Weekly Dev Update #182

Hey y’all!  

After our Christmas/New Year break the Oxen team returned freshly rested and rearing to get back to working on new developments and updates happening across the project. Some team members took some extended Christmas vacation leave, but as of this week all devs are back in action.

Oxen Core

• Ongoing wallet3 work on decoy selection for transaction building https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-core/pull/1508

• Implement “drip” rewards (see https://youtu.be/CpnbaEUdFBA?t=469) into batching PR https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-core/pull/1450

• Initial development of the wallet3 RPC interface (no PR yet)

Session

This week the Session team has been busy polishing off the calls support from the beta releases from last month, along with planning and beginning a few significant Session features for development and various small fixes and improvements. Since the last update the Session team has also welcomed two new developers, one concentrating on iOS and the other on Android. Looking forward, in addition to polishing off calls, the Session team’s focus over the next few weeks will be on adding global message search, message requests, new open group functionality, and Lokinet integration.

Session Android 

• Add full screen media gallery mode https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/813

• Add ability to mark a conversation as read https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/816

• [WIP] refactor to use view bindings https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/824

Session Desktop 

• Fix open group excessive hashing https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2122

• Remove deprecated call to delete open group auth tokens https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2121

• Translation updates https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2129

• Reintroduction/reimplementation of global message search https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2130 https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2136

• Integration testing framework https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2128

Session iOS 

• Ongoing calls development and fixes https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/485

• Updates to fix simulator builds on Apple M1 systems https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/547

Session Open Group Server

This week (and in the few days before the Christmas break) the new PySOGS backend has seen various improvements and features added to make the code more robust.  Several other features are also up-and-coming such as pinned messages, session ID blinding (so that other SOGS users can’t obtain your session ID without requesting it), more configurable room permissions (such as read-only rooms), and the ability to edit messages.

• Add more robust profanity filtering https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/26 – this filtering is now active on the official SOGS channels.

• Debian packages for simple PySOGS deployment on Ubuntu 20.04+ and Debian 11+ (see https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/blob/dev/install-debs.md for details)

• Fix an infrequent database transaction lock failure https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/29

• Rewrite documentation/readme https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/30

• Hide system user from moderator/admin lists https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/31

• Use SQLAlchemy for SQL engine https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/32

• Add support for postgresql database as an alternative to sqlite https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/33

• Add (and automate) an initial test suite to test various internal capabilities (and fix a few minor issues it uncovered) https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/34

Lokinet

Lokinet has seen a handful of small fixes, as well as some new features around exit nodes.  Additionally the Lokinet team has been working hard to wrap an open source library for handling Windows route configuration to hopefully fix the Windows routing configuration issues once and for all.

• Fix omission of libssl-dev in readme https://github.com/oxen-io/lokinet/pull/1828

• Add support for fixed list of auth codes (e.g. for accepting exit clients) https://github.com/oxen-io/lokinet/pull/1830

• Update readme to point to “gentler” docs.oxen.io install instructions https://github.com/oxen-io/lokinet/pull/1837

• Prevent a segfault if shut down before fully initialized https://github.com/oxen-io/lokinet/pull/1834

• [WIP] adopting the https://github.com/mullvad/libwfp/ library for the Windows build to better configure Windows network filtering

Thanks, 

Jason (standing in this week for Kee while he is on vacation)