The best part about this is that we are using LaunchPad.net to do our translations, so you can help improve Anomos through your browser!

To start translating, click here and choose your language!

The best part about this is that launchpad automatically suggests translations, so you don’t even need to know a language to help us out – you can go through a language and accept the suggestions (most of which come from Deluge and KTorrent). You will need a LaunchPad account, but this is easy and uses OpenID.

I only just put this up, and Anomos is already 25% tranlated into Turkish! How cool is that! With your help, we will soon have Anomos translated into all of the major languages of the world, and more people will be able to safely share files with each other!
In other Anomos news:

• The tracker was down for a few hours last night while we were upgrading some things, but it’s back up now (with some bugs fixed thanks to John). If you notice that the tracker is down, come into IRC (#anomos on freenode), or shoot us an email at partners@anomos.info so we can investigate.



• We need a Windows developer! If you have any experience with developing Python on Windows, please get in touch! There are a few bugs (particularly with Win7) that seem manageable, but we are mainly Linux people here and we don’t have any Win7 machines to experiment with. As usability is a core component of the Anomos philosophy, having a stable Windows version is extremely important and we need help in this area.



• We also need PHP/SQL developers! A major bottleneck in Anomos deployment is that there aren’t any places for people to host and index .atorrent files. We would like to develop a small package of web software that anybody with a spare server could put up to host and index .atorrent files which announce to our tracker. This is a crucial part for the next phase of Anomos adoption and if you are interested in the future of P2P and internet privacy and you have some web skills, we would love to talk to you!

Anybody interested in doing any of this should email partners@anomos.info to get in touch!
I think that’s all for now,
Rich!

This is a minor release which fixes the issues with invisible text areas which was caused by a problem in an underlying graphics component. It also introduces a Connections windows which will show information about connected neighbors and their geographic locations (provided by a MaxMind database). It is built from the ‘testing’ branch, but I believe that it is stable enough to release.

The new version has been tested on XP and Vista, but not Windows 7. If any Windows 7 users download this and try it, please let me know if it works, or if it doesn’t, what you are able to do to fix it.

Also, we need way more people to seed and relay on the network. Anomos requires that at least a handful of users are connected to a tracker to create the pathways necessary for a transfer to occur. You can use this torrent file to help seed and relay with. If you’re really cool, you’ll tell your friends! Anomos needs a community to support it!

Anyway, windows users can use this link to download the new version. Linux users can get the new features by downloading the testing branch in the git repository.

That’s all for now -
Rich!

If you’ve been using Anomos on Windows, you’ve probably noticed that there are some issues with text objects being invisible. This is a bug being caused by the “Wimp” theme in GTK-2.18. I am investigating and will be releasing a proper fix in an upcoming release, likely by downgrading to GTK-2.16.

To solve this problem, delete or rename the folder called ‘themes’ located in C:/Program Files/Anomos/share

You will notice that it will end up looking quite ugly as the native theming is removed, but at least it will draw properly.

I’m investigating further and hopefully will have a proper version upgrade available in the next few days.

I would really like some help in maintaining the Windows version of Anomos, so if you’re interested, please get in touch! The Windows 7 version in particular is a mess, but I don’t have a machine to test it on, so I’d really appreciate some help there.

Rich!

Update: Yep, downgrading from 2.18 to 2.16 fixed the bug, I will package a new version tomorrow.

This new version introduces faster downloads, a refreshed look and vastly improved overall stability.

* Windows users can click here to download the installer package from SourceForge.net.
* GNU/Linux users can follow the instructions on the Downloads page to get the software and the required libraries.
* There is currently no OSX version (because we don’t have any OSX machines), but it is possible to run Anomos on OSX, as this page describes. If you’d like to build an OSX package for Anomos, please get in touch!

The other big news is that we are now running a public Anomos tracker! Our server is located at: https://tracker.anomos.info:5555/announce

You can help us test our tracker by downloading this atorrent: Education on Humans (and Examples from Camera), a short film by video artist Dave Fischer.

For more information about sharing your files with Anomos, you should read this guide.

Although it has come along way, Anomos is still under active development and should not yet be used for purposes which require absolute security.

