Skype's Principal Architect explains why peer-to-peer was eliminated

http://markmail.org/message/exc3srjkx3uu66bz?q=android

by cantrevealname • 13 years ago

308 135 13 years ago

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pronoiac• 13 years ago

Reasons given:

* Avoiding things like the supernode crash from December 2012.[1]

* Supporting the growing mobile share, which can't contribute as supernodes.

[1] http://blogs.voxeo.com/voxeotalks/2010/12/23/skype-outage-i-...

ilaksh2• 13 years ago

Peer-to-peer technologies not only make Skype obsolete, but also make it much harder to spy on people.

By the way, use WebRTC or some completely peer-based video conferencing (WebRTC still uses central servers to establish connections). Don't use Skype. Doesn't make any sense from a technology standpoint or from a privacy standpoint or anything.

I am actually amazed by how little discussion there is on Hacker News and reddit about peer-to-peer technologies for things like video conferencing, publishing and realtime data collaboration.

This whole NSA thing should be enough to push things like named data networking/content centric networking, WebRTC and meshnets (http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan) into the mainstream.

I believe that we are going to move away from a lot of traditional ways of doing things pretty soon. For one, obviously centralized servers have to go. Replace that with encrypted, privacy-focused data oriented networking.

Replace centralized internet backbones with wifi meshnets, private laser systems, even private fiber networks, etc.

Its very nice to have a simple programming language and API available with things like Webkit and Mozilla browsers, but that still puts too much power in the hands of a few companies, and locks us into particular implementations, and also traps us within the browser.

Programmers and businesses do need easy-to-use, cross-platform and cross-device APIs and programming languages. I think we can port a lot of the Web APIs to a language-neutral, binary-neutral, implementation-neutral semantic representation. Dump as much of the unnecessary complexity from Web APIs as possible.

Take a look at what HTML/SVG etc. provide and re-engineer a more general purpose solution for representing all kinds of things _including_ software source code that is based on truly semantic representation inspired by description logics which separates presentation from display/editing.

randallu• 13 years ago

WebRTC still uses central servers to establish connections

WebRTC without a signalling server: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2013/05/17/webrtc-without-a-...

brianchu• 13 years ago

That is not even close to a solution. Then problem of establishing a connection (sharing connection info with both parties) remains in its entirety. The user still has to manually give the other user signaling information. The suggestion given is instant messaging chat (which requires a server).

Not to mention that a STUN server is still needed for NAT traversal, as the author acknowledges.

burntsushi10• 13 years ago

This whole NSA thing should be enough to push things like named data networking/content centric networking

You're damn right. It wasn't even a few days after this whole thing broke that I started working on a simple, distributed and automatic file synchronization program. No third parties and open source.

I was absolutely stunned to find out that nothing out there meets those criteria (despite my best efforts). The only thing that was close was git-annex assistant, but I don't want to use git for simple file synchronization (particularly for large files).

There's also Bittorrent Sync, but it's completely locked down. :-/

pwnna7• 13 years ago

This is all good but the biggest thing right now is that there is no coordinated effort to build a system that's easy to use, secure, and open source.

Everyone can spend their time working on their own solution but no one would use it as everyone's work will be incompatible with each other. This means no one (or rather, not enough people) will use any solutions that are developed and revert back to something like Skype, FB message, etc.

I think what we need is to establish a foundation that coordinates the development efforts for these secure and reliable software packages with a few centralized projects that become a standard (here's hope for WebRTC).

Fixnum• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Unison?

endgame• 13 years ago

Your synchronisation project sounds intersting, do you have source code online yet?

lukifer2• 13 years ago

There's also Bittorrent Sync, but it's completely locked down.

