GNUnet Messenger API: February 2024

Hi again,

As mentioned last time I’ve implemented so called transcripts now. When a user sends a PRIVATE message to another contact inside a chat, they will receive a transcript containing the information of the encrypted message but encrypted for themselves. Deletions and other actions which target the transcript message will be forwarded to target the original private message as well.

chat in messenger-gtk showing a sent invitation

So users can now read their own written private messages like invitations and delete them. Additionally I’ve implemented rejections of invitations using the new TAG message using an empty tag. This message can target any previous message via its hash and communicate tagging of messages or contacts (if applied to the last JOIN message of another contact in a chat).

This will allow blocking of contacts service wide. Because the same way a user can reject invitations, they can reject other contacts now to block them. Unblocking them will simply delete the remaining TAG messages with an empty tag pointing towards the selected contact.

contact menu in messenger-gtk with block button

On the front-end blocking will hide all messages sent by the blocked contact and unblocking them will show these messages again. So this will bring basic functionality for the privacy of users to the messaging application.

I’ve also adjusted the service that it will calls the applications callback with a message again when changes or deletions are applied to that message. Additionally messages with dependencies to previous messages will be received in correct order on application level when using libgnunetchat. This solved a lot of consistency issues.

The messenger GTK front-end is a lot more reliable now. Multiple segmentation faults and other causes for crashes have been fixed. I’ve finally debugged the issues with usage of the camera on the Pinephone Pro, my laptop and my desktop using a webcam. All of these devices work now with user-selectable camera sensor. The application uses PipeWire for camera sensor selection and even libportal for permission requests.

I will continue with the implementation of profile pictures using the TICKET message and reclaimID now. Another feature I am considering is tagging of messages and contacts with custom tag values. The service already allows this. But their’s still work required in libgnunetchat and the front-end for this functionality even though blocking works pretty much equivalent.

The idea would be that users could tag their contacts and messages in chats to filter or search for them more easily. You can think of it in a similar way as a favorites section in your contacts list but with custom title. I’m still working on the UI design for it. I assume this could be done next month but you’ll read about this in my next post here on my blog.

Kind regards,
Jacki

Read original article

Popular posts from this blog

GNUnet Messenger API: March

Image
Hi again, Last time I had big hopes to make enough progress for a first release. But I think I’m gonna delay that a bit (maybe still this month but we will see) even though I could actually complete the things, I anticipated. However here is finally the long promised video of it running on the Pinephone Pro because there’s still much to show. The back-end of the messenger-gtk application called libgnunetchat now uses the GNUnet Name Store service to manage your chats instead of using a local directory and some configuration files for each chat as before. This means that it is now possible to start the application from any directory and it will properly sync the chats depending on the account/identity selected. Next big feature is that it is possible to generate so called lobbies. Lobbies are empty chat rooms which will be shared in form of a GNS record under a newly generated zone instead of your own identity zone. This has multiple reasons: Technically your own key could
Read more

GNUnet Messenger API: September

Image
Hey, this is the last post under the topic “GNUnet Messenger API”. As mentioned last time I only had a few remaining things to implement in the messenger-cli application. So that is pretty much what I did with some small caveats. The only thing not working as planned is file sharing. Let me explain this: You can already write a file path to your text input and it will send the file. When a file gets received, you can select the message, hit ENTER and download the file. However depending on your GNUnet setup uploading a file might not work. This seems to depend on user access permissions of your selected files. The best work-around I know is to use a single-user installation for GNUnet. But I hope that this can be solved properly, so users don’t have to mess with configurations. More information about this issue can be found here . The second missing part is that you can technically download the file and progress of that will be visualized. However there’s still no opt
Read more

GNUnet Messenger API: December

Image
Hello again, Here is a little update to the GNUnet Messenger API from December. This time I’ve added a short video to show how it works at the moment on a local machine with multiple clients. I’ve now added most dialogs to invite contacts to groups, open custom private groups, open chats directly to your contacts and open public platforms (public chat rooms). Filtering the contacts in those dialogs using a search field will be implemented soon (this is visual only for now). Sending files should work in theory already but I haven’t hooked up visually representing those file messages. But it will likely be very similar to the implementation of it used in cadet-gtk . Chats will now allow renaming for contacts and update each widget using it. Also it is now possible to have persistent chats between closing and opening the application which will be necessary for ease of use. Many bugs got sorted out in libgnunetchat but there’s still a lack of thread safety which needs to be addres
Read more