TestNet1 AMA (Ask Me Anything)

Hey @dyamanaka, any talk of a date yet on this? Love to have the video sections to share with people when they ask those specific questions I’m only slightly familiar with.

Greetings! I understand that desktop clients are first on the list to be privileged and secured by maidsafe but being a very on the go user and the endless insecurity of mobile devices.

I am so anxious to know what the plans for the maidsafe client to be on iphone(im an iphone user) and android phones are? Would it be an app in an App Store or a profile you install? Or would an iphone even have to be jailbroken. I would feel far more comfortable knowing all my info was stored on the safe network. In apple ios8 they will have ‘extensibility’ feature to let all apps “securely” talk to you’re phone, so maybe this would allow maidsafe app to store all info encrypted on the network and still provide full factory functionality to the device. Although I still wonder about such things as the article I posted(essentially a remote data dump I believe). I have seen mobiles are on the roadmap I’m just very hungry to know details etc :smile: this is a great community with great discussions and fearless leaders I’m very glad to be a part of it even if all I can lend is food for thought and resources on launch. Thank you

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The date is dependent on when @dirvine can do a hangout session with either @ioptio or one of the other pods. I know MaidSafe is very busy right now trying to get through TestNet1 so the AMA video answers are on the back burner right now.

Keep adding questions so they can discuss it on the next Dev Meetup.

You could send a direct invite to @nicklambert to help answer some of these questions on SAFE Cafe #3

It will :slight_smile: it will also likely to be millions though, well depends on number of users, amount of data, current network safety margin (free space) and how quick it grows. If a single person or machine could emulate the bandwidth of millions of users the attack may happen, its just humans are really bad at this game. This is why the lottery wins, we think we can game it. In this case SAFE is the lottery and the users are farming on it. So its a blind lottery that pays out 100% of income to players.

When you add in caching both deterministic and opportunistic then repeated gets of data you know will be unbelievably difficult and result in avalanche attacks against your own ability to get the data from your vault. IT self protects this way quite well. Again waayyyy to many variables though. Honest I will try and write it all down in more detail. I intend to do a blog post (been too long) in none euclidean maths and xor in particular. Very very simple, but extremely different from our counting system and the knowledge of this will show how incredibly difficult it is to explain in English in a way we know of it (like logs or something). More importantly it will show how incredible things can be achieved in a non linearly addressed network of individuals. It should help an awful lot, well there is my eternal optimism again :wink:

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I think I get this, thanks for explaining. You are incredibly patient and attentive to this community and all our questions. :slight_smile:

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Updated the OP with the date 8/10/14 which is the next Dev Meetup with Pods: (Troon, SF, and Montreal) this should be a good one!

We’ll try to fit in some AMA questions between the tripod conference. If Washington DC pod can attend, that would be spectacular.

  1. Can a non-developer do anything with the s/w today?
    I read the install guide and I’d like to install the s/w, but it’s not clear what I could do with it.
    For example, could I use the testnet with Examples posted on Github?
  2. How to set MaidSAFE settings?
    A URL with docs would suffice.
    I’m interested in how I could set what part of filesystem can be used, how much bandwidth can be used, etc. because of security and network congestion concerns.
  3. Does it help to the project (devs) to have a node running on the testnet?
    If yes, what are you looking for - a variety of architectures and OS, fast nodes, large capacity?
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What happened with the AMA questions on the last Dev Meetup with pods?

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Nothing happened. I was surprised no questions from this thread were asked by the Pods. There was just an example demonstration and program language discussion then it ended abruptly.

It might be a better idea to take the entire list of questions and to let them be answered one by one by David or someone else from the dev team.

So a new video for every question and just show the question in screen at the beginning. If you’re going to do this during a Skype call, the sound or connection might be bad.

What do you think?

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I would happily do that. @ioptio is coming over soon and one idea was she interview me. This may be a good idea and we could use a proper camera etc. rather than skype etc. which is always bad. We could do a question at a time like that and perhaps even persuade the whole team to say hi :smiley:

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To the Pods or by the Pods?
I didn’t want to repeat what I posted a day earlier, so I didn’t ask any questions.
If I did, I would prefer to type my questions so that they can be replied in text as well and saved for sharing. It’s still difficult to search for words in audio and video recordings.

