Stays reachable on fast connections
After running for a while on a fast connection, Night Drop could become unreachable: contacts' messages stopped arriving directly, and it took minutes (or forever) to come back online after a restart.
The cause was in how the Tor library learns its circuit-build timeout. It learns only from the connections that succeed, so on a fast link the timeout kept shrinking — to about half a second — until ordinary connections were being abandoned. Each abandoned connection counted against the Tor entry relay it used, and once enough had, that relay was disabled for good. With none left, the app could not publish its address at all. The timeout now has a two-second floor, which stops the spiral without slowing anything down.
If your app has been slow to come online, this release fixes it going forward.
Also
- A stalled connection can no longer freeze delivery. If a Tor connection stopped moving mid-transfer, sending and receiving could stop until the app was restarted. Connections that make no progress for 60 seconds are now dropped and retried.
- Offline messages are stored on the relay once, not twice. The relay was being counted twice under two names, doubling both the copies and the mail checks.
- An unopened burn message that expires now leaves a marker ("Burn message expired unopened") instead of vanishing silently.
- Donations: Bitcoin, through a silent payment address (each payment lands at a fresh output, so donations cannot be linked to each other or to the address), and Zcash.
Verifying
Every binary is signed with the release key and listed in SHA256SUMS, itself signed. See SECURITY.md for the full verification steps; nightdrop-signing-key.asc is attached.