MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

The MuWire file sharing application
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Dr.Doom
Posts: 17
Joined: 19 Jul 2018 17:07

MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by Dr.Doom »

As is already known, MuWire is no longer being further developed and maintained according to the current status. MuWire is therefore no longer usable.
Are there alternatives or are alternatives to MuWire planned?

Greetings
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FreefallHeavens
Posts: 11
Joined: 18 Mar 2023 12:17

Re: MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by FreefallHeavens »

Ideally MuWire would be further maintained by others as it is quite matured and good at this point, though anyone taking it up would have to get familiar with all of its code. At minimum it would be nice if someone continued to release updates that integrate the latest version of I2P. Somebody needs to also run at least one tracker as currently there are none left and anyone new joining the network needs to add to friends at least one existing user for the "gossip" to begin node discovery otherwise you will never find any other users.
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Robin
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Joined: 04 Jul 2023 13:03

Re: MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by Robin »

RetroShare has somewhat similar functionality to MuWire, and it works with I2P according to the instructions.
acud
Posts: 2
Joined: 21 Aug 2022 18:22

Re: MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by acud »

why did zab chose to step away? what is this ~"wrong direction" i2p is taking? same with zzz. is it technical? what is the disagreement about?
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raccoondad
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Joined: 15 Mar 2023 21:02

Re: MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by raccoondad »

acud wrote: 24 Jul 2023 14:38 why did zab chose to step away? what is this ~"wrong direction" i2p is taking? same with zzz. is it technical? what is the disagreement about?
Zab had some mental problems and I recall he left around when DeSnake launched Dread (a Reddit clone that was mainly for discussing the illegal drug trade on darknet markets) on I2P. It flooded r/I2P and ZZZs forums with drug related posts, which I think effected Zab in some way. Was a while ago so my memory is fuzzy and theres no archives of ZZZs forum sadly.

We didn't hear much from him until he kinda just snapped and broke down due to some drama related to some of the language used on geti2p.net, which referenced sexual/ethnic/racial minority groups in a way that some people were complaining made I2P have an 'official stance' on those subjects. He made a vague threat directly to ZZZ publicly on his forum, then the entire forum was shut down overnight alongside stats.

It's not clear if this was the entire reason why, but it was apart of it. It basically happened overnight and by the end of the week IDK made an official response when deploying the next update to I2P that confirmed ZZZ had left and that he would be the new lead dev. Then ZZZ made a message explaining he was safe on this site (you can probably pull it up if you look at his last post here)
'Since The Heart Feels Pain So Easily Some Believe Life Is Pain'
raccoondad@i2pmail.org
acud
Posts: 2
Joined: 21 Aug 2022 18:22

Re: MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by acud »

thank you for your answer.

this is the mentioned post, I guess: http://i2pforum.i2p/viewtopic.php?t=114 ... 133e88cff4
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eepman
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Joined: 17 Sep 2023 14:10

Re: MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by eepman »

>he left around when DeSnake launched Dread

Afaik, it was Paris, who launched Dread, not DeSnake. DeSnake was a founder of some big Darknet Marketplace, I guess it was Whitehouse Market or something.

>which referenced sexual/ethnic/racial minority groups in a way that some people were complaining made I2P have an 'official stance' on those subjects.

The specific paragraph can be seen here: http://i2p-projekt.i2p/en/contact ---scroll all the way down. It reads:
Inclusion

I2P welcomes all kinds of people, as long as they are friendly and helpful to each other.
We disgrace hate, anger, racism, and bad speaking towards anyone.
We do support LBGT, suppressed minorites and other people, wether they need help in kind of our I2P software or not.
We work together to build a free world without hate, racism and violence.
The I2P router software was created in this spirit and should be used to help repressed people to regain their freedom of speech, while not suppressing others.
Back then, some users of zzz.i2p were of the position that i2p should be a neutral tool. It should not mention by name any side of the political spectrum, for the sole reason that it makes i2p picking sides in the western political discourse. Which brings up the question: "Is official i2p team going to take action against some kind of speech that they deem unacceptable on the i2p network, as per the political posturing they imply above?", or, "is the i2p team going to shape their tool as to make it more difficult for the dissemination of some ideas that they do not like?"

