[info-GNUnet] GNUnet 0.9.2 released

[Christian Grothoff]

Dear all,


We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.9.2. This release 
brings a major rewrite of the VPN subsystem, resulting in significant 
performance and stability improvements. The release also includes a new 
linear programming... based automatic transport selection mechanism. The 
release fixes various bugs and brings various API extensions and other 
minor improvements. Except for the VPN subsystem, this release is 
protocol-compatible with GNUnet 0.9.1.

About GNUnet
============


GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking. GNUnet's 
primary design goals are to protect the privacy of its users and to 
guard itself against attacks or abuse. At this point, GNUnet offers two 
primary applications on top of the framework:

The file-sharing service allows anonymous censorship-resistant 
file-sharing. Files, searches and search results are encrypted to make 
it hard to control, track or censor users. GNUnet's anonymity protocol 
(gap) is designed to make it difficult to link users to their 
file-sharing activities. Users can also individually trade-off between 
performance and anonymity. Despite providing anonymity, GNUnet's 
excess-based economy rewards contributing users with better performance.

The VPN service allows offering of hidden services within GNUnet (using 
a .gnunet TLD) and can be used to tunnel IPv4 and IPv6 traffic over the 
P2P network. The VPN can also be used for IP protocol translation 
(6-to-4, 4-to-6) and it is possible to tunnel IP traffic over GNUnet 
(6-over-4, 4-over-6).

Other applications are still under development.

Key features of GNUnet include:

* Works on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and W32
* P2P communication over TCP, UDP, HTTP (IPv4 or IPv6) or WLAN
* Communication can be restricted to friends (F2F mode)
* Includes a general-purpose, secure distributed hash table
* NAT traversal using UPnP, ICMP or manual hole-punching (possibly in 
combination with DynDNS)
* Small memory footprint (specifics depend on the configuration)

For developers, GNUnet offers:

* Access to all subsystems via clean C APIs
* Mostly written in C, but extensions possible in other languages
* Multi-process architecture for fault-isolation between components
* Use of event loop and processes instead of threads for ease of development
* Extensive logging and statistics facilities
* Integrated testing library for automatic deployment of large-scale 
experiments with tens of thousands of peers


Noteworthy improvements in 0.9.2
================================

* Major rewrite of the VPN subsystem, resulting in significant 
performance and stability improvements; support for ICMP was improved
* New DHT API allows better monitoring of the DHT's activity and the 
implementation of triggers on virtually any DHT operation
* New file-sharing API for asynchronous scanning of a directory tree for 
publishing
* Many bugfixes (crash on shutdown) in the testing library
* Many bugfixes in transport service and plugins
* Rewritten UDP plugin
* UDP and UNIX domain socket plugins now use select() for sending 
(better flow control)
* New linear programming based automatic transport selection mechanism 
implemented
* Improved MESH incoming tunnels, clients are only notified of an 
incoming tunnel if there is relevant traffic on it
* Important bugfixes in MESH, which no longer causes trouble in loopback 
tunnels



Availability
============


The GNUnet 0.9.2 source code is available from all GNU FTP mirrors. The 
GTK frontends (which includes the gnunet-setup tool) are a separate 
download.

All known releases
    https://gnunet.org/current-downloads
GNUnet on a FTP mirror near you
    http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnunet/gnunet-0.9.2.tar.gz
GNUnet GTK on an FTP mirror near you
    http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnunet/gnunet-gtk-0.9.2.tar.gz
GNUnet on the primary GNU FTP server
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnunet/gnunet-0.9.2.tar.gz
GNUnet GTK on the primary GNU FTP server
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnunet/gnunet-gtk-0.9.2.tar.gz

Note that GNUnet is now started using "gnunet-arm -s"; the old gnunetd 
binary is no more. GNUnet should be stopped using "gnunet-arm -e".

Further Information

GNUnet Homepage
    https://gnunet.org/
GNUnet Forum
    https://gnunet.org/forum
GNUnet Bug tracker
    https://gnunet.org/bugs/
IRC
    irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnunet


Thank you for your attention.

Happy hacking!


Christian Grothoff