re pretty happy with the insights that we’ve unearthed through this process. Did you know that Session now has a Wikipedia page? This was stalled for a fairly time while, but has finally been published, which is good news for Session and helps to bolster its credibility and trust in the private messenger space. Session development moves fast, and so our next job is to produce an updated and improved draft — which we have been tinkering with throughout last week.

We also spent some of last week perfecting our application to the Internet Society Fund, a foundation which provides funding for projects that work towards greater internet freedom. We are a prime candidate for this kind of funding, and it is one of several grants we have applied for recently or plan to in the foreseeable future, which will mean adding to our already substantial treasury and providing more resources to supercharge the technology we’re building. Alongside these projects, there has been (as always) ongoing work on the marketing campaign that will be launched alongside the re-launch of the Oxen brand. Our influencer campaign is in the final stages of planning, and we have spent some time this week generating a lot of new, disruptive ideas for our social media strategy. Looking forward to sharing more next week.