Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
changelog.complete.org
Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
1–10 of 215 posts
Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
#2Most of these criticisms are solvable problems.
If you make a direct connection to other users, they see your IP address. So use Tor or a VPN.
Many P2P lookup systems assign identifiers for routing etc. So assign ephemeral ones for anything that doesn't need a persistent one, and make sure persistent ones aren't suitable for correlation, either by not using the same identifier for multiple services by the same person, or by using the same identifier for multiple services operated by a large number of unrelated people, or both.
Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
#3Most of these criticisms are solvable problems. If you make a direct connection to other users, they see your IP address. So use Tor or a VPN. Many P2P lookup systems assign identifiers for routing etc. So assign ephemeral ones for anything that doesn't need a persistent one, and make sure persistent ones aren't suitable for correlation, either by not using the same identifier for multiple services by the same person…
That is however just another layer of complexity when the article already talks about the complexity of running a matrix server.
Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
#4Most of these criticisms are solvable problems. If you make a direct connection to other users, they see your IP address. So use Tor or a VPN. Many P2P lookup systems assign identifiers for routing etc. So assign ephemeral ones for anything that doesn't need a persistent one, and make sure persistent ones aren't suitable for correlation, either by not using the same identifier for multiple services by the same person…
This response has been written a thousand times, but here goes again...
Using a VPN or Tor is not a viable option for the average person.
Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
#5A bit annoying how servers meant to be run by people themselves are written in awfully slow languages. Python for matrix server is a terrible choice. Even worse for home assistant.
If it can't fit on raspberry pi it's useless.
Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
#6Most of these criticisms are solvable problems. If you make a direct connection to other users, they see your IP address. So use Tor or a VPN. Many P2P lookup systems assign identifiers for routing etc. So assign ephemeral ones for anything that doesn't need a persistent one, and make sure persistent ones aren't suitable for correlation, either by not using the same identifier for multiple services by the same person…
This response has been written a thousand times, but here goes again... Using a VPN or Tor is not a viable option for the average person.
Tor can be embedded into an application. Sadly, the service quality over Tor would be much worse than over a regular Internet connection.
Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
#7A bit annoying how servers meant to be run by people themselves are written in awfully slow languages. Python for matrix server is a terrible choice. Even worse for home assistant. If it can't fit on raspberry pi it's useless.
They're working on a Go server impl, "Dendrite" which is supposed to be far faster and use less RAM.
I was hoping for Rust, and I think there is a 3rd-party Rust server, but anything's better than Python. Node.js would probably be better than Python.
Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
#8Most of these criticisms are solvable problems. If you make a direct connection to other users, they see your IP address. So use Tor or a VPN. Many P2P lookup systems assign identifiers for routing etc. So assign ephemeral ones for anything that doesn't need a persistent one, and make sure persistent ones aren't suitable for correlation, either by not using the same identifier for multiple services by the same person…
This response has been written a thousand times, but here goes again... Using a VPN or Tor is not a viable option for the average person.
Using TCP/IP used to not be a viable option for the average person either?
Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
#9Can anyone chime in on their experiences hosting a synapse server? I have close to a dozen people on mine (although we don't federate much with the network as a whole, I set it up initially for a couple of groupchats/DMs with friends) and I'm not even close to hitting the limits of the $5/mo Digitalocean server I put it on. Does federating with the greater Matrix ecosystem cost that much extra processing power, that one user's chats are taking multiple gigs of RAM and gigabytes of space? It looks like the author's using multiple bridges, which could be a problem, but my understanding is that bridges are separate programs that hook into synapse via an API.
I will agree that voip/video isn't there yet, tried it with some friends and none of us could get anything working. I did go out and set up a TURN server afterwards, but once a piece of tech fails as badly as element did for us the damage is done. E2EE could definitely be done better as well, but in another post on here I saw a comment detailing a bunch of clients (many of which were abandonware) that didn't support E2EE at all. That's going to kill mass adoption, since you have no idea how many people are on those zombie clients that you still need to support. I wonder if the Matrix API has a way to define versions for these purposes, to advertise the highest supported version by both the client and server?
Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
#10Most of these criticisms are solvable problems. If you make a direct connection to other users, they see your IP address. So use Tor or a VPN. Many P2P lookup systems assign identifiers for routing etc. So assign ephemeral ones for anything that doesn't need a persistent one, and make sure persistent ones aren't suitable for correlation, either by not using the same identifier for multiple services by the same person…
This response has been written a thousand times, but here goes again... Using a VPN or Tor is not a viable option for the average person.
Why? You download a single program, run it, it unlocks forbidden content. There is nothing in this flow that people way below average already can't do.