This really surprised me; for some reason, I assumed it was open source. Since the storage is entirely peer-to-peer, I wonder what their business model is?

icebraining• 13 years ago

Just for checking: git-annex doesn't actually check the files into the git repository, so whether the file is small or large is irrelevant to it. Git is only used to keep track of the filenames and their locations.

whadar• 13 years ago

You can try the open sourced project, webrtc based, Sharefest.me for filesharing p2p with no cloud storage...

davedx• 13 years ago

There's a WebRTC demo that does something like this. I can't seem to find the link, but it was linked from one of the official/reference implementation sites.

pthatcherg3• 13 years ago

FYI,

Years ago I worked at a startup which made a distributed, p2p automatic file synchronization system. The startup didn't work out, but the system (mostly) worked. We spent a lot of time trying to solve things that are not largely solved, so if I were to start over today, a lot of the hard work would be done.

To be more specific, if I were you, I would start by using the p2p connectivity and data channel code built into WebRTC (at webrtc.org) or libjingle (at https://code.google.com/p/libjingle/). This is what AeroFS (at https://aerofs.com/) is doing.

By the way, writing a distributed file sync system is not that simple, even though it might seem simple at first. Things get complicated really fast. I think that ones reason one of these hasn't taken off is because it's really hard to get right. But, I still hope it will happen one day.

Oh, and there is http://camlistore.org/, which is an open source project run by a really smart Googler. It's not specific to file syncing, but it has a powerful foundation. A combination of the p2p bits from WebRTC and the distributed data bits from camlistore would be pretty powerful. It makes me wish I could find some more 20% time :).

(Full disclosure: I work at Google, often on the WebRTC code base, and am the maintainer of libjingle)

Scaevolus• 13 years ago

Have you looked into CurveCP? It would provide security and automatic bandwidth throttling with minimal effort.

nemothekid• 13 years ago

I believe that we are going to move away from a lot of traditional ways of doing things pretty soon. For one, obviously centralized servers have to go

This is a pretty bold statement, and I'd like to hear your reasoning for it.

I've always seen that centralized is better than decenteralized, just because its easier. Which is why when we see github go down, some teams can't continue to work even though git itself is decentralized. One click solutions, and decentralized applications tend to not go hand in hand.

I'll agree, if we want to maintain privacy these things will have to be decentralized. However I have a hard time making the case that decentralization will become the defacto standard. Even the web has a psuedo-central hub - DNS.

krichman• 13 years ago

I would say centralised is easier but usually worse instead of better. Most people use some centralised middleman out of convenience. Decentralisation is universally better IMO because there is no single point of failure and no choke point to nickel-and-dime users to death.

some teams can't continue to work even though git is decentralized.

I think you mean some teams won't continue to work because they don't know how to use git. If the de facto center goes down, a team is still able to use git to share changes with each other.

And IPv4/6 is decentralised, DNS makes it convenient for regular people to use. I would say DNS is decentralised as well, just the allocation of domain names comes from a few sources.

Locke16893• 13 years ago

This whole NSA thing should be enough to push things like named data networking/content centric networking, WebRTC and meshnets (http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan) into the mainstream.

I've tried multiple times to engage on this topic. From my experience, the people set of people who are interested in these topics for "freedom" reasons and the set of people who are technically informed enough to contribute even minimally to technical discussions are non-overlapping.

wavefunction• 13 years ago

Don't be so sure. In the great game there must be gambits and feints, misdirections and intentional losses. Some things are better left unsaid in public places with many ears.

Certainly not speaking about myself, but that's the sense I get from talking to people whose interests overlap like you'd hope.

stephengillie7• 13 years ago

The people I talk with about this, who also have the technical acumen to build these things, or those with the political connections to drive change, are both groups of people who have known this level of spying has been going on through their lifetimes, and are unconcerned.

The response on HN has been an order of magnitude larger than the response from any person I know. Of everyone I know, I'm more concerned about the NSA spying than anyone else, and I'm less concerned than most commenters. I begin to wonder if this isn't some kind of nerd-sniping paranoia-groupthink.

rdl2• 13 years ago

There are plenty of people who want to build things in a decentralized, distributed way for fault tolerance and cost reasons -- those people tend to be fairly competent.

