I thought it would be cool to start a weekly thread for people to post how they’re helping out the project. I think it could be helpful so we can all see how things are moving along on the community side, get ideas of what we/you can be doing that you haven’t thought of, bounce contribution ideas, or boast if that is your calling.
So this week I started leaning rust. I am hobby programmer but mostly in php, so system languages are a relatively new topic for me. I’ve learned enough that I can now understand most of what’s happening in the code, even if I don’t dare contribute yet. What I’m learning about rust makes me fully understand why they would move from c++ (basic knowledge from school) to rust. I will do my best to keep learning more and hopefully be at the point where I can start following jira and offering pull requests - though that may be a bit, that’s the goal.
I also talked to an ex-nsa analyst about the project. To my surprise he hadn’t heard of it. It was nice to talk to someone with a good knowledge base of the deeper topics that make up safe. His concern was in the deduplication and non-salting of data. I explained (please correct me if I’m wrong here) that the data in self encrypted to achieve deduplication and a pointer to that data is encrypted with your own private key along with information saying you have the right to access it. Because everyone has their own data map no one can tell who else also has access to that data without having their (other people with access) private key as well. So there is no way to amass a list of all people who have access without having everyone’s private key. Correct? Obviously this is high level of what is happening. (funny that talking about private keys and pointers is “high level”, that shows the depth of this project)
So, how did you contribute this week? Please share.
First off, well done really glad to have you poking around please keep up with this. It’s really important.
The data chunks are independent of ownership and belong to the network. It has no idea who put them there but that they are valid. Anyone can ask for them as they mean nothing, but searching is not allowed (or won’t be to be exact). So if you have the datamap you have the exact hashes to point to the chunks you want.
If they were ‘salted’ they would be unique to an individual thereby creating a link of some kind. In this way they are just there
This gets very very deep and very hard very fast so diving in is probably best done by a load of searching of the forums and my old reddit posts where I went days at a time explaining it. Basically though it’s just stuff the attack is trying to tie the stuff to a person and that’s where the battle ground is in the safety part here. It becomes like can you tell who downloaded what and when. Then kicks in encryption and real p2p to make all that much harder than watching a toorent site.
I’ve continued to work on the Crossroads of Project SAFE blog and podcast, with a couple podcasts in progress and at one article awaiting appropriate time to release.
I’m learning a lot, as I go, about everything it takes make this stuff happen. It’s fun, if challenging!
Would love any feedback on whether anyone finds the first podcast useful in introducing interested people to the SAFE Network.
Because of the SAFE project I have started looking deeper into JavaScript. Contrary to what I previously believed it turns out that JavaScript is a powerful language and also the performance nowadays is impressive. My prediction is that JavaScript will dominate for SAFE apps since it’s so widely used and implemented plus makes the applications completely independent of operating system, hardware etc, without any need for installations or upgrades and so on.
And even if I’m wrong about JavaScript becoming popular for SAFE apps, I can use the knowledge for ordinary web apps. So I’m not dependent on the SAFE project.
Good initiative @Wes … though I don’t think I’ll want to update every week, we’ll see! Maybe monthly we have a who’s doing what topic… anyway
Recently I’ve been moderating (aka reading every post on) this forum, hanging with the guys on slack, watching the repos, learning rust, helping the incredibly productive @hillbicks with the wiki (well, I hope it helped ), trying not to annoy the team too much (except for @nicklambert, sorry Nick ) and trying to figure out a simple App to test my skills and try getting going on testnet 3 when it’s up.
On the last point I’m looking for an open source project that I can tweak so it uses some feature of SAFE. Not chosen yet, so suggestions welcome. Ideally: cross platform, good fit with SAFE, easy (!), written in Rust (I wish… ok, C/C++ or Python) and mildly useful. Currently looking at file managers, and considering Midnight Commander.
This week I continued to explain MaidSafe to as many people as I possibly can, and helped teach at least 6 people everything I knew about the project at our SF Safe Pod Meetup
This week I helped by…erm….gracing the Forum with my presence, freely spreading my wisdom and educating the misguided. Not only do I in my munificence provide this community service gratis, but in a similar philanthropic manner, I also provide an opportunity for the community to bask in the radiance of my rightness in all matters at the same time.
Further weekly updates to come……
My first thought would be something that uses SAFE’s self-encryption to secure the files which people already have on existing cloud services. Say a mod of cryptsync or something similar.
A fun thing to do would be to integrate multiple cloud services, and scatter the chunks among them, so that each file has chunks on dropbox, box, google drive, skydrive etc. This keeps any one cloud provider from having access to them.
Not only that, but that would be a great way to use all the different available free services as one “drive”. So Google gives you 5 gig, Dropbox gives you 5 gig etc (I’m making up numbers, I don’t know what they offer) so now you have a 10gig encrypted drive with pieces on both so no full files on either. Would be a fun project.
Edit: might be a way to introduce people to the very basic use case of safe. “look what it can do, but the real thing can do it even better”
Not everyone would feel a need to contribute every week. When you do something interesting /noteworthy /boast worthy just let the community know. I know for me it will be a drive to do something to contribute.
Also, I think it will be nice for the core guys to see that the community, even if not in code, is doing their part as well. It’s a group effort, they give us weekly updates, seems the right thing to do would be to give them one too.
Love to. I’ll let you know when I’ve got something. You are also welcome to cross-post the Net Neutrality article if you think appropriate. Have fun in Vegas.
), trying not to annoy the team too much (except for 
