Weekly Dev Update #183

Hi all!

This week the Oxen devs were hard at work, as always, fixing bugs, adding features, and planning new capabilities. Most notably this past week we’ve spent a good amount of effort planning and brainstorming features for Session spam mitigation, discussed in more detail below.

Oxen Core

• Ongoing wallet3 RPC wallet implementation (no PR yet)

• Ongoing Service Node reward restructuring & testing https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-core/pull/1450

• [OxenMQ] Replace oxen-mq encoding code with the new(ish) dedicated oxen-encoding library  https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-mq/pull/72

Session

This week the Session team has been busy working on global search, fixing various bugs, and working on planning the implementation of spam mitigation features for Session.

Spam is a growing issue on Session, and so the team is developing and beginning to create a three-pronged approach to deal with it:

• Session is introducing a concept called “message requests” which will group messages from unknown contacts into a secondary section of the app to better allow you to filter and choose who you want to talk to.

• New versions of Session and SOGS will support “blinded” keys so that all participants in an open group will use quasi-random keys rather than having to reveal their actual Session ID.  Your contacts will be able to know that it’s you, but strangers will only see a random ID that doesn’t reveal your Session ID.

• Users will be able to send introductory private messages to other open group users through the open group itself, allowing a user to choose whether they wish to initiate a Session conversation with a new contact, or decline the conversation, giving users more control over who knows their Session ID.

Session Android 

• Use 4-digit display for unread messages instead of 2-digit (thanks to community member Ian MacDonald for this contribution) https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/827

• Fix displaying replies containing an image https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/issues/747

• 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 

• Global search implementation https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2136 https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2139

• Fix appearance of attachments https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2141

• Automated testing https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2140 https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2128

• Improve scroll positioning when opening a conversation with unread messages https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/2142

Session iOS 

• Fix empty mention list for open groups before seeing other users https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/550

• Default URLs HTTPS instead of HTTP https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/549

• Fix sharing items to Session from other apps https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/548

Session Open Group Server

• Add endpoint that reveals SOGS feature sets so that Session has a way to know whether it can use new SOGS functionality when interacting with an open group https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/36 

• Add batching, allowing Session to fire off a set of requests to be processed all at once https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/36

• Add new one-shot authentication mechanism that adds replay protection and reduces latency https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs/pull/38

• [WIP] new endpoints for room polling, more advanced message retrieval, and more permission options

Lokinet

Lokinet saw a few small PRs this week, though mostly Lokinet devs were working on other areas of the project.

• Make systemd status line (on Linux) more informative https://github.com/oxen-io/lokinet/pull/1838

• Allow disabling the on-by-default route blocking when in exit mode https://github.com/oxen-io/lokinet/pull/1839

• [WIP] Windows network filtering fixes for IPv6

Thanks,  

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