Or, decentralization in the face of a very specific threat (e.g. MAFIAA and piracy-optimized things like BitTorrent, and FinCEN and things like Bitcoin).

Until recently, there weren't widely-believed threats to general Internet use.

nano111• 13 years ago

everything still goes through your ISP when using peer to peer... but yes to encryption.

igravious• 13 years ago

Some entity (or service) has to provide your internet access. So perhaps you are always going to need an ISP to some extent. Or you are thinking mesh? Maybe in the future ISPs will compete on privacy issues and concerns in addition to how they compete now: bandwidth and cost. Maybe we'll have municipal WiFi, maybe we'll have mesh. We should work towards a mix of mesh and muni as well as a more privacy-focused ISP model. One can dream :)

pfraze• 13 years ago

Check out http://blog.grimwire.com/#2013-04-04-grimwire.md

lnanek2• 13 years ago

I have a friend who is really into WebRTC, and help him with debugging sometimes. Honestly, I've never found a network I use often that it works on. Doesn't work on my AT&T LTE except for presence. Doesn't work at all on my work internet. Video doesn't work on my work guest internet outside our firewall. Doesn't work from my hotel internet. I haven't tried at home, but I'm only home a couple weekends a month, so that's useless anyway.

WebRTC depends on things non-home internet filters out or prevents, so it is useless. The way to get around that? Use central servers and make your traffic look like HTTP. Heck, even STUN protocols admit there are cases where it won't work, but WebRTC fans seem to think they'll always be able to get a P2P connection. The technology is just naive as far as I'm concerned. Something that only works on home internet and a few open networks is worthless.

rdl2• 13 years ago

Sure, but as long as there's federation or something like it, you get to pick your choice of a server (including running your own). That's good enough for me.

jokoon• 13 years ago

Those techs are not taking off because there are no standards.

nkoren• 13 years ago

This whole NSA thing should be enough to push things like named data networking/content centric networking, WebRTC and meshnets (http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan) into the mainstream.

Mozilla is looking at making a foray into this with its "Firecloud" initiative[1]. While Firecloud itself appears to be a relatively innocuous endeavour, it would lay the infrastructure for P2P RTC-based meshnets, which are something I've been hoping to see for a while now.

1: http://literaci.es/firecloud

seclorum• 13 years ago

>>>Its very nice to have a simple programming language and API available with things like Webkit and Mozilla browsers, but that still puts too much power in the hands of a few companies, and locks us into particular implementations, and also traps us within the browser. Programmers and businesses do need easy-to-use, cross-platform and cross-device APIs and programming languages. I think we can port a lot of the Web APIs to a language-neutral, binary-neutral, implementation-neutral semantic representation. Dump as much of the unnecessary complexity from Web APIs as possible.

Well, this is exactly why I am a huge fan of technologies like MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) where the VM is under the control of the implementor, whose efforts to put the working VM on Platform-[X] results in a single codebase that will run on all Platform[s]. In my opinion, it pretty much matches your requirements, from the simple language, easy to use API, and more importantly: control over the host environment.

The only issue is that competence in MOAI in developing a cross-platform truly 100% compatible code base means you have to scale your attention from the up-front App, down to the lower-level host code. Or else. But thats 100% of the fun, imho ..

Note that this is just one of many such solutions to the issues you describe, and it is indeed a fertile playground for anyone with as much affinity for Lua - and similar tools - as one must have, to suffer the platform wars pleasantly, these days ..

dhimes• 13 years ago

Bear in mind that there are at least five spying programs going on. One is server-based (PRISM), but the others (FAIRVIEW, BLARNEY, and two others whose names were redacted) apparently monitor the pipes.

