GNUnet Messenger API: April 2024

Hi there,

another month of development is over. A lot of improvements, fixes and adjustments have been made. I started by fixing remaining issues in libgnunetchat from the last month and published a minor release to solve it for builds. Then I continued tweaking the GTK user interface of the GNUnet Messenger.

It’s now possible to filter messages in chats by tags. There’s also a dialog to add tags to a selected message. In the chat details side bar there will be a list of media previews as well as a list of all shared files from the chat. Additionally I got rid of a memory leak I noticed from the media previews. Now those will even take less memory as footprint during runtime and you can switch between different accounts fluidly without consuming too much space on low-powered devices.

Another quality of life improvement is the added localization. I only did translations from default English to German. But additional translations of any labels in the UI can easily be added now. So anyone interested in contribution might want to contact the GNUnet developers mailing list.

I continued working on custom sharable attributes in libgnunetchat. The idea is to utilize reclaimID from GNUnet to share attributes linked to your identity with selected contacts via tickets. You can send those tickets via the Messenger service to provide access to selected attributes but the tickets stay revokable at any point. So the user stays in control over who accesses what. Changes to those attributes get processed immediately.

While integrating this functionality in the library I noticed an issue with the tickets. It was possible to consume a ticket even if it hasn’t been issued to the consuming party. So I filed a report and a solution to this is currently being worked on. In the mean time I implemented a test case for the attribute functionality as well as sharing and fixed some issues I noticed because of this test case.

Technically there’s even a functional interface in the Messenger GTK application to show, edit and share attributes already. But from testing today it doesn’t seem working properly yet in all cases. So there’s still work to be done getting it right. After that’s solved the next step would be to share image data via those attributes and implement profile pictures like that.

So users of the Messenger application will be able to select which of their contacts receive their profile picture and which don’t. The same goes for attributes like real name, address, phone number, email address and similar. But these are just examples what users might store as attributes. In current state it’s fully customizable but the idea is definitely that this should be a safer and more convenient way to share personal information with others than sending a text message.

Kind regards,
Jacki

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