WeeklyStatus05/13/2012

Conference Call Minutes 13 may 2012

participants: Tyrone Isaac Bill Nick Leonard

Agenda: 1. our relationship w project meshnet 2. mechanisms for collaboration: mailing lists, bulletin boards, &c 3. isaac's going to the colo tomorrow to install stuff

MECHANISMS FOR COLLABORATION -Bill talked about his experience w bulletin boards in the earlier days of the internet -boards have some advantages, like searchability, ability to transfer between machines -isaac: we put a forum up, it's been used limitedly but organically -the ideal solution would be a “reddit-style” forum -we only want to use tools that we can run ourselves and that could be deployed by operators elsewhere -does software exist that would allow us to run our own reddit-style forums? -i'd like to get a chatroom going too. We have an IRC channel, but we don't really use it -one option would be to integrate IRC into our wiki -we should stand up some kind of forum, but not prioritize migrating everything there from mailing lists

isaac: we have a lot of resources, but I don't know how visible/accessible they are to newcomers -bill: I was looking at the front page, thinking about reorganizing it to make it easier to reach our resources -leonard: mailing lists have worked pretty well for me. I think the best would be to combine mailing lists and forums -concerns about redundancy/fracturing the conversation -isaac: maybe we should add subtitles under “learn, contribute, etc” to have hyperlinks directly to things like the wiki from the mainpage -we're also thinking about adding the blog, or wiki updates, to the main page -Sara in NYC is working on some new website code -is there any way to avoid fracturing discussion between mailing list and forum? We'll look into it further -right now we use a wordpress plugin for the forum, maybe we want to find a better forum code, or stand up reddit code -if anyone comes across a forum question they can't answer themselves, forward it to a list so that someone can -this could be a good way to integrate email and forum data, for the moment

PROJECT MESHNET: -isaac: project meshnet is a reddit community that emerged from darknet plan, sub/r/ has 35,000 subscribers, with hundreds of active participants and dozens of active devs -that makes it just about the biggest other community of free network people, other than us -isaac was talking with Richard Stallman, who introduced isaac to Chris Breezy, the mod on meshnet -isaac and chris have been talking about bringing our two projects together -one concern is they've put a lot of stock into one piece of software -another issue is we don't share exactly the same goals, but we should definitely collaborate and help each other out -they are focused on CJDNS, anonymity -how can we make our systems interoperable?

DISCUSSION OF CJDNS, ROUTING SYSTEMS -isaac: so far most of our work has been at the hardware level. CJDNS as a protocol is designed to be agnostic. It can run over a TCP socket, or anything that links things. So, CJDNS can run over anything, but with significant overhead costs -we could integrate it into our stack, but we've looked at the code, looked at the protocol, and are skeptical of whether it can deliver what it promises -b/c an address book routing protocol isn't a protocol at all, it's an address book, so it doesn't scale well -it's more like a p2p system, a distributed look-up mechanism -the routing table for hyperborea is 5 MB, and there are only 300 nodes -how are they going to deal with the costs/size of routing tables with growth -nevertheless, we can still work with them even if we don't agree with their tech solutions, and hopefully convince them to adopt better practices -we have nothing to lose by establishing stronger lines of communication -let's engage with the community, stay hands-off on the software project for now -isaac's gonna talk w chris more on tuesday, hopes we can bring our communities together in a more meaningful way -what would we use as a protocol? DNS is pretty good as a protocol -isaac: we've considered including alternate route directories and a dns system as one option, and a more CJDNS-like system as another option -there's a problem in p2p systems called zooko's triangle: readable by a human, cryptographically secure, useful for a worldwide system: choose two -we're looking at a system that gets around this with pet names and software -there is some promise in CJDNS as a naming system for “Neruda” -nick: a release candidate of “Santiago” should be dropping within the next twelve hours on github -it's similar to CJDNS but designed to solve a slightly different problem: server discovery between friends' nodes -so scale of routing tables is not so much an issue

COLO TOMORROW -isaac: i'm going in there tomorrow to install some on-site backups. Not too much more on that because charles isn't here

-Bill had a question about switching his email addresses on the list. Isaac will check it out.