2018 MAR 30

New life for XMPP. Build your own decentralized messenger!

The idea of building decentralized messenger run by users, not corporations, is not new. But the process of building it costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. But what if we take the old good XMPP protocol, which has everything already implemented for us?

That's not "real P2P", you may argue, for using XMPP one needs to have a server running with a registered domain name. Yes, but we can run our server software on a local host and use virtual I2P network for connecting with other servers. I2P (Invisible Internet Protocol) allows us to use virtual .i2p address instead of a real domain name, plus it gives us advanced protection against illegal dragnet surveillance.

That way we have:

Hybrid P2P messenger, which can be run both on end-user devices and on high-performance server infrastructure.
Features which many of "real P2P" messengers miss: offline message delivery …

2018 MAR 11

The magical world of Pleroma, setting up your instance.

This guide is out of date, use the official docs.

This little blog post will guide a user through installing pleroma on a "$3 instance" as suggested by lain.

First, what is pleroma?

Pleroma is an OStatus and ActivityPub compatable server, a component of the fediverse of which GNU Social and Mastodon belong to as well. Think if twitter was structued how email is. With Email you have many different servers, yahoo mail, gmail, aol, (etc) that all can send mail to each other but are owned by different entities, the thing they have in common is they all speak SMTP. OStatus and AcitivityPub are each the "Twitter of SMTP", tweets/toots/shitposts/japanese-moonrunes are exchanged between servers. Many users can be on 1 server, (in fact mastodon.social and pawoo.net have a large chunk of the users) or 1 user can run their own server just for them …

2018 MAR 05

Building sbuild environment for cross-building raspbian packages on amd64/i386 machines

Updated: reworked style and text, add fix for supported filesystems workaround - aufs works only on jessie or earlier

Used documents and topics:

https://wiki.debian.org/mk-sbuild
https://log.cyconet.org/2013/11/25/crossbuilding-debian-packages-with-sbuild-for-raspbian/
https://gist.github.com/waja/7639011

Install requirements, add user, set distribution, etc. to build chroot and package

Install required packages

$ apt-get install sudo gnupg dirmngr curl sbuild ubuntu-dev-tools qemu-user-static binfmt-support

Recommended to work under user with full sudo access without password prompting.

sudo needed to install packages and mount chroot, requrement of mk-sbuild. You can ignore second line if want every time write password when it asked.

$ sudo useradd -m -s /bin/bash -G sudo,sbuild builder
$ sudo bash -c 'echo "builder ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" >> /etc/sudoers'

$ sudo su - builder
$ export RELEASE="stretch"

Next 4 steps (till 8th) can …

2018 JAN 31

i2pd 2.18.0 static arm build

my unofficial static arm build for i2pd 2.18.0 is up here.

make sure to check the signature or verify the hash

b2sum:

8f5fb682725273685370a0c839b75413914974f9e3030d112f44dfb1490fe1fcd623b911ede7148595d3d4a9de28309290b8623b1197489d71fdc75b17dca439  i2pd

sha256sum:

535197a7e06af4a6fc56bc1c6944c2571116c4575927fc060bc86e7213098326  i2pd

2018 JAN 30

i2pd 2.18 released

i2pd (I2P Daemon) is a full-featured C++ implementation of I2P client.

I2P (Invisible Internet Protocol) is a universal anonymous network layer. All communications over I2P are anonymous and end-to-end encrypted, participants don't reveal their real IP addresses.

I2P client is a software used for building and using anonymous I2P networks. Such networks are commonly used for anonymous peer-to-peer applications (filesharing, cryptocurrencies) and anonymous client-server applications (websites, instant messengers, chat-servers).

I2P allows people from all around the world to communicate and share information without restrictions.

i2pd is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license, binary packages are available for Debian, Ubuntu, OS X, FreeBSD, Android and Windows.

View release on GitHub

Changelog for i2pd version 2.18:

Added

Show tunnel nicknames for I2CP destination in WebUI
Re-create HTTP and SOCKS proxy by tunnel reload
Graceful shutdown as soon as no more transit tunnels

Changed

Regenerate shared local destination by tunnel reload
Use …

2017 DEC 04

i2pd 2.17 released

i2pd (I2P Daemon) is a full-featured C++ implementation of I2P client.

