Ring is free software for communication developed by Savoir-faire Linux in our Montréal offices. It was conceived and developed on a peer-to-peer architecture model, relying on OpenDHT, its dedicated distributed hash table for retrieving its users on the network. Ring's Beta 2 version released on november 4th 2016 provides many new features for its users. The most interesting of them is the identity and account management mechanism, implementted on a blockchain Ethereum technology.
Since the project started and the software's first release about 2 years ago, Ring has evolved in many directions. Our new Beta 2 release features new funcionalities developed to improve the user's experience: The Multi-device function makes it possible for users to associate many devices to the same identity (many RingID's to the same identity/person), and all the devices will be synchronized. The Blockchain supports the multi-device feature for the identity and account management. It is implemented on an Ethereum technology. OpenDHT library was enhanced in order to optimize user's retrieval on the p2p network and decrease the network's operations time. Ring is now available on UWP (Universal Serial Platform thus offering support for Ring's clients on different platforms supported and maintained from Microsoft.
Finally, we are planning to release Ring's first stable version in a few months, which will introduce new elements and potentially a higer level of software reliability, users' privacy protection, utilisability and a better user experience
Speakers: Alexandre Viau