Did anyone see the full moon this week? Hopefully, amidst all of the stress and uncertainty, you found a moment to delight in the small joys of spring.
Here are the updates from this week:
- We’ve updated the Wallets page on z.cash. Check it out and let us know what you think.
- We welcomed two new team members this week: Kris and Ying Tong. We’re thrilled to have them on board!
- Zcash Foundation is part of the TCN Coalition, a global coalition for privacy-first digital contact tracing protocols to fight COVID-19. ZF’s @hdevalence compared two contact tracing protocols. Coincenter published a post on the topic.
- More ZFoundation good news, Walking Onions research was accepted at USENIX Security 2020. Congrats ckomlo and the whole team! ZF grantee mitchellpkt also shared some of his preliminary research this week.
- Community Shout Outs – This section celebrates the contributions to Zcash made by folks outside of ECC and Foundation. Ping me if you have suggestions for next week.
- Shout out to afterconnery for your work automating the z2z newsletter.
- Shout out to garethtdavies for updating your analysis on shielded transactions.
- Shout out to ZcashRU for sharing Zcash updates and translating them to Russian. Спасибо!
DevInfra Team
- Made progress on Tekton: Github check status integration.
- Starting documentation for new/updated dev-infra tools.
- Download server ready to cutover.
Core Team
- NU3 implementation complete and FlyClient support very nearly merged!
- Pulled in several good Community PRs from oxarbitrage (2) and ca333 (1).
- Updated Zcashd version and release scheme (Version.Release.Modification).
- Version number bumps when mainnet activation height set for specific NU, Release number bumps for each release within NU, and mod bumps for each hotfix within a release (ex: Version 3.1.1 – NU3, release 1, hotfix 1).
Security Team
- We’ve got graphs to show edge and request bytes per IP, used that to inform website protection strategies.
- Turned on Cloudflare security – managed-rule WAF for wordpress, rate limits.
- Three accidental cutoffs were reported, fixed them both quickly and re-tuned the rules.
- There were 5-7 malicious cut-offs, including some bandwidth offenders.
- Remaining vigilant against attacks (monitoring still working).
Wallet Team
- Block file cache system for lightwalletd has been merged to master.
- Released 0.4.0 iOS SDK with enhanced networking capabilities.
This week in privacy, NYT editorial board published an OpEd in defense of privacy. Jillian York at the EFF writes about the right to anonymity. Brian Armstrong shares his views on financial privacy and Zcash gets a mention. Twitter changes its data sharing terms and some people are not happy about that. That’s it for now. Have a great weekend y’all!
