Monero Monday Missives

December 8th, 2014

Hello, and welcome to our twentieth Monero Monday Missive! We're combining last week's one with this week's, as last week's Missive was pulled down shortly after being put up due to breaking issues in the Windows build of Monero 0.8.8.5 (since resolved). Thank you for your patience!

Major Updates

Monero 0.8.8.6, recommended update, please take note of new download links:

Windows, 64-bit (monero.cc/downloads/win64) - SHA: facbeb2e408cf8b9a46534363eba161dbb047654
OS X, 64-bit (monero.cc/downloads/mac) - SHA: 7069de92083fb7831b063cc152e8f35508ff61bf
Linux, 64-bit (monero.cc/downloads/linux) - SHA: 16f3f55bcfbfae6135cbeda6574f651890a8be64
FreeBSD, 64-bit (monero.cc/downloads/freebsd) - SHA: 9fd0005b697e146a26a0bf9e3cd0c89b978f7fbd

NOTE: When opening your wallet with simplewallet for the first time with this update you will be prompted to choose a language for your mnemonic seed words, and you will be given a new 25 word mnemonic. You will always be able to restore from the old 24 word mnemonic seed, but it is of course recommended that you move to the newer, more robust mnemonic.

1. We are (finally) happy to release Monero 0.8.8.6. We released 0.8.8.5 last week, but due to a breaking Windows bug we pulled the announcement down until we solved the bug on the weekend. The major changes for 0.8.8.5 include: OpenAlias support, per-kb fees, multi-language mnemonics, file-based checkpointing, MoneroPulse DNS checkpointing, a move from MSVC to an msys2 / mingw-w64 build environment for Windows, and brand new build CMake. 0.8.8.6 adds some important fixes to the multi-language mnemonic system.

2. Due to the launch of MyMonero we feel it prudent to add a new section to the Missives, called "External Projects". This is a section to provide updates on other projects that are not an official part of the Monero Project or collectively created by the Monero Core Team, but is related to Monero in some way - thus OpenAlias would not be part of this section, but MyMonero would. If you have an update you would like included in this section, please email [email protected] for inclusion the following Monday, or send any member of the Monero Core Team a message. If this section becomes overly full we may choose to shutter the section, so please keep updates brief and only those that are important. It is not a marketing area, and so every new mining pool launched or minor feature added to a pool will not be eligible for inclusion (although if you've done something cool, let us know;)

3. We're also quite happy to announce the addition of a new feature to Monero: Smart Mining. This is a feature that will evolve over time, but at its most basic it is something that will allow everyone running the client software to support the network in an unobtrusive manner. Smart Mining detects your CPU usage, and if your CPU is idle and you aren't on battery power (for laptops and/or connected UPS devices) it will begin mining. As soon you switch to battery power or your CPU activity picks up it will pause mining until it sees it is safe to start again. You still set your Monero address for Smart Mining, as always, and whilst your chances of solving a block may be relatively small (for now;) it is still an easy way to support the network without needing to purchase expensive equipment. This work is complete (for Linux) and is currently being tweaked to work on our other supported operating systems. Ongoing process can be followed here: https://github.com/oranjuice/bitmonero/tree/smart-mining

External Projects

MyMonero: the various modal windows, such as the login screen, should be displaying correctly across devices now. We are fixing the scroll issues which still plagues these on some devices. Just to make sure everyone is aware after the recent blockchain.info issues: the MyMonero code has unit tests using the Jasmine testing framework for JavaScript, as well as tests for other parts of the backend application. These tests are executed and checked for every commit. We also have had HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) enabled from the beginning, and have various other things enabled for client-side security such as X-Frame-Options set to deny, X-XSS-Protection on, and X-Content-Type-Options set to nosniff.

I2PD: for those not aware, the i2pd project is a new implementation of the i2p protocol in C++, and is the software that Monero will use for its connection to the i2p network. The source code of the project can be found here: https://github.com/PrivacySolutions/i2pd - the regular stream of commits is testament to the ongoing progress being made. The i2pd team will provide regular updates on i2p-specific functionality as it is added and the project grows to a point of maturity.

Dev Diary

Build: tests are now disabled when building the build-release, build-debug, or release-static targets. The default make target (all-release) will include tests, as will all test- targets, obviously.

Account: lots of fixes to multi-lang mnemonics, although UTF-8 on Windows still seems to be a bit shaky.

Core: all 0.8.8.5 and 0.8.8.6 changes have been covered over the past few Missives.

Until next week!