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> HTTP servers (microservices): By combining Service Workers with virtualized TCP sockets, we will allow HTTP servers inside the WebVM to be reachable from the

> HTTP servers (microservices): By combining Service Workers with virtualized TCP sockets, we will allow HTTP servers inside the WebVM to be reachable from the browser itself. A JavaScript API will be exposed allowing to connect an iframe to the internal servers. This is mostly supported already, although not exposed on the current demo page. A similar solution could be used to support REST microservices as well since Service Workers also handle fetch/XHR requests. I wonder if this can be used to create a semi-decentralized website where visitors automatically served a vm to run, turning them into an edge server to offload requests from other visitors. The more active visitors, the more edge servers you have. Infinite scaling on the cheap! The visitors may not like you abusing their browser though, but there might be use case where this is acceptable, such as popular community run websites that too expensive to run due to huge amount of traffic.

foota 5y ago
I don't see how these could be exposed to another person's browser as an http site, my reading of this is that they are exposed to the user's environment running inside WebVM. To my knowledge the only way that one browser can talk to another is through peer to peer webrtc, but that requires a handshake.
- neurostimulant 5y ago
  Websites rendered via websocket instead of http is already possible these days using various frameworks, right (e.g. Phoenix.LiveView)? It might be possible to add webrtc support in addition to websocket for transport. The initial connection is served from a centralized server, just enough to render the initial page and initialized webrtc handshake. After that, subsequent page navigation is handled over webrtc to available peers. The vm will also get downloaded over this channel, turning the visitor into a node to expand the network.
  - foota 5y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking about this, but at that point there's not much reason to prefer a vm over just writing a server that's compiled to wasm, if you're going to have to write something that renders via javascript instead of serving http?
    - foota 5y ago
      Come to think of it, this kind of looks like an isomorphic SPA if you squint enough.
    - neurostimulant 5y ago
      Having a vm means you get to use a huge amount of pre-existing softwares instead of writing them by yourself, and even expose them on webrtc using something like webrtc-socket-proxy. Ideally you'll just need to write some glue code to tie them all.
NavinF 5y ago
If you just want to serve static files between browsers, you can do that with WebTorrent. I also searched “webrtc rpc” and found another piece of the puzzle. I suspect that running arbitrary computations on peer browsers is uncommon today because verifying the output of an RPC executed on hostile machines is nontrivial unless you’re serving static files with a known hash, mining crypto, or solving an NP problem. I guess you’d also need a quota system to prevent users from taking over your botnet’s CPU time by spamming peer browsers with expensive RPCs.
geocar 5y ago
> I wonder if this can be used to create a semi-decentralized website where visitors automatically served a vm to run, turning them into an edge server to offload requests from other visitors. The more active visitors, the more edge servers you have. Infinite scaling on the cheap! The visitors may not like you abusing their browser though, but there might be use case where this is acceptable, such as popular community run websites that too expensive to run due to huge amount of traffic. You can buy ads. Ads cost about as much as ads, so you can buy and sell the same unit, and then run some compute for free. I ported k(5) to html+js (ecmascript) during Iverson College (I think this was 2014?) and used webtorrent to connect to secondaries to run a scale test. The cpus are cheap, and they are slow, but it was a lot of (distributed) fun. I pitched the idea to KX (and a few others) to sell compute for fractions-of-pennies-per-hour but I think it was still a little early. Do you think Now's the time?
- neurostimulant 5y ago
  Hold on, so you buy an ad slot, serve your code in that ad slot, AND serve another ad inside that slot to resell? Is that actually allowed by ads provider? The idea of running vm inside an ad to harvest compute from unsuspecting visitors... I think this might accelerate widespread use of adblockers even more if you successfully deploy this in the wild because people will notice ads are getting heavier.
  - geocar 5y ago
    > Hold on, so you buy an ad slot, serve your code in that ad slot, AND serve another ad inside that slot to resell? Exactly. > Is that actually allowed by ads provider? On some ad networks it's prohibited by ToS and (in some cases) a review process, but it is extremely difficult to prevent in practice, especially if you have any understanding of how this works. I estimate perhaps as much as 50-90% of Google's adsense revenue comes from this, so they aren't (directly) incentivized to stop it. > The idea of running vm inside an ad to harvest compute from unsuspecting visitors... I think this might accelerate widespread use of adblockers even more if you successfully deploy this in the wild because people will notice ads are getting heavier. Perhaps, but people also have a lot of idle cores, so if you don't block networking and you monitor system performance carefully to ensure you don't affect things, for the most part people simply won't notice. Quite a few people have been caught out doing wasteful things like trying to generate "coin", which definitely doesn't help, but there's also some interesting applications that have been run on volunteer-cpu-time (folding, seti, etc), so it seems plausible with some charitable examples and some care to avoid impact, this might be a doer?
m3at 5y ago
Sibling comments have mentioned web torrents, you could also look at IPFS for something related to what you're describing (without the abuse) https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/

