ANNOUNCING Tahoe, the Least-Authority File Store, v1.16.0 The Tahoe-LAFS team is pleased to announce version 1.16.0 of Tahoe-LAFS, an extremely reliable decentralized storage system. Get it with "pip install tahoe-lafs", or download a tarball here: https://tahoe-lafs.org/downloads Tahoe-LAFS is the first distributed storage system to offer "provider-independent security" — meaning that not even the operators of your storage servers can read or alter your data without your consent. Here is the one-page explanation of its unique security and fault-tolerance properties: https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/about.html The previous stable release of Tahoe-LAFS was v1.15.1, released on March 23rd, 2021. The major change in this release is the completion of the Python 3 port -- while maintaining support for Python 2. A future release will remove Python 2 support. The previously deprecated subcommands "start", "stop", "restart" and "daemonize" have been removed. You must now use "tahoe run" (possibly along with your favourite daemonization software). Several features are now removed: the Account Server, stats-gatherer and FTP support. There are several dependency changes that will be interesting for distribution maintainers. In all, 240 issues have been fixed since the last release. Please see ``NEWS.rst`` for a more complete list of changes. WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? With Tahoe-LAFS, you distribute your data across multiple servers. Even if some of the servers fail or are taken over by an attacker, the entire file store continues to function correctly, preserving your privacy and security. You can easily share specific files and directories with other people. In addition to the core storage system itself, volunteers have built other projects on top of Tahoe-LAFS and have integrated Tahoe-LAFS with existing systems, including Windows, JavaScript, iPhone, Android, Hadoop, Flume, Django, Puppet, bzr, mercurial, perforce, duplicity, TiddlyWiki, and more. See the Related Projects page on the wiki [3]. We believe that strong cryptography, Free and Open Source Software, erasure coding, and principled engineering practices make Tahoe-LAFS safer than RAID, removable drive, tape, on-line backup or cloud storage. This software is developed under test-driven development, and there are no known bugs or security flaws which would compromise confidentiality or data integrity under recommended use. (For all important issues that we are currently aware of please see the known_issues.rst file [2].) COMPATIBILITY This release should be compatible with the version 1 series of Tahoe-LAFS. Clients from this release can write files and directories in the format used by clients of all versions back to v1.0 (which was released March 25, 2008). Clients from this release can read files and directories produced by clients of all versions since v1.0. Network connections are limited by the Introducer protocol in use. If the Introducer is running v1.10 or v1.11, then servers from this release (v1.12) can serve clients of all versions back to v1.0 . If it is running v1.12, then they can only serve clients back to v1.10. Clients from this release can use servers back to v1.10, but not older servers. Except for the new optional MDMF format, we have not made any intentional compatibility changes. However we do not yet have the test infrastructure to continuously verify that all new versions are interoperable with previous versions. We intend to build such an infrastructure in the future. This is the twenty-first release in the version 1 series. This series of Tahoe-LAFS will be actively supported and maintained for the foreseeable future, and future versions of Tahoe-LAFS will retain the ability to read and write files compatible with this series. LICENCE You may use this package under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or, at your option, any later version. See the file "COPYING.GPL" [4] for the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. You may use this package under the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1 or, at your option, any later version. (The Transitive Grace Period Public Licence has requirements similar to the GPL except that it allows you to delay for up to twelve months after you redistribute a derived work before releasing the source code of your derived work.) See the file "COPYING.TGPPL.rst" [5] for the terms of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1. (You may choose to use this package under the terms of either licence, at your option.) INSTALLATION Tahoe-LAFS works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Solaris, *BSD, and probably most other systems. Start with "docs/INSTALL.rst" [6]. HACKING AND COMMUNITY Please join us on the mailing list [7]. Patches are gratefully accepted -- the Roadmap page [8] shows the next improvements that we plan to make and CREDITS [9] lists the names of people who've contributed to the project. The Dev page [10] contains resources for hackers. SPONSORSHIP A special thanks goes out to Least Authority Enterprises [12], which employs several Tahoe-LAFS developers, for their continued support. HACK TAHOE-LAFS! If you can find a security flaw in Tahoe-LAFS which is serious enough that we feel compelled to warn our users and issue a fix, then we will award you with a customized t-shirt with your exploit printed on it and add you to the "Hack Tahoe-LAFS Hall Of Fame" [13]. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is the eighteenth release of Tahoe-LAFS to be created solely as a labor of love by volunteers. Thank you very much to the team of "hackers in the public interest" who make Tahoe-LAFS possible. fenn-cs + meejah on behalf of the Tahoe-LAFS team October 19, 2021 Planet Earth [1] https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/blob/tahoe-lafs-1.16.0/NEWS.rst [2] https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/blob/master/docs/known_issues.rst [3] https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/RelatedProjects [4] https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/blob/tahoe-lafs-1.16.0/COPYING.GPL [5] https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/blob/tahoe-lafs-1.16.0/COPYING.TGPPL.rst [6] https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.org/en/tahoe-lafs-1.16.0/INSTALL.html [7] https://lists.tahoe-lafs.org/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev [8] https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/roadmap [9] https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/blob/master/CREDITS [10] https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Dev [12] https://leastauthority.com/ [13] https://tahoe-lafs.org/hacktahoelafs/ [14] https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole