I2P Future: Make I2P a GUI Application

[anonymousmaybe]

I know this is not going to happen anytime soon, but its a future feature to better make I2P as an application made by Java or Golang ...etc instead of using the browser.

As the browser is not the best practice for anonymity/privacy to run or modify the router.

[zlatinb]

There are some pros and cons to something like this, depending on how much you want to put into such GUI application:

One option is to put everything in it - embedded browser, irc client, torrent client, jabber, etc. This is not going to work well because the built-in HTML engines that come with Java are poor. So you would need to integrate an engine like Chromium and that's going to be very messy (at least in Java).

Another option is to build just a "control panel"-type application that contains the functionality of the router console and use real browser just for browsing. I'm a fan of this approach and afaik it is what Tor does.

Or do you have something completely different in mind?

[anonymousmaybe]

One option is to put everything in it - embedded browser, irc client, torrent client, jabber, etc. This is not going to work well because the built-in HTML engines that come with Java are poor. So you would need to integrate an engine like Chromium and that's going to be very messy (at least in Java).

yeah thats bad one , and also insecure by design.

Another option is to build just a "control panel"-type application that contains the functionality of the router console and use real browser just for browsing. I'm a fan of this approach and afaik it is what Tor does.

Or do you have something completely different in mind?

Just having the I2Pconsole + anything regarding tunnels (creating , deleting , modifying , router log...etc)= enough.

no services running within i2p application like jetty or susimail or snark.... = simple and secure.

[eyedeekay]

Hey anonymousmaybe, I don't know if this is the way you want to go with it, but I've more-or-less got a re-implementation of i2ptunnel running on the terminal over SAM, sam-forwarder, and intend to have a set of interfaces that can be used with it, I had started a web interface already, but I can switch). It's in Go, so memory-safe, and no need for a JVM. Works awesome in groups of Docker containers(this is how I use it mostly). The same possibility exists for Snark via XD already as well. In general, if we want to switch to out-of-router packages to work with on Whonix, I can help make that happen while we wait for the difficulties of sorting out the packages and applications to be resolved. We just need to talk to SAM, at the inter-VM level it's basically the same process that goes on in https://github.com/Whonix/anon-ws-disable-stacked-tor. I've kind of got a lot of time in it already. If Debian packaging is at issue, then I can make that more of a priority now that I'm sure that UDP is functioning and more importantly, I have meaningful tests for most of it's features. Turns out it's actually fairly easy to build an alternative interface for i2p once you know how to configure it programmatically via one of the APIs.

P.S. Sorry I'm literally never on IRC or here, asynchronous/reddit has been much easier for me due to a complicated set of work schedules. I am gradually making it less complicated.

[anonymousmaybe]

Thats brilliant , yeah why not we need to test that and see how it goes.