I2P (Invisible Internet Protocol) is a universal anonymous network layer. All communications over I2P are anonymous and end-to-end encrypted, participants don't reveal their real IP addresses.

I2P allows people from all around the world to communicate and share information without restrictions.

i2pd is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license, binary packages are available for Debian, Ubuntu, OS X, FreeBSD, Android and Windows.

View release on GitHub

Changelog for i2pd version 2.17:

Added

Reseed through HTTP and SOCKS proxy
Show status of client services through web console
Change log level through web connsole
transient keys for tunnels
i2p.streaming.initialAckDelay parameter
CRYPTO_TYPE for SAM destination
signature …

2017 OCT 28

hosting an outproxy for i2p (part 1)

This quick blog was requested by someone on IRC and it details how to set up an outproxy on i2p.

If this is too quick a guide or you feel like you don't know what you're doing then I'd suggest against running an outproxy.

Software used:

debian stable
i2pd
tinyproxy

The setup process goes as follows:

install i2pd and tinyproxy
edit tinyproxy.conf to have sane defaults
have tinyproxy deny access to loopback
create an i2p server tunnel pointing to 127.0.0.1:8888
publish destination of outproxy

/etc/tinyproxy/tinyproxy.conf

User tinyproxy
Group tinyproxy
Port 8888
Listen 127.0.0.1
Timeout 600
DefaultErrorFile "/usr/share/tinyproxy/default.html"
MaxClients 100
LogLevel Warning
PidFile "/run/tinyproxy/tinyproxy.pid"
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 20
StartServers 10
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
Allow 127.0.0.1/8
ViaProxyName "tinyproxy"
Filter "/etc/tinyproxy/filter"
FilterExtended On
ConnectPort 443

/etc/tinyproxy/filters

^127\.
^10 …

2017 OCT 06

Syncthing over I2P

In which I show you how to use Syncthing over I2P for secure, self-hosted, file synchronization.

What is Syncthing?

Syncthing is an open source, self-hosted file synchronization tool. Instead of trusting a third party (e.g. Dropbox) to host your files, and synchronize files between your machines, you can use an open source alternative.

By default, syncthing is not truly decentralized, and relies on third party relay servers and discovery servers. While I am sure the syncthing protocol is safe enough, and the people hosting these services have good intentions, wouldn't it be nice if we don't have to trust either?

What is I2P?

I2P is a decentralized, peer to peer, anonymous network layer. By relaying your computer traffic by a volunteer ran network spread around the world, following the path of traffic becomes nearly impossible.

I2P has the added benefit that you can bypass limitations on hosting imposed by …

2017 SEP 27

Kovri and the curious case of code rot (part 1)

I'd like to preface this going in as being clear that I like monero project and think they make a damn fine coin. Yes, they have a rather elitist community but such comes with the territory. I have interfaced with the kovri codebase in the past and I can say that the project left me rather disapointed. To really get a good grasp of the sitatuon I need to go back to 2014 (?).

i2pcpp and i2pd 0.x.x

In the begininning there was i2pcpp, a decent partially working i2p router written in C++ 11 for FreeBSD by a guy with the nym orion. Orion was originally funded by the monero community but discontinued i2pcpp after i2p's protocols left a sour taste in his mouth. My only role in i2pcpp was trying to compile it on Linux as at the time my C++ was pretty much non existent. Orion is …

2017 AUG 26

nntpchan 0.5.0 released

After over a year I am proud to release nntpchan version 0.5.0.

The daemon has gone through a lot as well as the build system, we have many many new things added.

smart varnish caching
ed25519-blake2b signatures
no longer use cgo, libsodium not used at all, we are 100% pure go now.
no more noticable gc leaks
use 1 repo for everything, don't split backend and frontend repo for ease of building

Many features were also gutted:

filesystem markup cache
redis support (all of it)

I think this covers everything, so much changed I probably forgot something or a few other things ...

Download on github here and join us on IRC to peer into the main network.

We're on the following networks:

rizon: irc.rizon.net #nntpchan

freenode: irc.freenode.org #nntpchan

irc2p: irc.dg.i2p #overchan