This isn't so much of a technical problem as a political one. Although, in principle I agree- I would much rather have p2p so I could at least have a fighting chance via encryption.

pthatcherg3• 13 years ago

Why do you think WebRTC puts too much power in the hands of a few companies? It's completely open source and can do everything you want. You can take all the source code from either webrtc.org or chromium.org and use it to build your own end-to-end full encrypted communication system that no one can hack (as far as we know, and assuming you have secure device and OS).

The implementation at webrtc.org gives you cross-platform, cross-device source code in C++. You can build any API on top of that, in any language you want. It's already really easy to use if you an to use the HTML5 WebRTC API built into Chrome (and the same API in Firefox).

It seems to me that you have everything you want, or at least all the pieces of the puzzle. Someone just needs to do the work of assembling them the way you want them, and then of convincing the people with whom you want to talk (your friends, family, or business associates) to use your securely built communication system. Technology-wise it's possible, even fairly easy if you know what you want. But the social aspect (convincing others to use it) is more difficult.

(Full Disclosure: I work at Google, and I have worked both on Hangouts and WebRTC)

ilaksh2• 13 years ago

I'm actually really excited about WebRTC and have a project using it.

I was talking more generally about Web browsers and web APIs, not specifically WebRTC. I still see the web platform as currently the most open, practical solution we have.

However, the reality is that Google IS still a business. And so quite a lot of this key infrastructure, although it is open source, is still being packaged up by a giant private company.

Yes, we can use the web platform including things like WebRTC to do what we want, but I believe the the medium and long-term future will move away from specific implementations by a few companies and towards open machine-processable specifications.

I believe that the way forward will be to move away from textual programming languages and into truly semantic representations of programs, protocols, and implementations. Obviously it will be many years before this is mainstream.

wmf4• 13 years ago

P2P is harder to build and harder to monetize than client-server, so it's like poison to startups. Crackpots are still into it, but they don't give a good appearance.

drivebyacct27• 13 years ago

"Crackpots"? Is this a serious, honest comment? Or is a crackpot anyone who doesn't choose and create philosophically and technically inferior products for the sake of "Just one more social network that will surely be worth millions if I can make it centralized and proprietary and non-inter-operable and get just enough users." SOUNDS GREAT.

"P2P is harder to build" is an equally loaded statement, though you've caught my intrigue. I wrote a WebRTC signaling server in a weekend that is capable of letting peers establish N:N connections with each other for video conferencing.

Outside of cases where TURN would have been necessary, the clients were all connected, P2P with encrypted connections. (And even with TURN, I believe end-to-end encryption could be ensured, but the traffic would go through a third party)

dfc• 13 years ago

Archive that displays more than a paltry 15 lines at once:

https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2013/06/sort/time...

lancewiggs• 13 years ago

And the original submission that points to it. fwiw: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5929404

Aloha• 13 years ago

The reasons given lined up with my own thoughts. It's very hard to build a stable, reliable and self repairing distributed network. Communicating status and presence info is the largest challenge that distributed networks is the hardest and most difficult challenge you have, whereas with a centralized server, and 'register' its fairly easy to push updates out for all of this. Also, the server can be set to maintain status for the subscriber, even if they are not really connected.

runn1ng• 13 years ago

To anyone using Skype for actual work, the problems with peer-to-peer messaging become rather obvious, as messages from one device appear only when both that device and the receiver are online, which gets really chaotic when communicating with more people at the same time.

Basically, the perception is "if you don't send the message when all of you are online, really weird things happen".

pwnna7• 13 years ago

Still, that does not mean that encryption needs to be dropped (or e2e encryption needs to be dropped, or that MS has your encryption keys).

jnbiche2• 13 years ago

Bitmessage is a peer-to-peer messaging system that doesn't require both participants to be online at the same time to exchange messages:

White paper: https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf [pdf link]

mistermann• 13 years ago

One related thing that bothers me, if you use more than one computer for your Skype chats, the conversations aren't fully synchronized among your PC's. With always on supernodes, this is trivial, yet it still doesn't work. How Skype itself never fixed this, and MS after spending billions on the acquisition also still hasn't fixed it boggles my mind. If they're not fixing simple but very important bugs like this, what are all those developers working on?

drivebyacct27• 13 years ago

I've been saying this for, probably close to a year now. Moving supernodes from being personal consumers to running in a cloud is a good thing and has minimal impact on privacy.