foota 5y ago

I don't see how these could be exposed to another person's browser as an http site, my reading of this is that they are exposed to the user's environment running inside WebVM. To my knowledge the only way that one browser can talk to another is through peer to peer webrtc, but that requires a handshake.

neurostimulant 5y ago
Websites rendered via websocket instead of http is already possible these days using various frameworks, right (e.g. Phoenix.LiveView)? It might be possible to add webrtc support in addition to websocket for transport. The initial connection is served from a centralized server, just enough to render the initial page and initialized webrtc handshake. After that, subsequent page navigation is handled over webrtc to available peers. The vm will also get downloaded over this channel, turning the visitor into a node to expand the network.
- foota 5y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking about this, but at that point there's not much reason to prefer a vm over just writing a server that's compiled to wasm, if you're going to have to write something that renders via javascript instead of serving http?
  - foota 5y ago
    Come to think of it, this kind of looks like an isomorphic SPA if you squint enough.
  - neurostimulant 5y ago
    Having a vm means you get to use a huge amount of pre-existing softwares instead of writing them by yourself, and even expose them on webrtc using something like webrtc-socket-proxy. Ideally you'll just need to write some glue code to tie them all.

NavinF 5y ago

If you just want to serve static files between browsers, you can do that with WebTorrent. I also searched “webrtc rpc” and found another piece of the puzzle. I suspect that running arbitrary computations on peer browsers is uncommon today because verifying the output of an RPC executed on hostile machines is nontrivial unless you’re serving static files with a known hash, mining crypto, or solving an NP problem. I guess you’d also need a quota system to prevent users from taking over your botnet’s CPU time by spamming peer browsers with expensive RPCs.

geocar 5y ago

> I wonder if this can be used to create a semi-decentralized website where visitors automatically served a vm to run, turning them into an edge server to offload requests from other visitors. The more active visitors, the more edge servers you have. Infinite scaling on the cheap! The visitors may not like you abusing their browser though, but there might be use case where this is acceptable, such as popular community run websites that too expensive to run due to huge amount of traffic. You can buy ads. Ads cost about as much as ads, so you can buy and sell the same unit, and then run some compute for free. I ported k(5) to html+js (ecmascript) during Iverson College (I think this was 2014?) and used webtorrent to connect to secondaries to run a scale test. The cpus are cheap, and they are slow, but it was a lot of (distributed) fun. I pitched the idea to KX (and a few others) to sell compute for fractions-of-pennies-per-hour but I think it was still a little early. Do you think Now's the time?

neurostimulant 5y ago
Hold on, so you buy an ad slot, serve your code in that ad slot, AND serve another ad inside that slot to resell? Is that actually allowed by ads provider? The idea of running vm inside an ad to harvest compute from unsuspecting visitors... I think this might accelerate widespread use of adblockers even more if you successfully deploy this in the wild because people will notice ads are getting heavier.
- geocar 5y ago
  > Hold on, so you buy an ad slot, serve your code in that ad slot, AND serve another ad inside that slot to resell? Exactly. > Is that actually allowed by ads provider? On some ad networks it's prohibited by ToS and (in some cases) a review process, but it is extremely difficult to prevent in practice, especially if you have any understanding of how this works. I estimate perhaps as much as 50-90% of Google's adsense revenue comes from this, so they aren't (directly) incentivized to stop it. > The idea of running vm inside an ad to harvest compute from unsuspecting visitors... I think this might accelerate widespread use of adblockers even more if you successfully deploy this in the wild because people will notice ads are getting heavier. Perhaps, but people also have a lot of idle cores, so if you don't block networking and you monitor system performance carefully to ensure you don't affect things, for the most part people simply won't notice. Quite a few people have been caught out doing wasteful things like trying to generate "coin", which definitely doesn't help, but there's also some interesting applications that have been run on volunteer-cpu-time (folding, seti, etc), so it seems plausible with some charitable examples and some care to avoid impact, this might be a doer?

m3at 5y ago

Sibling comments have mentioned web torrents, you could also look at IPFS for something related to what you're describing (without the abuse) https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/