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Yeah and riding 1000cc bike is just like driving the bicycle with Extreme Speed /s > In the case of webRTC, I've seen so many projects do this where they’re li

by adql 3y ago

Yeah and riding 1000cc bike is just like driving the bicycle with Extreme Speed /s > In the case of webRTC, I've seen so many projects do this where they’re like, “It‘s peer-to-peer! You just connect to the signaling server and then the things talks!” That’s not really peer-to-peer cause you've got a server. If you've already got a server...my advice is: don't mess around with peer-to-peer stuff, just use that server. The prevalence of NAT really did a number on ability to have properly p2p communication. And, well, rampant insecurity of default user setups making most internet connection be at the very least behind "only allow outgoing traffic or traffic initiated by user" type of firewall. Even if you make all that nice code with each user having it nice and secure private key and having to accept someone's public key to start communicating there is still problem with distribution and ascertaining that user is really who they are. And even if they are, well, they can be compromised, so your local app also have to be very secure or else the potential malware can just go between your contacts and compromise everyone using the app. Or, you can just use SaaS and don't worry about it, or at the very least not worry about more than one app having ability to compromise your system

klabb3 3y ago
NAT is definitely the villain but their are other things as well. You still need a discovery system to find who you want to connect with. An ip isn’t very good because it moves around, and DNS is too slow to be operationally viable. And even if you solve those you have an N^2 problem in the naive solution, and to reduce that you need mesh networks which just don’t have the QoS we’ve come to expect (to my meager knowledge). Imo we should be able to find a better middle ground, because full decentralization is insanely hard. If we had federated standards and tooling like web and email, but for modern use cases, I’d be a happy man. Despite (or perhaps because) the tech craze over the last decade, the developments of such open and useful standards leaves a lot to be desired. Almost everything cool these days is some app with perhaps an api that is branded as a “platform”. We’re basically treading water.

by adql 3y ago

klabb3 3y ago

NAT is definitely the villain but their are other things as well. You still need a discovery system to find who you want to connect with. An ip isn’t very good because it moves around, and DNS is too slow to be operationally viable. And even if you solve those you have an N^2 problem in the naive solution, and to reduce that you need mesh networks which just don’t have the QoS we’ve come to expect (to my meager knowledge). Imo we should be able to find a better middle ground, because full decentralization is insanely hard. If we had federated standards and tooling like web and email, but for modern use cases, I’d be a happy man. Despite (or perhaps because) the tech craze over the last decade, the developments of such open and useful standards leaves a lot to be desired. Almost everything cool these days is some app with perhaps an api that is branded as a “platform”. We’re basically treading water.