Even comments here indicate people clearly didn't read this email or fail to understand it at all.

pwnna7• 13 years ago

Maybe I am understanding the system wrong.. but can you explain how it is good for privacy when Microsoft can decrypt your messages (They acknowledged that by saying they can do spam filtering and link blocking).

I am unaware of a way to ensure privacy but still have a third party have the ability to read your messages. However, I'm open to ideas.

tjohns• 13 years ago

You're both talking about two different topics...

The location of the "supernodes" (on client machines, or in a datacenter) is separate from whether encrypted traffic can be read by a third party. Using a totally decentralized system makes it a little harder to eavesdrop, but it's entirely possible to develop a completely secure system in the centralized model.

That said, I've never been terribly impressed with Skype's security model. Even before Microsoft bought them. It might have been decentralized, and the traffic might be encrypted, but the encryption lacks a strong trust model. There's never been any way to make sure that your connection hasn't been MITM'ed, since the system doesn't provide any way to verify the identity (key fingerprint) of the person you're talking to.

The current encryption is fine if you're worried about rogue network administrators, but has never been sufficient if you're worried about being targeted by state actors.

drivebyacct27• 13 years ago

I can think of ways, but I don't know how Skype does it. The client could have a local blacklist, they could only send hashes of URLs to a server, etc.

mtgx4• 13 years ago

Minimal impact on privacy? I wouldn't say NSA having access to all Skype calls a "minimal impact on privacy".

tincholio• 13 years ago

Given how supernodes worked, the NSA might have had as many supernodes as it wanted, with your traffic going through them and you none the wiser. Hence, your argument doesn't stand, really.

drivebyacct27• 13 years ago

Seriously? I give up.

nadaviv• 13 years ago

Most of the points mentioned make it reasonable to use central servers, but why did they need to drop the p2p encryption?

The only thing that seems related is "and other nice features like spam filtering and malicious URL removal" which he briefly mentions, but I don't find it a good enough reason to drop encryption and make it possible to intercept communication. Seems like an awful tradeoff.

nextweek2• 13 years ago

Taking off my tin foil hat for a moment, I would propose that encryption adds latency which they felt most users didn't care about. However most users demand land line quality voice.

wfunction• 13 years ago

Relevant: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/think-your-skype-mes...

crazygringo• 13 years ago

I'm curious... I understand that the Microsoft servers are functioning as supernodes now.

But when one computer calls another, and neither are behind NAT/firewall/etc., is the actual audio stream going directly between computers, or are they both sending the actual audio to/from the Microsoft servers?

Obviously Microsoft could choose to redirect it through their servers whenever desired, but I assume that audio communication is still direct, whenever possible?

stephengillie7• 13 years ago

I don't think the scenario you're presenting is realistic. Either an exposed PC on the internet has its own firewall, or it's already exploited.

tokenizerrr2• 13 years ago

Same lan network?

zurn• 13 years ago

Nope - centralised network firewalls never became popular for consumer users. Microsoft started shipping a default-on host firewall in XP SP2, those let the user get prompted on what apps to allow. Lately corporations have been moving to host firewalls too since the "crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside" intranet mindset is increasingly incompatible with the modern world.

throwawaykf3• 13 years ago

It really isn't that hard to test. Any of a million packet sniffing or network monitoring tools could be used to trivially settle this.

I cannot understand why none of the alarmist articles about Skype (some even by so-called "cypherpunks") has ever even bothered to run such a simple check.