@Melvin The “interview (face to face)” format would provide better audio and video result.

@russell this could also double as material for the documentary, if you’re still interested in starting one.

@Shona Hopefully, you’ll have your Project SAFE shirts in time?

@janitor no worries, I suspect the meetup was very focused on testnet1 and it did take up a good amount of time. So the AMA would be better served as part of an interview.

We’ll get it done, eventually. :smiley:

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Thanks. For my personal feeling, there’s already far too much explanation about this project hidden in videos. I don’t like videos in general, and especially for explanation and tutorials, because I can’t search in them to go back to that particular information I remember was explained somewhere, and I can’t skim them to get a quick overview. I really have a very hard time trying to understand why video tutorials are so popular nowadays. :slight_smile:

@phrphz Videos are not intended instead of traditional documentation - that’s a big work in progress - but rather as an easy to digest source of information for those that do like them, and we know there are a lot of people who do. Also to help those (me included) who want to get the gist but not necessarily start coding. I also like them because I get a feel for the people, community, MaidSafe etc. So personally I try to watch them even though I’m not really looking for the factual stuff they contain.

He’s saying that in his view the effort (time invested) should be tilted a bit more towards documenting rather than recording the videos (assuming the same people can do the both types of work). Let’s say these activities consume 10% of their time and it’s spent 10% on docs and 90% on vids/interviews. Maybe 15-85 would be better.

I also like videos, but that doesn’t tell us about the overall marginal utility of the participants’ time. I think the P man is right.

But then there are dependencies. If the code isn’t ready, it’s not necessarily useful to constantly create outdated and incorrect documentation. Still, I’d like to see existing docs fixed and updated (in a word, maintained) rather than more vids. Just my opinion.

I’m not sure if @phrphz is saying that. Best to let people speak for themselves. You are saying that :slight_smile: which is fine.

The decision to produce these videos is a result of an earlier discussion of exactly this issue, though it seems to have moved from “we can make them as part of the PoD hangouts” back to “let’s have David sit down and run them off”. I agree it is a valid question about best use of David’s time, but he’s best person to judge that I think.

From a dev point of view, documentation is an enormous time consumer. A new Boost C++ Library can expect to invest about 25% of total development time on documentation if it expects to pass peer review, and that is all time not spent writing or debugging code because only devs can write documentation for a company as small as MaidSafe. In fact there is an argument going on right now in the Boost dev mailing lists about upping still further what we demand of documentation for a new library, and the bar is already set so high that no large library has passed that bar in years.

There are many high level non-video documents written on SAFE already. People perpetually seem unable to either find these or read them or understand them, which is fair enough. However there are also dozens of articles in the press which also deliver even higher level overviews. All appear readily in Google searches.

I’ll be honest here: I didn’t find a problem with the quantity or quality of the documentation when I was evaluating whether to sign on with MaidSafe, and I had a good enough understanding to say yes after only a few hours of searching. The technology is very straightforward, almost conservative.

For those wanting docs on SAFE application development, I do feel for you because there are none apart from the source code itself. Such is the price of being in the vanguard of a new technology platform, and it is no different anywhere else. If you want to be the first in, you pay the price of a high barrier to entry.

Niall

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Can somebody respond to questions from this thread?
Mine are here (above):

I see how I can install the s/w, but I can’t find instructions on how to use it. Should we read the source code for that too (I’m not trolling, just asking), or wait for how-to instructions?

It would be nice if before the next testnet some instructions are provided. I am not asking for a detailed explanation of everything and as I said above I agree that it’s a huge effort (as stated by @ned14 as well), however without any instructions whatsoever it’s going to be really tough.

If that would be easier, could a ready-made VM without IDs be put online for our download? Then we’d just need to create the accounts and restart services (or reboot the VM if they’re set to autostart).

The examples (only one currently) show you the basics of running your own test network, and you can also run tests “make ExperCommon” etc. Not very exciting but worth doing just to ensure you’re ready for when the networks open up and we can all join together. At that point, I’m sure Viv and others will put out instructions as to how to join the network, how to make and run the sample apps etc. Its all very exciting and not long to go, though I have accused @Viv of teasing to build up interest for the launch, the old “curiosity dollar” heh! :slight_smile: