Hacker News: grothoff

New comment by grothoff in "Any Open Source projects in need of documentation writer?"

grothoff — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:54:21 +0000

https://taler.net/ would be happy to get help.

New comment by grothoff in "Swiss voters back e-ID and abolish rental tax"

grothoff — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:24:36 +0000

It's only partially open source. Some server-side code remains proprietary, and the client-side will depend on proprietary code of Google and Apple and they do not plan to support platforms that are actually Free Software. The law overall is badly written. For example, articles 12 and 26 effectively say that "The source is shared with public, except if it is proprietary or insecure." Or take Article 4: "The government may operate systems that protect the privacy of the identity subjects."

New comment by grothoff in "Swiss voters back e-ID and abolish rental tax"

grothoff — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:13:13 +0000

Not quite. If you reside in Switzerland, you can own rental homes. Just foreign non-residents cannot buy.

New comment by grothoff in "Ask HN: What open source projects need help?"

grothoff — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 18:35:10 +0000

We do need to expire cryptographic keys eventually, there is no sane alternative to this. Now, note that "regularly online" here could mean once every X years depending on how the system is configured.

New comment by grothoff in "Ask HN: What open source projects need help?"

grothoff — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 18:20:30 +0000

GNU Taler (https://taler.net/); privacy-preserving payment system. Written in C/Java/TypeScript/Kotlin/Rust/Postgresql/etc.; needs include coding (especially integration into other applications) documentation (review, proof-reading), testing (incl. benchmark, UX), packaging, translation (Weblate/gettext); any help welcome ;-).

New comment by grothoff in "R5N - Obfuscated mesh routing on hostile networks."

grothoff — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 22:12:39 +0000

On this Internet if you don't trust third parties to route all of your traffic through and peers are behind NAT or CGNATs. Or imagine a mixed network with some peers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network (s), possibly with some connected to the Internet. The key assumption we have (for the random walk to work) is that it must be a small-world network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network) and network topologies surprisingly often are.

New comment by grothoff in "R5N - Obfuscated mesh routing on hostile networks."

grothoff — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 22:06:44 +0000

Actually, there are two: One in C at https://git.gnunet.org/gnunet.git/tree/src/service/dht And one in Go at https://git.gnunet.org/gnunet-go.git/

New comment by grothoff in "The Internet Is Broken: Idealistic Ideas for Building a GNU Network [pdf] (2014)"

grothoff — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 19:39:02 +0000

I'm personally primarily busy with GNU Taler, but still in touch with the more active developers. Major work is still happening on the transport subsystem with the goal of improving NAT traversal. Some work is being done to make the code run on Android. A messenger application (incl. text and voice) works --- if your network/NAT are happy, which most of the time they are not (see my first point). There is also fun cryptographic work happening on Reclaim:ID (SSI), and improvements to the GNU Name System (registrar implementation, automatic scalable import of large DNS zones). Plus some work on automatically testing the system using Linux network namespaces. But yes, quite regular breaking changes and still too frequent breakage on the transport layer means that the active network is tiny. OTOH, until NAT traversal reliably works (incl. our self-imposed restriction to not simply assume that Google runs a TURN server/ICE environment to relay our for us), GNUnet is really only suitable for developers anyway. So normal users sadly still cannot use it. But, development is still quite active.

New comment by grothoff in "R5N - Obfuscated mesh routing on hostile networks."

grothoff — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 19:28:51 +0000

Yes, the random walk relates to the "NAT problem". Basically, due to NAT, peers may not succeed when trying to connect to arbitrary other peers (especially if you assume no TURN servers or other infrastructure to facilitate). The same situation may also arise in mobile ad-hoc networks, where your wireless signals simply don't get everywhere. As a result, the usual greedy routing will get stuck in a local minimal. By prefixing the greedy routing with a random walk, you basically randomize the starting position, and then end up at a random local minima. Replicate at enough local minima (O(sqrt(n)) and do enough (O(sqrt(n)) lookups and the birthday paradox will make it increasingly likely for you to succeed. Without the random walk, both the putter and the getter would greedily route always to their local minimum, and if they differ, never find each other's data.

New comment by grothoff in "The Internet Is Broken: Idealistic Ideas for Building a GNU Network [pdf] (2014)"

grothoff — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 06:14:31 +0000

We've been mostly working on GNU Taler (https://taler.net/), the GNU Name System (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9498.html) and GNU Anastasis (https://anastasis.lu/). They all relate.

New comment by grothoff in "FOSS funding vanishes from EU's 2025 Horizon program plans"

grothoff — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 06:48:11 +0000

NGI funded us to work on the GNU Name System (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9498.html), that includes the Go implementation, updates to the C implementation, and the specification. Plus NGI funds work on https://taler.net/. Another example for a project they funded is https://cryptpad.fr/. https://nlnet.nl/project/ has an extensive list. If you actually care about privacy on the Internet and FLOSS, I'd be surprised if you did not find some project there that you know or use.

If you are working on improving privacy on the Internet with FLOSS, you can still apply for funding at https://nlnet.nl/propose.

Patrick Breyer: "The Digital Euro is a problem and not the solution"

grothoff — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 19:36:08 +0000

Article URL: https://taler.net/en/news/2024-14.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970814

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by grothoff in "EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone"

grothoff — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 07:31:13 +0000

Indeed, I just wanted to point out that the "game changing" desire of entropyie to fully automate payments can still be done with GNU Taler. So you are right that the scammer in the default deployment won't succeed, but additionally entropyie could still totally get what entropyie wants as a feature on their own system (and conceivably make this reasonably secure, too).

New comment by grothoff in "EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone"

grothoff — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 22:10:50 +0000

Not quite. GNU Taler's reference implementation requires explicit user consent for payment. But as GNU Taler is Free Software, you are free to modify the code on your system (and share your with others) to not require an explicit confirmation if you prefer that. Or even better, to add an option to do that on some "trusted" sites which you make configurable for each user via settings. I don't know if the risk is worth the UX improvement, but a key contribution of GNU Taler is that it is a Free Software payment system where you actually have the full four freedoms. Use them!

New comment by grothoff in "RFC 9498 on the GNU Name System"

grothoff — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 12:13:39 +0000

Eh, you realize that this very work on the GNU Name System prompted IETF to create the ".alt" zone for this purpose already, minus the $200k fee? Registration is open at https://gana.gnunet.org/dot-alt/dot_alt.html

New comment by grothoff in "Seriously, Don't Sign a CLA"

grothoff — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 19:45:06 +0000

You are wrong on many details here. First of all, GNU isn't even a legal entity. The only legal entity is the FSF. Second, only some GNU packages have a copyright assignment to the FSF, not all. Some packages use a DCO, and some have way more creative solutions (see https://www.gnunet.org/static/pdf/copyright.pdf for example). Finally, not all GNU packages are necessarily GPL-x-or-later. Yes, that's generally a good default (and sometimes AGPL-or-later or LGPL-or-later are good, too), but not a strict rule.

New comment by grothoff in "The EU is getting ready to pilot a Central Bank Digital Currency by 2028"

grothoff — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 18:34:41 +0000

They were clearly told what can be done (like: https://www.suerf.org/docx/f_8ec57b4b3e0f08f05b4793beef0bcd6...) and what cannot be done (like: https://taler.net/papers/euro-bearer-online-2021.pdf) but for politics the technological reality doesn't matter so much, as the decision makers don't care to actually understand the technology.

New comment by grothoff in "Taler Systems SA is looking for investors for development of GNU Taler"

grothoff — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 22:36:00 +0000

Short version: see RedHat. Long version: contact us.

New comment by grothoff in "Taler Systems SA is looking for investors for development of GNU Taler"

grothoff — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 22:34:05 +0000

Eh, we never called it decentralized. And you are right, it absolutely is not. We can disagree about whether allowing the government to see your income is ethical or not. However, we have consistently stated the facts (not decentralized, income visible, expenses non-traceable).

I appreciate your concern that income transparency enables (some) surveillance. However, are you willing to acknowledge that without it, you will have significantly more criminal activity in the system and will never be legal in most jurisdictions? And that this would force most people to effectively use account-based systems without any privacy? (Or staying with physical cash, which we also advocate for, btw.).

New comment by grothoff in "GNU Taler: An anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography"

grothoff — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 21:28:42 +0000

We have a mailinglist (taler@gnu.org), and my personal e-mail is also not difficult to find out. We can always use help. Still looking for an iOS developer, for example.