FWIW, I ran my own simple test using netstat when Skype first centralized the supernodes. I walked away satisfied when I still saw primarily P2P activity during voice/video calls to an IP that belonged to the remote party. (It used UPnP port forwarding to traverse the NAT/firewall, if anybody is curious.) But then, I'm the trusting kind and dug no further. And it's been a couple years since. If there truly are "hackers" on here, I encourage them to try their own experiments and share them.

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

And it's been a couple years since. //

It was bought by MS in 2011. It's literally the last couple of years that people are concerned about. It's recent changes that have moved from distributed to central routing.

From the OP article (apparently by Skype [past] principal architect):

"[...] people who were concerned about privacy -- including many of us in the security industry -- used Skype for secure communications.
Both eBay and Silverlake maintained this architecture, as well as the Luxembourg HQ.
Since being acquired by Microsoft, however, the service has been re-architected to run through MSFT-owned servers, rendering encryption functionally meaningless and making it just as easy as POTS to monitor.
None of this -- neither the $7.5B acquisition itself, nor the decision to move to a datacenter model -- make strategic or business sense for Microsoft as far as I can tell." //

anologwintermut• 13 years ago

Its funny, people got so caught up on the fact that Microsoft must have changed Skype's architecture to allow wiretapping. Via Snowden/PRISM we know wiretapping of Skype was possible well before the acquisition, let alone the redesign.

acqq• 13 years ago

Exactly!

Prism slide: Skype: 2/6/11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg

But "Microsoft to acquire Skype": May 10, 2011

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20061371-17.html

mtgx4• 13 years ago

What about collecting all https links, with the excuse that they're protecting you against spam (as if most spam links are https)?

throwawaykf3• 13 years ago

In a previous discussion on HN, a HN user checked and confirmed that MS servers hit both HTTP and HTTPS links. Unfortunately I can't find that comment at the moment, so here's an Ars article that reports the same behavior:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/think-your-skype-mes...

bifrost• 13 years ago

As a network engineer, I always knew when skype was misbehaving because those users always came up to me and complained. They complained because our corporate firewalls blocked them for using thousands and thousands of TCP connections when they became supernodes.

They asked "how do we fix this" and sadly the answer was generally (if you were on a mac), you don't, just shutdown your client when you're not using it and it won't become a supernode. It wouldn't really have been a big deal if it was 5-10 connections, but it wasn't so it became a problem.

I assume eliminating the crypto has to do with eliminating overhead, but it could have to do with DPI and making it more firewall friendly.

bosky101• 13 years ago

   >
   > these devices are a lot different: they're running on battery, sometimes on WiFi 
   > but often on expensive (both in money and battery) 2G or 3G data networks,
   > and essentially "off" most of the time. 
   > On iOS devices, applications are killed and evicted from memory when they attempt 
   > to do too much background processing or use too much memory. 
   > On Windows RT and Windows 8 Modern applications, when the application is not in
   > the foreground we only get a few seconds of CPU execution time every 15 minutes
   > and again, strict memory limitations if we want to stay loaded.
   > And when the Skype application is unloaded, it can no longer receive incoming 
   > calls or IMs, rendering it a lot less useful.
   >

This is pretty much why/how all IM clients for iphone/ipad/android work as well.

( i work on verbs.im, we're a team of 4 now, here's a link to our privacy policy http://includetech.co/privacy/verbs)

The server becomes a proxy for your account, and being able to send push notifications.

Your apps become thinner clients needing lesser battery, bandwidth.

Infact we've got a step further, and replaced XMPP/HTTP with MQTT to save even more battery.

