Summary

Here are some of the main things to highlight this week:

The first version of the Crust Test will be going offline tomorrow morning. Before releasing the next test, we’d like to work on a couple of improvements in order to increase the information returned from the test.

SAFE-Fleming is our new name for Alpha 3.

Next week, @dugcampbell will be heading across to Berlin for the Web3 Summit - so if you’re going, say hi!

@m3data is running a survey to gauge interest in a SAFE Network: Sydney meetup.

The Routing team estimates that they have tackled around a third of the kinds of malice they detected during their brainstorming.

Release of the Crust Test

First up, we’d like to thank everyone who has taken the time to get involved with the release of the Crust Test over the last 24 hours. Excitement reached fever pitch as people from all over the world successfully connected to each other by testing out the SAFE Network’s hole punching functionality. There have been a few comments on the Forum along the lines of ‘it’s amazing to watch the birth of the new internet’ - and we couldn’t agree more The test is the visible culmination of many months of work by the Crust team, with everyone across the business working together on preparing the release over the last couple of weeks so we hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have!

We’re delighted to say that we’ve now achieved the goals that we set for the initial part of this test. We’d like to work on a couple of improvements in order to increase the information returned from the test - so as of early tomorrow morning, we will be stopping the first version of this Crust Test.

One of the most important iterations we’d like to make to the test is to enable the next version to record direct connections between nodes. In addition, we knew that the Dashboard would have certain performance constraints so we’d like to ensure that this is a little easier for you all to read (essentially the next Dashboard version won’t have to load all the data with each refresh). Finally, in addition to displaying data for all tests that have taken place, we’d like to let individual users filter the results in order to show their own connection results in isolation.

It’s important to point out however that this is another stage on the route to SAFE-Fleming (our new name for Alpha 3). Oh, and don’t forget to give both posts explaining this week’s activities the full 50 claps on Medium if you feel they deserve it ;-). So whilst we’re looking at making a few improvements for the next iteration of the text, the goal here is not to provide a fully-functional all-singing all-dancing dashboard. Instead, the goal is to provide a basic feedback mechanism for the community that provides a feel for what is happening - and just why it is so important.

Marketing

Unsurprisingly, the Marketing team has pretty much been working on the Crust Test release exclusively this week - drafting Medium posts, messaging for social media, storyboarding and recording the video, updating DevHub - together with a myriad of many other details relating to the release and promotion.

Next week, @dugcampbell will be heading across to Berlin for the Web3 Summit - so if you’re going, say hi! Also, it’s worth pointing out that @m3data is running a survey to gauge interest in a SAFE Network: Sydney meetup.

SAFE API & Apps

This past week we focussed on improving the packaging for the safe_app_java Android Library and its compatibility with the jcenter and maven repositories. Internal review/testing of the example mobile application gave way for some fixes and suggestions that are now being implemented in the application.

@shriram2301 has been ramping up and showing good progress in understanding the SAFE Browser codebase, as well as the safe_app_nodejs API. He’s already been assigned a first bug to fix which he is using to also understand the development process we follow in the team.

There has been an improvement implemented in safe_app_nodejs recently (PR #295) to remove the need of setting a NOVE_ENV env variable to download the native libraries to use the Mock network. This has been causing problems to users in the past and we are hoping this will allow applications to not need this environment variable when they are being executed for the Mock network.

Part of the team has been trying to resume its efforts on the initiatives for supporting RDF data & APIs, as well as XOR URLs to better support linked data. As you probably can imagine, now that the Crust Test has been made public, this was one very important milestone for the project, and for the company, which required some help from the frontend team as well. This slowed us down or even distracted us from being that active in relation to RDF and linked data related tasks. Apart from the discussions and details we’ve already been sharing in our forums, we are planning to trigger some discussions about these topics also on the Solid Community Forum in order to get some feedback from that community as there are many people there with good knowledge of RDF and linked data.

We would like to encourage anyone interested in these topics to participate in the discussions we are having. We try to be focused and pragmatic in the process, with concrete details of how things can be changed and implemented and not just from a theoretical angle, but with code snippets, data structures examples, etc. We will shortly be creating a new post on the Dev Forum to trigger a discussion around a proposal for migrating our DNS data to an RDF representation, and it will be important to have you all keep an eye on it and provide your valuable technical input and feedback.

SAFE Client Libs

This week we’ve been continuing to refine and polish the API for the next Client Libs release. We added a new constant, GET_NEXT_VERSION , which can be passed to the API functions dir_update_file and dir_delete_file to automatically fetch the next version to be used from the network. Previously, one could pass the special value 0 to dir_update_file , which led to some confusion from community members who thought this should be a bug. Also, these two functions dir_update_file and dir_delete_file will now return the new version of the file entry.

Routing

The main task that has kept the Routing team busy this week has been to continue and implement detection of various types of Malice in PARSEC and implement functional tests for each of these.

Some forms of Malice have required important additions to the code, such as the addition of “per peer membership list” that started last week. In simple terms, this allows any node to place itself in another node’s shoes in order to figure out if they respected the protocol at all time. We started implementing this task last week but left aside some aspects of the task that we have been picking up this week. Since it is a rather important change to the code, we will only really be able to call it done once we’ve implemented the tests for it.

For implementing these tests, we need to add support to “per peer membership list” in the generation and the parsing of our dot format graph files. This task is currently in progress. We are also using the opportunity to further refine our graph files syntax, so as to help with any new tests we will be writing.

As we are coding all these new features, we are continuously refactoring the codebase to keep the code maintainable and allow us to maintain velocity for the upcoming features.

In addition to these malice related tasks, we extended PARSEC’s API with two methods that we expect will be needed for integration with the Routing repository. One allows checking whether there are any observations in the graph that haven’t obtained consensus yet. The other one retrieves all unpolled observations created by a given peer.

This should allow us to start work on integrating PARSEC with Routing in parallel with the continuing work on malice detection. This is the reason why we tackled dynamic membership in priority over malice detection. Expect to see some of this progress along the road to SAFE-Fleming

Having a look at the bigger picture for milestone 2, we have started to make a dent into malice detection as we have tackled around a third of the kinds of malice we detected during our brainstorming. This should keep us busy for a while longer, after which we will be turning our gaze at the other aspects of milestone 2. Namely: performance analysis and enhancements, production-ready documentation, additional testing and enhancements to the whitepaper based on all the feedback we have been gathering.

Crust

We’ve been working hard to make the Crust Test happen. We made a special application that makes use of the Crust and p2p crates, attempts hole punching and sends the collected information to our server-side software. It then collects all of those results which I’m sure you all saw on our live dashboard Our main focus was hole punching but at the same time we collected UPnP availability stats which we’re sure the Marketing team will summarize later.

We’re also aware of several bugs and inconveniences that prevented some people from running the test clients on their computers. Because the client binaries require rather recent versions of operating systems, the users who prefer more stable OS releases like Debian, Ubuntu 16.04, or macOS High Sierra ran into a variety of problems trying to execute them. We have a plan for lowering the OS requirements and making the Crust client accessible to a much wider audience for the next iteration of the test.