Cross-posted from
https://forum.monero.cc/1/news-and-announcements/98/monday-monero-missives-18-november-17th-2014Monero Monday Missives
November 17th, 2014
Hello, and welcome to our eighteenth Monero Monday Missive!
Major Updates
1. We still have ongoing Windows static build issues, which is preventing us from tagging and releasing Monero 0.8.8.5. It is our highest item of priority at the moment, although the nature of the problem and the geographic / timezone spread of the various people working on it means that testing and reproducing the problems is a painstakingly slow process.
2. On the topic of binaries, we'd like to just remind everyone that the only trustworthy, official binaries are those release by the core team. Any others on any other website may or may not be safe, but it is always recommended that the appropriate level of caution is exercised and that unofficial builds are avoided if possible.
3. Over the weekend of the 8th and 9th of November the Monero Research Lab had a closed mini-meetup in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. In attendance were surae, sarang, and shen, as well as tewinget and fluffypony. A great time was had by all attendees meeting for the first time, and long academic discussions were the order of the day. Three primary focus areas that the MRL researchers will be looking at going forward are: Difficulty - an initial foray into creating a more robust, well-understood, and documented difficulty retargeting algorithm; Payment IDs - simplifying payment ID use, including stealth payment IDs or encouraging cross-blockchain payment ID collision; Offloading Processing - ways and means to offload viewkey scanning to a hosted daemon in a way that does not reveal the viewkey to the hosted instance
4. Excellent feedback has been received from all those that have been testing the initial blockchain DB implementation. Please keep those coming - of particular use would be to test rollbacks by creating a fake checkpoints.json file. We need to ascertain how performant and reliable rollbacks are on various environments.
Dev Diary
Core: more CMake changes, although lingering issues exist with static mingw-w64 builds (both native and cross-compiling on Arch)
Core: several bug fixes to the multi-language mnemonic system, a more unified JSON library, and others, are in the wings and nearly ready to deploy, pending the CMake issues being resolved
Until next week!
- updated by fluffypony
Can you explain more about diff retargeting? 