( here's a nice article profiling power consumption of MQTT vs HTTP here across wifi/3g: http://stephendnicholas.com/archives/1217 )

That being said, the recent iOS 7 have introduced API's for longer running background apps

Torgo• 13 years ago

I don't know why this necessitates the removal of supernodes though, because it has always been the case that desktop clients could disable supernode functionality with a checkbox option. Why would it ever be enabled (or even an option) on a mobile client? Or is the issue simply that the majority of clients have become non-supernode-capable and it became an issue? I wish he would have went into more detail on this because at first glance the explanation is not sufficient to justify the change.

wmf4• 13 years ago

Kaufman's point is that phones don't even have enough resources to be a normal Skype peer, let alone a supernode. Thus work had to be shifted from peers to servers. I guess they could have shifted all that work to supernodes, but it was probably simpler to just put that functionality in reliable MS data centers. Also, I don't know that it's safe to send iOS/Android push messages from random PCs.

smutticus• 13 years ago

When my non-technical friends want to Skype with me I tell them to go with Jitsi. ZRTP all the way.

https://jitsi.org/

People with a clue should no longer be using Skype.

specto• 13 years ago

I attempted to use jitsi with ddg's xmpp server, however the video and audio would never work between us. It was always one or the other. I hope the kinks are worked out as I would like to stop using Skype asap.

noptic• 13 years ago

TL;DR Skype P2P performs on mobile devices so we removed the featues people loved about Skype and kept the name.

antocv• 13 years ago

I liked this part

"In the case of instant messaging, we have merged the Skype and Windows Messenger message delivery backend services, and this now gets you delivery of messages even when the recipient is offline, and other nice features like spam filtering and malicious URL removal."

And wish to add to that, other nice features like "censorship and loss of privacy."

I remember when I ditched MSN in favor of a what I thought was a secure communications solution, I waved goodbye to Microsoft. Here I am again, my messages routed yet again through their backend.

atesti• 13 years ago

And let's not forget how Microsoft scanned all private urls that were mentioned inside Skype chats recently:

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/May/78

bskap2• 13 years ago

Um yes, that's covered in the "malicious URL removal" part. Hard to do malicious URL removal without, you know, looking at the URLs to see if they need to be removed.

vr000m• 13 years ago

WebRTC is not a silver bullet, it mainly standardizes the profile for enabling interoperable media (via SRTP, SDP,...) and an API to control it from JS.

The signaling is open, so it is mainly up to the developer to decide the topology they want to enable: p2p, mesh, centralized MCU, hub-and-spoke, overlays, etc.

However, in many cases you'd have to use a TURN server to communicate from within very restrictive firewalls. This turn server could possibly run by anyone, including you. Just need to call the appropriate API with your own TURN server.

I run restund (a open source turn server) on an amazon instance and route my packets via that (I also remove all other ICE candidates and just keep the TURN).

magoon• 13 years ago

Sounds legit.

FiloSottile• 13 years ago

    In the case of
    instant messaging, we have merged the Skype and Windows Messenger message
    delivery backend services, and this now gets you delivery of messages even
    when the recipient is offline, and other nice features like spam filtering
    and malicious URL removal.

This relates well to the HTTPS url visiting thing of a while back.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

To collect and store the data, stupid.)

hawleyal• 13 years ago

Why not let me run my own server then, for me and my friends?

preneur• 13 years ago

The original design of the Internet was peer to peer.

This is not some revilutionary idea. It's getting back to the original design.

Small scale peer to peer networks can still be achieved, easily, even in the presence of "firewalls", "ISP's" and "NAT".

You need a least one reachable IP address to be able to pierce NAT and "bootstrap" the network. Easy.

You need to do some simple encapsulation. Again, easy.

You need an OS with a TAP interface. Easy? iPhone denies programmers the TAP device. And any other company controlling a mobile OS could easily block your peer to peer networking capability by interfering with your access to the TAP device.

Maybe it makes more sense to distribute your peer to peer solution as part of an open source OS that will run on many hardware architectures than to distribute a solution that purports to run on all the popular OS's.

Maybe "apps" don't have to run on the OS that does the peer to peer connection. Maybe they can run "through" it instead: point your router/gateway settings at this open source OS, running on some small form factor pocket-sized computer like the Pi, and voila, you have a decent simulation of the "original" end-to-end Internet that you can use with people you know (the original Internet was among people who knew each other).

Skype's Principal Architect explains why peer-to-peer was eliminated

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