5 ms·

We need peer to peer. These central hubs can’t hack the traffic.

by quickthrower2 7y ago

philbarr 7y ago
WebRTC is peer to peer and is supported in most major browsers.
- yomly 7y ago
  From experience WebRTC starts to fall down in rooms of more than 8 people for video chat. Meanwhile Zoom and Discord (who use servers) can achieve much greater so YMMV That said p2p definitely has its advantages
  - dana321 7y ago
    Its just a case of p2p with people running servers (like bitcoint does) and differentiating between the two based on a bandwidth test.
- basejumping 7y ago
  Doesn't WebRTC need a TURN server to proxy traffic when you're behind a NAT? It's not really peer to peer when all the data goes through a central point.
  - johncolanduoni 7y ago
    TURN only proxies if it’s unable to make a connection via STUN, which requires the server to handle only a few packets when the initial connection is formed and provides direct peer to peer access after. Many home NATs only need the latter.
michaelt 7y ago
Peer-to-peer has its advantages, but it's no panacea. After all, practically everyone is behind NAT these days, and it's so rare for an application to ask you to open a port in your firewall, most users probably don't know how to do it. And early videoconferencing was famous for its unreliability - even simple things like people being able to join calls. Particularly as users might be behind restrictive firewalls on corporate networks or cell phone connections. Video calling that only works 95% of the time isn't good enough for things like job interviews :) And users don't only expect one-to-one calls - everyone offers multi-party calls. If eight people want to watch Bob while he's talking, you've got to find eight videos' worth of upload bandwidth from somewhere. And there are far more people trying to video call from battery-powered devices and metered connections than there were 15 years ago. If your competitors' apps uploads one video stream and yours uploads eight at once, users are going to notice the battery and data consumption. And if you only have to test compatibility between your server and every version of your software, that's a much simpler task than testing compatibility of every possible n-way call between different versions of your software. Especially as you'll have to support Windows, OS X, Android and iPhone at the very least.
- the8472 7y ago
  You could still do opportunistic P2P to lessen server load. And NAT is an issue, but not insurmountable, perhaps both sides have IPv6 or one side has a router with UPnP, PCP or a NAT implementation that makes hole punching easy.
- dana321 7y ago
  Thats a pretty negative picture you paint there. To me, those are fun things to solve. The answer is to still have clients and servers, just that the servers deal with the grunt work of routing traffic and the clients just stream the data through a server. Push vs pull, depending if you can get upnp to open a port to the client. Skype was originally a peer to peer application, seemed pretty popular and while it still was p2p? It was written by the people who wrote Kazaa, remember that?
  - syshum 7y ago
    and one of the primary reasons Skype is no longer p2p is to violate user privacy not because of technical reasons
    - amaranth 7y ago
      I think Ars Technica's take on this makes the most sense. Basically the new architecture might make violating privacy easier but they could do that with the old one too and there are legitimate improvements from the new architecture that are more than enough explanation for the switch. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/skype-finalizes-its-move-to-the-cloud-ignores-the-elephant-in-the-room/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/skype...
      - syshum 7y ago
        The main reason was to make is compliant with the desire of US Law Enforcement. but yea continues to believe what you want. I really dont care All of the performance improvements could have been done while maintaining the core of P2P, the ONLY reason to centralize it is to make it easy to tap, and harvest data from
michaelcampbell 7y ago
But then your data can't be taken and tracked and sold. Never happen.
MockObject 7y ago
If only we hadn't killed multicast.

We need peer to peer. These central hubs can’t hack the traffic.

philbarr 7y ago

WebRTC is peer to peer and is supported in most major browsers.

yomly 7y ago
From experience WebRTC starts to fall down in rooms of more than 8 people for video chat. Meanwhile Zoom and Discord (who use servers) can achieve much greater so YMMV That said p2p definitely has its advantages
- dana321 7y ago
  Its just a case of p2p with people running servers (like bitcoint does) and differentiating between the two based on a bandwidth test.
basejumping 7y ago
Doesn't WebRTC need a TURN server to proxy traffic when you're behind a NAT? It's not really peer to peer when all the data goes through a central point.
- johncolanduoni 7y ago
  TURN only proxies if it’s unable to make a connection via STUN, which requires the server to handle only a few packets when the initial connection is formed and provides direct peer to peer access after. Many home NATs only need the latter.

michaelt 7y ago

Peer-to-peer has its advantages, but it's no panacea. After all, practically everyone is behind NAT these days, and it's so rare for an application to ask you to open a port in your firewall, most users probably don't know how to do it. And early videoconferencing was famous for its unreliability - even simple things like people being able to join calls. Particularly as users might be behind restrictive firewalls on corporate networks or cell phone connections. Video calling that only works 95% of the time isn't good enough for things like job interviews :) And users don't only expect one-to-one calls - everyone offers multi-party calls. If eight people want to watch Bob while he's talking, you've got to find eight videos' worth of upload bandwidth from somewhere. And there are far more people trying to video call from battery-powered devices and metered connections than there were 15 years ago. If your competitors' apps uploads one video stream and yours uploads eight at once, users are going to notice the battery and data consumption. And if you only have to test compatibility between your server and every version of your software, that's a much simpler task than testing compatibility of every possible n-way call between different versions of your software. Especially as you'll have to support Windows, OS X, Android and iPhone at the very least.

the8472 7y ago
You could still do opportunistic P2P to lessen server load. And NAT is an issue, but not insurmountable, perhaps both sides have IPv6 or one side has a router with UPnP, PCP or a NAT implementation that makes hole punching easy.
dana321 7y ago
Thats a pretty negative picture you paint there. To me, those are fun things to solve. The answer is to still have clients and servers, just that the servers deal with the grunt work of routing traffic and the clients just stream the data through a server. Push vs pull, depending if you can get upnp to open a port to the client. Skype was originally a peer to peer application, seemed pretty popular and while it still was p2p? It was written by the people who wrote Kazaa, remember that?
- syshum 7y ago
  and one of the primary reasons Skype is no longer p2p is to violate user privacy not because of technical reasons
  - amaranth 7y ago
    I think Ars Technica's take on this makes the most sense. Basically the new architecture might make violating privacy easier but they could do that with the old one too and there are legitimate improvements from the new architecture that are more than enough explanation for the switch. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/skype-finalizes-its-move-to-the-cloud-ignores-the-elephant-in-the-room/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/skype...
    - syshum 7y ago
      The main reason was to make is compliant with the desire of US Law Enforcement. but yea continues to believe what you want. I really dont care All of the performance improvements could have been done while maintaining the core of P2P, the ONLY reason to centralize it is to make it easy to tap, and harvest data from

michaelcampbell 7y ago

But then your data can't be taken and tracked and sold. Never happen.

MockObject 7y ago

If only we hadn't killed multicast.