Interpeer Project

#Layer 8 Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 were technical in nature, examining communications networks.

There are enough updates to last year’s “In Search of Foundational FLOSS Freedom(s)” to make a blog category of its own, or almost so.

2024 was a relatively quiet year for the Interpeer Project, so it’s only right to go out with a bang: Interpeer gUG joined the Datacom Industry Association as a founding member in December!

#Recap Part 1 focused on Baran’s terminology on this topic.

On (De-)Centralized Communications: Part 1 discussed Baran’s terminology of “centralized”, “decentralized” and “distributed” networks and how it relates to how the Internet and the networks that it’s composed of are typically arranged.

#Introduction At IETF121 in Dublin earlier this year, I was surprised to see my name appear on a number of slides, starting with the Discussion of Next Steps presentation Dirk and Lixia gave.

Yes, we’re still talking about how Vessel + Wyrd implement something kind of like a Merkle Clock, and yet also arguably better.

#Recap We compared Merkle DAGs to Vessel’s DAG, to find that although they are constructed very differently, they offer very much the same guarantees: both provide logical ordering, and this ordering is deterministic across replicas.

It turns out that this article has been sitting mostly finished in my drafts for months now.

There’s a new interview up on Safety Detectives where I get to discuss the origins, motivation and direction of the Interpeer Project as a whole.

Open letter initially published in French by the petites singularités association, translation by OW2 – with French original version below.

A few days ago, a vulnerability in xz-utils named CVE-2024-3094 was discovered, and since then the open source community as well as security pundits fall over themselves and each other to provide the best analysis of this incident.

Yesterday, we explored the differences between a Merkle DAG and vessel’s DAG.

One of the recurring conversations I’m having is on whether vessel is a Merkle DAG or Merkle Tree/Trie, and every time I have to start over with explaining that it is not.

With 2023 over, and some time between now and the last update, it’s perhaps a good moment to reflect on what happened in 2023 and where the project is right now.

I was thrilled to be on stage with the Tor Project[^cite-1] for the 2023 edition of EmpoderaLIVE.

The recent issues with Google’s WEI proposal have provided for a few more views of this blog and website, which makes it worth diving into our work a little again.

Previously, I wrote about how to use Valgrind for debugging memory issues – and today, I’d like to go into how to use the tool for profiling.

A few days ago, I made a social media post about Google vs. the Open Web.

A recent thread on social media reminded me that some of the development tools I take for granted are not widely known.

Figure: “Bucket & spade” by Dale Gillard is licensed under CC BY 2.0 The other day, I was asked by a friend what it is I’m doing with this project.

This year, we were presenting at the Linux Days in Chemnitz.

Just over a week ago, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights hosted a consultation on human rights in technical standard-setting processes, which I managed to attend the first half of.

A few days ago, I found myself attending a pitch by the Consumer Reports Digital Lab for their Data Rights Protocol[^cite-1].

Unfortunately, in 2023 there were no Interpeer related talks at FOSDEM – after a few years of virtual conference, FOSDEM had a large number of talk submissions to deal with, and ours did not make the cut.

Yesterday, I found myself accidentally live-blogging some thoughts on the EU Open Source Policy Summit 2023 event organized by OpenForum Europe.

#Happy New Year 2023!

IETF115 in London was our first change to present some of Interpeer’s work to the IETF community – or, more precisely, to it’s sister organization, the Internet Research Task Force.

Today, at 14:00, I went to the notary to sign the paperwork for incorporating a non-profit organization for the Interpeer Project.

There is an ongoing discussion on human rights on the Internet on the IRTF HRPC mailing list that I want to express an opinion on.

I was recently reminded of the fact that people use the term “peer-to-peer” to mean a variety of different things.

February is FOSDEM month.

Previously, I’ve been writing about how to perform task delegation with a distributed authorization scheme.

In my previous post, I was discussing how distributed authorization might be facilitated.

Whenever I don’t write much here, I feel like I’m not producing anything of value.

There’s something rotten in the state of FOSS, and it’s not the software.

In previous posts, I spent some time describing a protocol design for negotiating independent channels over a shared connection of sorts.

Since I occasionally find people focused on the same kind of problem that I’m trying to tackle with this project, and I have a terrible tendency to share my thoughts informally, I figured it would be a good idea to post a kind of roadmap for the project.

A few days ago, I managed to complete another milestone for the NGI0 grant agreement.

In my last post, I wrote about how REST architectural principles feed into the problem with surveillance capitalism that the world faces today.

Just as my previous FOSDEM talk, my presentation at FOSSASIA was titled “Designing a Human Centric Next Generation Internet”.

Remember the early 90’s and Salt-n-Pepa?

OK, so in the last post, I was getting into some channel capability flags, and how they impact handling of lost packets.

In February, I was able to give a talk at FOSDEM, Europe’s premier conference on free and open source software.

It seems as if I start every piece here with an apology for taking so long to continue writing.

As is usual these days, I don’t write here half as much as I would like to.

Since I took such a long break before my last post, I figured I should forge ahead and write them while I can.

After a short hiatus imposed by a broken elbow, it’s high time for an update again.

Following my last post in which I worked through various definitions of reliability in networking, it’s time in this post to look at the main protocol contenders, and examine how they measure up to those definitions.

In the past months, I have not written much.