Anomos needs help! We are looking for:
* People to seed files and run trackers! Anomos can’t work unless people use it.
* People to test the client and tracker looking for bugs.
* Python programmers to find and fix bugs and add new features.
* People to maintain packages for different linux distributions, a Windows maintainer and a maintainer for OSX.
* Translators, so that Anomos can be easily used by people in non-English speaking countries.
* Programmers in other languages (particularly C/C++) who could add Anomos support to other existing BitTorrent projects.

If you’d like to become part of the Anomos community, you can join our new web forum, or you can join us in #anomos on irc.freenode.org. Become part of the future of digital freedom!

Anomos is graciously funded by the NLNet Foundation, without which none of this would have been possible.

That’s all for now – though there’s always more in the pipeline!

Rich – Anomos Liberty Enhancement

First, you’ll need to download and install the program on your system. See the ‘Downloads’ link above. Then, open up the program and go to File – Make a New Atorrent, like below.

This will bring up this screen. Add the files or directories you wish to share. If you wish to use our tracker, leave the Announce URL the same, or if you wish to share on another tracker, use the complete URL which they provide you with. When you are finished, press Make.

This will create your_filename.atorrent in the directory where your files are. Now, in the main client, open that .atorrent and when asked where to save, point it to the files you are trying to share. (On some older linux systems, you may need to type ‘.’ when sharing directories.)

Then, to share your files with other people, you will need to send them your .atorrent file. You can do this via email or via the web. (This is an important step, but if you aren’t careful, you may compromise your anonymity. If you are using the web to publish your torrents, you may want to do so through Tor. ) Then, when other people open the file, they will be able to download the file from you over the Anomos network.

In a rare break from my usual work at Anomos Liberty Enhancements, I ran the new Gource version control visualization tool on our Git repository. The above is the result, and I’m pretty pleased with it. Gource required practically zero configuration and I know with a little tweaking it can produce results even nicer than this. If you have any projects of your own I definitely suggest you try it out. One thing I’d really like to see the developers add (besides phaser sound effects) is a way to dump the output straight to a video file. I used another excellent program called Yukon to generate the above video.

The burst of activity towards the end of the video might have given it away, but we’re getting ready for some large scale tests and we should have some exciting updates for you in the next couple weeks.

John

You might notice some small changes to the UI to make it a bit cleaner.

This isn’t a stable release, but a sign that we’re steadily getting closer. More soon!

R

The most interesting thing we’ve been working on is the complete 20-page Anomos protocol specification, which will allow other developers to create their own Anomos clients and trackers, and to add Anomos compatibility to existing BitTorrent software.

I’m not going to give an exact date release date right now, but we’re hoping it will be as soon as possible. For those of you who can’t wait for an official release and want to take a peak at some of the technical details of the project, take a look in the testing branch of the git repositories to see the current work.

Rich

The wonderful João Almeida has managed to get Anomos running on Macs with OS 10.5.7 Leopard.

UPDATE: He’s also made a DMG package, which you can download from his website here: Anomos.dmg.

This is how he did it:

Installed MacPorts with this dmg: http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/downloads/MacPorts-1.7.1/MacPorts-1.7.1-10.5-Leopard.dmg
(Im almost sure the following step is unnecessary, but not sure)
-> Then at the terminal: sudo port install py25-m2crypto
After this there was still a m2crypto error, so i downloaded this egg file: http://chandlerproject.org/pub/Projects/MeTooCrypto/M2Crypto-0.18.2-py2.5-macosx-10.5-i386.egg
and extracted it using Stuffit Expander, and copied the contents to /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages, getting something like in the first screenshot.
Then I installed git (dont know if it is necessary, but hey...):
sudo port install git-core
Afterwards, at the terminal:
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/jhbuild/trunk jhbuild
cd jhbuild && make -f Makefile.plain install
cd /Users/*username*/bin
./jhbuild bootstrap
./jhbuild build meta-gtk-osx-bootstrap
./jhbuild build fontconfig
./jhbuild build pygtk
Et voilá!


Thanks again, João!

In other exciting news in the Open Source world, both BitTorrent and M2Crypto, projects which we depend on, have accepted patches we have made back to them. Feels nice to give back to Open Source.

Rich out!