Help Create A Chat Control Resistant Turnkey Chatmail/Deltachat Relay Stack - Rootless Podman Compose, OpenSUSE BCI, Hardened, & SELinux by 3nd5h1771fy

Description

The Mission: Decentralized & Sovereign Messaging

FYI: If you have never heard of "Chatmail", you can visit their site here, but simply put it can be thought of as the underlying protocol/platform decentralized messengers like DeltaChat use for their communications. Do not confuse it with the honeypot looking non-opensource paid for prodect with better seo that directs you to chatmailsecure(dot)com

In an era of increasing centralized surveillance by unaccountable bad actors (aka BigTech), "Chat Control," and the erosion of digital privacy, the need for sovereign communication infrastructure is critical. Chatmail is a pioneering initiative that bridges the gap between classic email and modern instant messaging, offering metadata-minimized, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) communication that is interoperable and open.

However, unless you are a seasoned sysadmin, the current recommended deployment method of a Chatmail relay is rigid, fragile, difficult to properly secure, and effectively takes over the entire host the "relay" is deployed on.

Why This Matters

A simple, host agnostic, reproducible deployment lowers the entry cost for anyone wanting to run a privacy‑preserving, decentralized messaging relay. In an era of perpetually resurrected chat‑control legislation threats, EU digital‑sovereignty drives, and many dangers of using big‑tech messaging platforms (Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Instagram, SMS, Google Messages, etc...) for any type of communication, providing an easy‑to‑use alternative empowers:

• Censorship resistance - No single entity controls the relay; operators can spin up new nodes quickly.
  
• Surveillance mitigation - End‑to‑end OpenPGP encryption ensures relay operators never see plaintext.
  
• Digital sovereignty - Communities can host their own infrastructure under local jurisdiction, aligning with national data‑policy goals.
  

By turning the Chatmail relay into a plug‑and‑play container stack, we enable broader adoption, foster a resilient messaging fabric, and give developers, activists, and hobbyists a concrete tool to defend privacy online.

Goals

As I indicated earlier, this project aims to drastically simplify the deployment of Chatmail relay. By converting this architecture into a portable, containerized stack using Podman and OpenSUSE base container images, we can allow anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving communications node in minutes.

Our goal for Hack Week: package every component into containers built on openSUSE/MicroOS base images, initially orchestrated with a single container-compose.yml (podman-compose compatible). The stack will:

• Run on any host that supports Podman (including optimizations and enhancements for SELinux‑enabled systems).
  
• Allow network decoupling by refactoring configurations to move from file-system constrained Unix sockets to internal TCP networking, allowing containers achieve stricter isolation.
• Utilize Enhanced Security with SELinux by using purpose built utilities such as udica we can quickly generate custom SELinux policies for the container stack, ensuring strict confinement superior to standard/typical Docker deployments.
• Allow the use of bind or remote mounted volumes for shared data (/var/vmail, DKIM keys, TLS certs, etc.).
  
• Replace the local DNS server requirement with a remote DNS‑provider API for DKIM/TXT record publishing.
  

By delivering a turnkey, host agnostic, reproducible deployment, we lower the barrier for individuals and small communities to launch their own chatmail relays, fostering a decentralized, censorship‑resistant messaging ecosystem that can serve DeltaChat users and/or future services adopting this protocol

Resources

• The links included above
• https://chatmail.at/doc/relay/
• https://delta.chat/en/help
• Project repo -> https://codeberg.org/EndShittification/containerized-chatmail-relay

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Collection and organisation of information about Bulgarian schools by iivanov

Description

To achieve this it will be necessary:

• Collect/download raw data from various government and non-governmental organizations
• Clean up raw data and organise it in some kind database.
• Create tool to make queries easy.
• Or perhaps dump all data into AI and ask questions in natural language.

Goals

By selecting particular school information like this will be provided:

• School scores on national exams.
• School scores from the external evaluations exams.
• School town, municipality and region.
• Employment rate in a town or municipality.
• Average health of the population in the region.

Resources

Some of these are available only in bulgarian.

• https://danybon.com/klasazia
• https://nvoresults.com/index.html
• https://ri.mon.bg/active-institutions
• https://www.nsi.bg/nrnm/ekatte/archive

Results

• Information about all Bulgarian schools with their scores during recent years cleaned and organised into SQL tables
• Information about all Bulgarian villages, cities, municipalities and districts cleaned and organised into SQL tables
• Information about all Bulgarian villages and cities census since beginning of this century cleaned and organised into SQL tables.
• Information about all Bulgarian municipalities about religion, ethnicity cleaned and organised into SQL tables.
• Data successfully loaded to locally running Ollama with help to Vanna.AI
• Seems to be usable.

