This week we have been putting the finishing touches on Cwtch Beta 1.5, a much larger release than its predecessors due to the new features and significant refactors that have been planned in.

I wanted to take a moment away from pull requests and fuzz testing to talk to you about the future of Cwtch and present to you a vision for the future of surveillance resistant applications. Don’t worry, there isn’t a single blockchain or NFT in sight!

Cwtch Beta 1.5, slated for release in mid-December, includes a number of quality-of-life improvements that users have been asking for. Some are even already available in nightlies, such as the clickable links experiment. This post will give you a small preview of what’s coming and, in Discreet Log tradition, talk about some of the technical choices we made and try to answer questions you might have about the implementation.

Three years ago, on February 11th 2018, we officially incorporated the Open Privacy Research Society. At that point in time I don’t think any of us had any idea how the following years would go.

2020 was difficult and challenging. The work outlined here is a fraction of what we had hoped to achieve. 2020 impacted our projects, our priorities, and our lives. That said, I think it represents some of the most important work we have done so far, and I am excited to push it as far as we can in 2021.

This work couldn’t exist without an active and amazing base of supporters, like you, who enable our mission - researching and developing privacy enhancing technologies focused on those people and communities that need them most.

To celebrate our 3rd year anniversary I would like to invite you to review some of the amazing work that you helped support in 2020 - and once again ask for your help and support to help us continue our mission in 2021.

Today we are releasing the first cut of Lockbox, an application for creating simple encrypted web forms!