Update M2Crypto by mcepl

There are couple of projects I work on, which need my attention and putting them to shape:

• M2Crypto

Goal for this Hackweek

• Put M2Crypto into better shape (most issues closed, all pull requests processed)
• More fun to learn jujutsu
• Play more with Gemini, how much it help (or not).
• Perhaps, also (just slightly related), help to fix vis to work with LuaJIT, particularly to make vis-lspc working.

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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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HTTP API for nftables by crameleon

Background

The idea originated in https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/164060 and is about building RESTful API which translates authorized HTTP requests to operations in nftables, possibly utilizing libnftables-json(5).

Originally, I started developing such an interface in Go, utilizing https://github.com/google/nftables. The conversion of string networks to nftables set elements was problematic (unfortunately no record of details), and I started a second attempt in Python, which made interaction much simpler thanks to native nftables Python bindings.

Goals

1. Find and track the issue with google/nftables
2. Revisit and polish the Python code, primarily the server component
3. Finish functionality to interact with nftables sets (retrieving and updating elements), which are of interest for the originating issue
4. Align test suite
5. Packaging

Resources

• https://git.netfilter.org/nftables/tree/py/src/nftables.py
• https://git.com.de/Georg/nftables-http-api (to be moved to GitHub)
• https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:crameleon:containers/pytest-nftables-container

Results

The original goals will probably not be met, but progress is made regardless. Upon starting to unify the structure and implementing more functionality, missing JSON output support was noticed for some subcommands in libnftables. I am submitting patches as needed: - https://lore.kernel.org/netfilter-devel/20251203131736.4036382-2-georg@syscid.com/T/#u

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Song Search with CLAP by gcolangiuli

Description

Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) is an open-source library that enables the training of a neural network on both Audio and Text descriptions, making it possible to search for Audio using a Text input. Several pre-trained models for song search are already available on huggingface

Goals

Evaluate how CLAP can be used for song searching and determine which types of queries yield the best results by developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in Python. Based on the results of this MVP, future steps could include:

• Music Tagging;
• Free text search;
• Integration with an LLM (for example, with MCP or the OpenAI API) for music suggestions based on your own library.

The code for this project will be entirely written using AI to better explore and demonstrate AI capabilities.

Result

• Result Presentation
• hw25-song-search Github repo

References

• CLAP: The main model being researched;
• huggingface: Pre-trained models for CLAP;
• Free Music Archive: Creative Commons songs that can be used for testing;

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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

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RMT.rs: High-Performance Registration Path for RMT using Rust by gbasso

Description

The SUSE Repository Mirroring Tool (RMT) is a critical component for managing software updates and subscriptions, especially for our Public Cloud Team (PCT). In a cloud environment, hundreds or even thousands of new SUSE instances (VPS/EC2) can be provisioned simultaneously. Each new instance attempts to register against an RMT server, creating a "thundering herd" scenario.

We have observed that the current RMT server, written in Ruby, faces performance issues under this high-concurrency registration load. This can lead to request overhead, slow registration times, and outright registration failures, delaying the readiness of new cloud instances.

This Hackweek project aims to explore a solution by re-implementing the performance-critical registration path in Rust. The goal is to leverage Rust's high performance, memory safety, and first-class concurrency handling to create an alternative registration endpoint that is fast, reliable, and can gracefully manage massive, simultaneous request spikes.

The new Rust module will be integrated into the existing RMT Ruby application, allowing us to directly compare the performance of both implementations.

Goals

The primary objective is to build and benchmark a high-performance Rust-based alternative for the RMT server registration endpoint.

Key goals for the week:

1. Analyze & Identify: Dive into the SUSE/rmt Ruby codebase to identify and map out the exact critical path for server registration (e.g., controllers, services, database interactions).
2. Develop in Rust: Implement a functionally equivalent version of this registration logic in Rust.
3. Integrate: Explore and implement a method for Ruby/Rust integration to "hot-wire" the new Rust module into the RMT application. This may involve using FFI, or libraries like rb-sys or magnus.
4. Benchmark: Create a benchmarking script (e.g., using k6, ab, or a custom tool) that simulates the high-concurrency registration load from thousands of clients.
5. Compare & Present: Conduct a comparative performance analysis (requests per second, latency, success/error rates, CPU/memory usage) between the original Ruby path and the new Rust path. The deliverable will be this data and a summary of the findings.

Resources

• RMT Source Code (Ruby):
  • https://github.com/SUSE/rmt
• RMT Documentation:
  • https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP7/html/SLES-all/book-rmt.html
• Tooling & Stacks:
  • RMT/Ruby development environment (for running the base RMT)
  • Rust development environment (rustup, cargo)
• Potential Integration Libraries:
  • rb-sys: https://github.com/oxidize-rb/rb-sys
  • Magnus: https://github.com/matsadler/magnus
• Benchmarking Tools:
  • k6 (https://k6.io/)
  • ab (ApacheBench)

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Uyuni read-only replica by cbosdonnat

Description

For now, there is no possible HA setup for Uyuni. The idea is to explore setting up a read-only shadow instance of an Uyuni and make it as useful as possible.

Possible things to look at:

• live sync of the database, probably using the WAL. Some of the tables may have to be skipped or some features disabled on the RO instance (taskomatic, PXT sessions…)
• Can we use a load balancer that routes read-only queries to either instance and the other to the RW one? For example, packages or PXE data can be served by both, the API GET requests too. The rest would be RW.

Goals

• Prepare a document explaining how to do it.
• PR with the needed code changes to support it

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