6 ms·

Ugh, I hate these P2P "CDNs". A few years back, CNN tried this for their streaming video with technology from a company called Octoshape. Users (including mys

Ugh, I hate these P2P "CDNs". A few years back, CNN tried this for their streaming video with technology from a company called Octoshape. Users (including myself) were unwittingly conned into accepting the plugin in order to watch live video. This created a huge mess for big corporate IT departments, who suddenly had hundreds or thousands of desktop machines streaming out video whenever there was a major news event. I realize that this is a server-side option now, however. Still, it's a crappy deal. A decently-sized deployment of public cloud boxes to support your private CDN is going to cost far, far more than an actual CDN. Public cloud bandwidth is obscenely priced compared to what you can get it for on the CDN market.

jloveless 9y ago
Author here: >"Public cloud bandwidth is obscenely priced compared to what you can get it for on the CDN market" Amen to that! I think where this comes in to play is when you've already got colo space and excess capacity (e.g. eBay etc) and/or you'd like to leverage other edge pop's outside of your provider (e.g. mainland China). But it also adds some level or protection against correlated backbone issues if you can add p2p edges along other providers (similar to Netflix's design). When we looked at the correlation across existing CDN providers we found it was ~95%[1]. Video streaming specifically is _especially_ bandwidth intensive and will definitely cause issues in corporate LANs. It's one of the reasons we add ASN categorized black listing (e.g. residential vs. hosting vs. corporate etc) [1] https://blog.edgemesh.com/understanding-diversification-networks-and-nobel-prizes-114bf61247c4 https://blog.edgemesh.com/understanding-diversification-netw...
technopriest 9y ago
Hello, lead engineer here. Just to clarify, you don't need a plugin to enable Edgemesh as a user. Everything is 100% browser compliant. Your webmaster adds our one line of code and our one javascript file you are done. Your users will never even see a pop up.
- tokenizerrr 9y ago
  But will users their bandwidth get abused?
  - xori 9y ago
    Probably. https://sig.edgeno.de/edgemesh.client.min.js https://sig.edgeno.de/edgemesh.client.min.js is being added to my uBlock list.
    - chrissnell 9y ago
      Good call. I just submitted an issue to UBlock to get their JS client added to the block lists: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/659 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/659 Sorry Edgemesh team, but this kind of activity without user opt-in is not okay.
      - jloveless 9y ago
        No worries - that's exactly what uBlock is there for! :) We've struggled to find the best way to add opt out on the client side without effecting the actual page itself (e.g. pop-up etc) and would love to get some thoughts on this - please PM me if you have any. Alternatively we went with a more aggressive approach on network based detection (e.g. metered connections, replication across ASN vs intra-ASN etc).
        gcb0 9y ago
        how can you even know if a connection is metered from within a browser?! thats crazy talk rigth there. there are so many variations that all happen completely outside of the browser domain and/or the connection destination.
        technopriest 9y ago
        via the Network Information API. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Network_Information_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Network_Inf... Connections start metered and are then upgraded when an unmetered connection is successfully detected.
xj9 9y ago
welcome to the future
- fundabulousrIII 9y ago
  Yes, and this is utter shit. You want to push CDN bandwidth constraints onto consumer networks in some p2p model and trust the content coming out of it? The idea is ridiculous in every aspect except for those who don't know anything that are buying this paradigm. The DOS possibilities are endless and the MD5 + layered approach already has chinks in the armor. Come on. You filter every participant through some ddos filter provider you don't own, filter good content from bad based on some persistent hash database state and take a look at the content you are introducing in some heuristic (probably comparative) profile. Garbage, move along.

jloveless 9y ago

Author here: >"Public cloud bandwidth is obscenely priced compared to what you can get it for on the CDN market" Amen to that! I think where this comes in to play is when you've already got colo space and excess capacity (e.g. eBay etc) and/or you'd like to leverage other edge pop's outside of your provider (e.g. mainland China). But it also adds some level or protection against correlated backbone issues if you can add p2p edges along other providers (similar to Netflix's design). When we looked at the correlation across existing CDN providers we found it was ~95%[1]. Video streaming specifically is _especially_ bandwidth intensive and will definitely cause issues in corporate LANs. It's one of the reasons we add ASN categorized black listing (e.g. residential vs. hosting vs. corporate etc) [1] https://blog.edgemesh.com/understanding-diversification-networks-and-nobel-prizes-114bf61247c4 https://blog.edgemesh.com/understanding-diversification-netw...

technopriest 9y ago

Hello, lead engineer here. Just to clarify, you don't need a plugin to enable Edgemesh as a user. Everything is 100% browser compliant. Your webmaster adds our one line of code and our one javascript file you are done. Your users will never even see a pop up.

tokenizerrr 9y ago
But will users their bandwidth get abused?
- xori 9y ago
  Probably. https://sig.edgeno.de/edgemesh.client.min.js https://sig.edgeno.de/edgemesh.client.min.js is being added to my uBlock list.
  - chrissnell 9y ago
    Good call. I just submitted an issue to UBlock to get their JS client added to the block lists: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/659 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/659 Sorry Edgemesh team, but this kind of activity without user opt-in is not okay.
    - jloveless 9y ago
      No worries - that's exactly what uBlock is there for! :) We've struggled to find the best way to add opt out on the client side without effecting the actual page itself (e.g. pop-up etc) and would love to get some thoughts on this - please PM me if you have any. Alternatively we went with a more aggressive approach on network based detection (e.g. metered connections, replication across ASN vs intra-ASN etc).
      - gcb0 9y ago
        how can you even know if a connection is metered from within a browser?! thats crazy talk rigth there. there are so many variations that all happen completely outside of the browser domain and/or the connection destination.
        technopriest 9y ago
        via the Network Information API. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Network_Information_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Network_Inf... Connections start metered and are then upgraded when an unmetered connection is successfully detected.

xj9 9y ago

welcome to the future

fundabulousrIII 9y ago
Yes, and this is utter shit. You want to push CDN bandwidth constraints onto consumer networks in some p2p model and trust the content coming out of it? The idea is ridiculous in every aspect except for those who don't know anything that are buying this paradigm. The DOS possibilities are endless and the MD5 + layered approach already has chinks in the armor. Come on. You filter every participant through some ddos filter provider you don't own, filter good content from bad based on some persistent hash database state and take a look at the content you are introducing in some heuristic (probably comparative) profile. Garbage, move along.