September development

[meejah]

Hello Tahoe-LAFS,

Through September, we continued work on the foundation.

The python-spake2 library got some long overdue attention, and a new
release.  As well, magic-wormhole got another release (0.16.0) to take
advantage of new python-spake2

    https://pypi.org/project/spake2/0.9/
    https://pypi.org/project/magic-wormhole/0.16.0/

PACKAGERS: These releases gets rid of the low-activity "hkdf" library
dependency (in favour of using primitives from "cryptography", the
standard Python cryptography library).

Some experimental tooling around both Tahoe-LAFS and Magic Wormhole
are in the works.  The first is "Magic Grid" to assist with setup of
simple, single-server Tahoe-LAFS Grids -- to go along with
in-development documentation improvements from Blaise.

    https://git.sr.ht/~meejah/magic-grid

The second is "Git With Me", a way to use Magic Wormhole to
collaborate via Git Daemon (but with end-to-end encryption etc)

    https://git.sr.ht/~meejah/git-withme

More progress on improving Magic Wormhole's feedback to user-code
surrounding Dilation and the Mailbox have not yet been released.  This
will give user-code (like Fowl) the ability to better-inform users of
current network conditions and connections.

There have been more improvements on Fowl policy/permission, although
these are also not yet in a release.

An interesting thing from the public I2P Grid came up: it announces a
server available via an Onion address.  In certain configurations,
clients will end up making clearnet DNS queries for this Onion address
(_not_ when you've disabled TCP transport, though, as would be common
for a Tor setup).  One could detect and "block" these attempts (when
e.g. Tor is not enabled) however, this would break "transparent Tor
proxying".  For more on this topic, see:

    https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/4108

Another change worth noting is:

   https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/4110

...which is technically backwards-incompatible.  The "--storage-dir"
option was being interpreted as a flag (instead of an
argument-consuming option), and so could never have properly
functionted.


thanks,
meejah