State Report 11/2023

By Mathias Ball

After a long time of silence on this site its time to give at least a short update about progress on our K4 project. Contrary to the picture that our web presence gave to you the project is still active and experienced some fundamental changes. The following notes only give a short and incomplete overview about what happened (between 2019 and end of 2023):

  • Our original intention to implement the GUI of K4 (which is also called Clarissa) in Object Pascal turned out to be too limited - so we decided to completely redesign it in Python3 + QT5.
  • In the meanwhile K4 is able to communicate using chat systems like Telegram (https://telegram.org/) and Matrix (https://matrix.org/) - we call them Transports.
  • We developed two further transports. One is based on a shared file system, the other one is based on the P2P synchronization software Syncthing (https://syncthing.net/).
  • The first one was originally intended for testing purposes, but proved to be suitable for enclosed environment communication.
  • The later one enables K4/Clarissa users to communicate peer to peer - that means without any server in between which theoretically may inspect your communication.
  • K4/Clarissa is able to detect QR codes and to capture objects via “own channels” for instance in Telegram.
  • K4/Clarissa is now available in English and German. The design is prepared for even more translations.
  • K4/Clarissa is able to handle and merge contacts, groups, identities (for encrypted communication) and on-line account data.
  • K4/Clarissa is able export and import the whole database which is very important for future migration between different software versions.
  • K4/Clarissa is able to make archives from any set of data and to reimport them.
  • K4/Clarissa contains a spartan ticket/issue tracking system and helps to import tickets from MANTIS servers.
  • K4/Clarissa now has an Explorer like media object view not only to browse files in a file system hierarchy but also related to communication channels and contacts.
  • We also implemented identity exchange, data exchange, file transfer and remote search between K4/Clarissa instances using any transport available. These 4 methods are the foundation of Clarissa Net.