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I feel like I've seen this pop up a few times now, but this is really, really cool stuff. The only thing that concerns me about the growing popularity of using
by mmcclure 11y ago
I feel like I've seen this pop up a few times now, but this is really, really cool stuff. The only thing that concerns me about the growing popularity of using WebRTC is the security concerns around unknowingly joining a p2p network like this for potentially any site you visit. It's not hard to imagine what a bad actor could do to content before passing it along, or more simply, the fact that your true IP is exposed.
Curmudgeony security issues aside, this undeniably feels like The Future™ and a big deal to watch out for. It's also one of those cases where a creator / maintainer makes a huge difference for long term viability in my opinion. Feross is crazy smart and has been working with all the related tech for a while now (via PeerCDN, Instant.io, etc, etc), and is just an all around respectful, nice guy, which is important for the continued development / community aspect.
- MCRed 11y agoSeems like this is an opportunity for a tor like network over a webRTC peer to peer network, maybe? (Dunno maybe that's a bad idea for some reason...)
- bb88 11y agoWhy Tor-like? Why not just Tor? Seems like a great way for people to send messages that don't involve a cloud-based server.
- dcposch 11y agoSame reason webtorrent isn't quite bittorrent. WebRTC gives you P2P in a webapp, but it doesn't let you connect to arbitrary hosts and ports. You could have an onion routing protocol derived from tor or i2p that uses the webrtc data channel. You could even, like webtorrent, have the concept of hybrid nodes that existing network to the new webrtc-based one.
- raffomania 11y agoIIRC, torrent clients do heavy checksumming by default. You should be mostly safe from malicious content.
- zymhan 11y agoThere are concerns about connecting to a malicious network besides just voluntarily downloading an unsafe file.