As I posted yesterday, we released PATHspider 1.0.0. What I didn’t talk about in that post was an event that occured only a few hours before the release. Everything was going fine, proofreading of the documentation was in progress, a quick git push with the documentation updates and… CI FAILED!?! Our CI doesn’t build the documentation, only tests the core code. I’m planning to release real soon and something has broken.
In today’s Internet we see an increasing deployment of middleboxes. While middleboxes provide in-network functionality that is necessary to keep networks manageable and economically viable, any packet mangling — whether essential for the needed functionality or accidental as an unwanted side effect — makes it more and more difficult to deploy new protocols or extensions of existing protocols. For the evolution of the protocol stack, it is important to know which network impairments exist and potentially need to be worked around.
Once a month I am involved in running an informal session, loosely affiliated with Open Rights Group and FSFE, called Cryptonoise. Cryptonoise explores methods for protecting your digital rights, with a leaning towards focusing on privacy, and provides a venue for like minded people to meet up and discuss the state of the digital landscape and those that may try to infringe on the rights of digital citizens. We’ve all made it easy for large enterprises and governments to collect masses of data about our online activities because we perform most of those activities in the same place.