The thing most of the people don't understand is freedom of speech also includes what some people might call "hate speech." By putting above appendage to the official i2p contact page, i2p picks "which speech" it condones, officially. Instead of doing it, the paragraph should just mention, "I2P is a freedom tool that gives radical free speech to the ones who are willing to speak it and who are willing to hear it." ---That's it. No mention of "LGBT", no mention of "hate speech," etc. etc. These words are political terms that only signal certain political attitudes to the reader and excludes others. These terms are fake, and unnecessary.
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FreefallHeavens
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Joined: 18 Mar 2023 12:17

Re: MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by FreefallHeavens »

Alright so it's been a while, I figured I might as well say this:

I have a build of MuWire's 2nd last commit with the libs exposed. There is a "muwirelibs" folder where all the libraries are visible as .jar archives and by overwriting the following:

i2p-1.9.0.jar
mstreaming-1.9.0.jar
router-1.9.0.jar
streaming-1.9.0.jar

with the ones from I2P's "lib" folder(libraries must be renamed and appended "-1.9.0" to the name), it is possible to keep MuWire running on the latest version of I2P. In addition the "certificates" and "geoip" folders from I2P should also override the ones in the MuWire folder.

The package is portable and intended for Windows x64. It is also portable as it redirects the profile folder to an internal one, meaning it's possible to instantiate multiple nodes on the same user profile with minimal hassle by just putting multiple copies in different folders.

If anyone is interested, I am willing to put up a download for it.

It is mandatory at this point in the application's development that one or more trusted hosts are added to Contacts since the developer no longer hosts trackers. Automatic updates should also be disabled since not only has zlatin taken the private key with him but this build is run as a java application through runtime instead of being a standalone .exe(app is launched via a vbs script and JRE is included in the package, don't worry).

The big reason I've been hesitating bringing this up is because I am of course a nobody and very much trying to keep it that way, and both security and anonimity are at big risk by running random binaries somebody puts up online. When zlatin imploded, a fake version was already making quick rounds on torrents. I want to gauge the overall interest of people in this and hear opinions before I proceed.

I don't know how to make these packages myself. This was apparently compiled by git's pipeline and the artifacts are long gone. With a bit of public involvement it would at least be possible to create an automated script that builds these so people can automatically pull and make their own builds without having to rely on trusting me, and then just add the extra scripts that make it all work which are themselves small and easy to audit.

The application is quite very usable at this point and distribution and continued I2P node updates are all that's missing. Sure it won't get any meaningful development until someone adopts it but it would at least be staying up to date with I2P node versions.
arowana
Posts: 29
Joined: 05 Sep 2018 20:55

Re: MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by arowana »

I think this is a good idea and would run a bootstrap node to help, provided it can be run from within i2p as I don't want to expose myself.
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FreefallHeavens
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Joined: 18 Mar 2023 12:17

Re: MuWire has died, development has stopped, are there any alternatives?

Post by FreefallHeavens »

In the mean time I had already gone ahead and uploaded a package which I announced to multiple other places.

The package is available to download on my eepsite - same as my username, just add .i2p - it is directly on the main page as a .torrent download link.

When you say "run from within I2P", what are you referring to?

There used to be a MuWire applet that ran under the I2P node, the same way as I2PSnark but it was actually discontinued by zab some time even before he decided to stop the project.

If you mean from within an isolated machine, be my guest and set up a VM to test this with.

If that machine has to be not Windows, things are out of my competence as I have no experience with that.

For some reason MuWire doesn't work with a dedicated node. It only ever starts to connect and work with the builtin one. I tried to connect to my localhost port 7657 but it won't do anything. It only runs with its internal node.

The contents of the package have evolved since I first announced my intention: http://retrobbs.i2p/rocksolid/article-f ... shared.i2p

This is a big read with some technical aspects included but also builtin I2P node updates have been automated and no longer rely on a local install of I2P Java. The updater script fetches I2P node updates from I2P's official clearnet site via curl.exe so if your machine is isolated strictly within I2P, it will not work. On the other hand you could just read the .bat instructions to figure out what files you need to put where yourself if you wanna update the node manually.

Also discussed in that posting is what exactly is easy to audit and what not. The short of it is that most of the package save for a few tens of .jar files in a folder are entirely reproducible by you the user, if you just download the JRE and I2P node files by yourself. The scripts are plaintext and can be read, and in case you are satisfied with the update script's safety you can even modify the txt file in the startup folder to fake the I2P node version and force the script to redownload the latest official files just for you.

I've tried building MuWire from zab's git but it only produces a handful of jar files. These can be placed in the muwirelibs folder over the ones included in the archive, as long as their names are preserved. I do not know about the rest of the files, they appear to be external libraries and I am not knowledgeable enough to know where you get them.

Ideally the entire package could be automated to just be a series of downloads and git pulls + build that recreate the entire package out of nothing but the download scripts themselves and the extra scripts and files sprinkled on top, which are all human-readable and easy to audit. I'm sure JRE download can be automated. But until I find a way to automate assembling the whole rest of the package, this is the maximum level of trust that I'm able to provide.
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