TODO

• Add more statistical information about municipalities and ....

Code and data

• Github

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Improve/rework household chore tracker `chorazon` by gniebler

Description

I wrote a household chore tracker named chorazon, which is meant to be deployed as a web application in the household's local network.

It features the ability to set up different (so far only weekly) schedules per task and per person, where tasks may span several days.

There are "tokens", which can be collected by users. Tasks can (and usually will) have rewards configured where they yield a certain amount of tokens. The idea is that they can later be redeemed for (surprise) gifts, but this is not implemented yet. (So right now one needs to edit the DB manually to subtract tokens when they're redeemed.)

Days are not rolled over automatically, to allow for task completion control.

We used it in my household for several months, with mixed success. There are many limitations in the system that would warrant a revisit.

It's written using the Pyramid Python framework with URL traversal, ZODB as the data store and Web Components for the frontend.

Goals

• Add admin screens for users, tasks and schedules
• Add models, pages etc. to allow redeeming tokens for gifts/surprises
• …?

Resources

tbd (Gitlab repo)

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Improve chore and screen time doc generator script `wochenplaner` by gniebler

Description

I wrote a little Python script to generate PDF docs, which can be used to track daily chore completion and screen time usage for several people, with one page per person/week.

I named this script wochenplaner and have been using it for a few months now.

It needs some improvements and adjustments in how the screen time should be tracked and how chores are displayed.

Goals

• Fix chore field separation lines
• Change screen time tracking logic from "global" (week-long) to daily subtraction and weekly addition of remainders (more intuitive than current "weekly time budget method)
• Add logic to fill in chore fields/lines, ideally with pictures, falling back to text.

Resources

tbd (Gitlab repo)

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Improvements to osc (especially with regards to the Git workflow) by mcepl

Description

There is plenty of hacking on osc, where we could spent some fun time. I would like to see a solution for https://github.com/openSUSE/osc/issues/2006 (which is sufficiently non-serious, that it could be part of HackWeek project).

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openSUSE Lounge by Ishwon

Description

openSUSE Lounge is a membership management platform for the openSUSE Project. It aims to simplify how we maintain member records, track membership status, and support election processes.

The platform provides Membership Officials with an easier way to keep the membership database accurate and up to date. It also helps Election Officials export the latest voter list and report issues such as bounced voter-credential emails, giving the Membership team early visibility into outdated or inactive accounts.

Goals

This project seeks to make openSUSE membership management more efficient, reliable, and transparent.

Long-term plans include enabling contributors to apply for membership directly through the platform and improving coordination between Membership and Election teams.

Technology stack

• Laravel - Backend framework powering the core application logic, routing, and data management.
• Tailwind CSS - Utility-first CSS framework used for building responsive and clean user interfaces.
• Alpine.js - Lightweight JavaScript framework for adding interactivity and dynamic behavior to frontend components.
• MariaDB — Relational database management system for storing and managing application data.

Demo

Available at https://lounge-test.cloudnativemauritius.com. Test account:

• Election: election@example.com

Password is oSL0ung3Pass.

Project Repo

https://github.com/ishwon/opensuse-lounge

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Port the classic browser game HackTheNet to PHP 8 by dgedon

Description

The classic browser game HackTheNet from 2004 still runs on PHP 4/5 and MySQL 5 and needs a port to PHP 8 and e.g. MariaDB.

Goals

• Port the game to PHP 8 and MariaDB 11
• Create a container where the game server can simply be started/stopped

Resources

• https://github.com/nodeg/hackthenet

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Kudos aka openSUSE Recognition Platform by lkocman

Description

Relevant blog post at news-o-o

I started the Kudos application shortly after Leap 16.0 to create a simple, friendly way to recognize people for their work and contributions to openSUSE. There’s so much more to our community than just submitting requests in OBS or gitea we have translations (not only in Weblate), wiki edits, forum and social media moderation, infrastructure maintenance, booth participation, talks, manual testing, openQA test suites, and more!

Goals

• Kudos under github.com/openSUSE/kudos with build previews aka netlify

• Have a kudos.opensuse.org instance running in production

• Build an easy-to-contribute recognition platform for the openSUSE community a place where everyone can send and receive appreciation for their work, across all areas of contribution.

• In the future, we could even explore reward options such as vouchers for t-shirts or other community swag, small tokens of appreciation to make recognition more tangible.

Resources

(Do not create new badge requests during hackweek, unless you'll make the badge during hackweek)

• Source code: openSUSE/kudos
• Badges: openSUSE/kudos-badges
• Issue tracker: kudos/issues

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