Status update, December 2020 December 15, 2020 on Drew DeVault's blog

Happy holidays! I hope everyone’s having a great time staying at home and not spending any time with your families. It’s time for another summary of the month’s advances in FOSS development. Let’s get to it!

One of my main focuses has been on sourcehut’s API 2.0 planning. This month, the meta.sr.ht and git.sr.ht GraphQL APIs have shipped feature parity with the REST APIs, and the RFC 6749 compatible OAuth 2.0 implementation has shipped. I’ve broken ground on the todo.sr.ht GraphQL API — it’ll be next. Check out the GraphQL docs on man.sr.ht if you want to kick the tires.

I also wrote a little tool this month called mkproof, after brainstorming some ways to allow sourcehut signups over Tor without enabling abuse. The idea is that you can generate a challenge (mkchallenge), give it to a user who generates a proof for that challenge (mkproof), and then verify their proof is correct. Generating the proof is computationally expensive and resistant to highly parallel attacks (e.g. GPUs), and takes tens of minutes of work — making it unpractical for spammers to register accounts in bulk, while still allowing Tor users to register with their anonymity intact.

On the Gemini front, patches from Mark Dain, William Casarin, and Eyal Sawady have improved gmnisrv in several respects — mainly bugfixes — and gmnlm has grown the “<n>|” command, which pipes the Nth link into a shell command. Thanks are due to Alexey Yerin as well, who sent a little bugfix with redirect handling.

The second draft of the BARE specification was submitted to the IETF this month. Will revisit it again in several weeks. John Mulligan has also sent several patches improving go-bare — thanks!

scdoc 1.11.0 was released this month, with only minor bug fixes.

That’s all for now! I’ll see you in a month.

...

The secret project has slowed down a bit as we've started on a new phase of development: writing the specification, and new compiler which implements it from the ground up. Progress on this is good, but won't introduce anything groundbreaking for a while. Stay tuned.

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