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WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

venturebeat.com

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Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#61

Post by rorrr »

vectorpush wrote: post #30

Look, you're kidding yourself if you think that WebRTC is going to liberate you from the prying eyes of government surveillance. As a developer, I'm very excited about the possibilities that WebRTC enables (websockets just can't cut it in many instances), but computer science is not a panacea for political apathy. P2P is nothing new, and anybody who cares to secure their online communications can already do so with e…

It will make it a lot harder. Right now governments have backdoors in apps like Skype, and all Skype's traffic is now routed through Microsoft's servers.

With WebRTC governments would have to perform man-in-the-middle attacks, which is pretty damn hard for P2P-style connections.

Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#62

Post by rorrr »

spindritf wrote: post #41
thebigshane wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain how I can have a secure online conversation with my mother easily. (Easy for me, easy for her). Is it going to involve setting up my own trusted server somewhere? Is it going to involve downloading some large undocumented project and have to build myself (on my box and her box)? Is it going to require troubleshooting arcane protocols, firewalls, and xml files? I haven't seen an easy way to have secure…

> Please explain how I can have a secure online conversation with my mother easily. (Easy for me, easy for her). Pidgin with OTR -- configure and verify keys once, use whatever protocol you want. It is doable and not very difficult right now, the problem really is that no one cares.

That's assuming the clients are not compromised, hardware is not compromized, and "whatever protocol" is not susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#63

Post by jan_g »

Is no one here worried about (again!) audio/video codecs and presence implementation? As far as I've read webrtc specs there are no specifics, they've left implementation details in the hands of implementors.

I fear that Microsoft will push something skype-specific, Google (and possibly Mozilla) vp8 and xmpp/jingle, who knows what Apple will do with Safari. And different clients/browsers won't be able to communicate between themselves.

Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#64

Post by Egregore »

msutherl wrote: post #48
mtgx wrote: post #12

Since Skype is moving to fully centralized service that can be even more easily wiretapped by Governments around the world (not just US), I'm very excited about the "revolutionary" (literally) capabilities of this protocol, as people will be able to speak 1-on-1 without interference, if the communication is also encrypted. Does being encrypted or not depend on that specific WebRTC client, or does it come encrypted by…

Don't make the mistake of thinking that because the communication channel is "encrypted", it is secure. SSL can already be compromised (so much for trusting encrypted transport) and the WebRTC client code could be compromised (always a problem).

Can you please provide links on how SSL can be compromised?

Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#65

Post by rmc »

Egregore wrote: post #64
msutherl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that because the communication channel is "encrypted", it is secure. SSL can already be compromised (so much for trusting encrypted transport) and the WebRTC client code could be compromised (always a problem).

Can you please provide links on how SSL can be compromised?

It's not SSL per se, but the Certification Authority system that is weak. If you get one of the root CA certs, you can make any SSL cert a valid SSL cert for any domain name.

Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#66

Post by rmc »

thebigshane wrote: post #35
vectorpush wrote: post #30

Look, you're kidding yourself if you think that WebRTC is going to liberate you from the prying eyes of government surveillance. As a developer, I'm very excited about the possibilities that WebRTC enables (websockets just can't cut it in many instances), but computer science is not a panacea for political apathy. P2P is nothing new, and anybody who cares to secure their online communications can already do so with e…

Please explain how I can have a secure online conversation with my mother easily. (Easy for me, easy for her). Is it going to involve setting up my own trusted server somewhere? Is it going to involve downloading some large undocumented project and have to build myself (on my box and her box)? Is it going to require troubleshooting arcane protocols, firewalls, and xml files? I haven't seen an easy way to have secure…

Don't just focus on one attack method. Look for the weakest link in the chain. If you get a totally secure computer system & internet connection, there could be a microphone in your room recording what you say. Easy to use crypto won't help there and only give a false sense os security.

Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#67

Post by novalis »

wmeredith wrote: post #18
phase_9 wrote: post #11

Yet another HTML5 "Game Changer" which has already been available as part of the Adobe Flash Platform[1] for the best part of three years. Just saying :) For those down-voting me; I find this attitude very strange. If the tools were present in another widely deployed runtime, but were heavily under utilised then why are people getting so excited about them this time around? I guess some people just love to hate Flash…

Well, stop saying. This is like arguing about the features of a lake when everyone else is playing in the ocean. Flash is proprietary and it doesn't run on mobile. These are both near show-stoppers in, and of, themselves. Combine the two and well, it doesn't matter what else it does . Until flash runs on mobile and/or is an open standard, it won't be relevant to the future of the web most developers (myself included)…

About that ; You can code ActionScript Flash/Flex and run the compiled applications on Google Android, Apple iOS and on BlackBerry Tablet OS.

This is possible through the use of the Flex SDK that is under the open source Mozilla Public License, for some time now.

As for the lake/ocean analogy attempt, not so much.

Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#68

Post by novalis »

sp332 wrote: post #28
phase_9 wrote: post #11

Yet another HTML5 "Game Changer" which has already been available as part of the Adobe Flash Platform[1] for the best part of three years. Just saying :) For those down-voting me; I find this attitude very strange. If the tools were present in another widely deployed runtime, but were heavily under utilised then why are people getting so excited about them this time around? I guess some people just love to hate Flash…

Reliability, security, performance. Don't take my word for it http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

That is the sort of PR that doesn't get held back by facts. Also, to pretend that Steve Jobs was some sort of unilateral source of fair reasoning on the matter is either disingenuous or very short sighted. I hope it isn't both.

But please, do not take my word for it: http://truegryc.blogspot.pt/2010/05/response-to-thoughts-on-...

Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#69

Post by ZoFreX »

While this tech is exciting for a wide variety of reasons, this blog post completely misses the point for me in its efforts to hype this.

> imagine it amplified by secure, real-time transmissions of audio and video

Ok, I'm imagining it. And I'll still be imagining it in 12 months time, because WebRTC does nothing to fix the outstanding issues in setting up secure communications.

> Skype, Cisco, and Polycom will all see their conferencing technology commoditized.

Really? Surely you could have said that Cisco / Polycom would be destroyed by Skype, but that didn't happen. Why would in-browser conferencing, which will almost certainly be a worse experience than Skype, which is itself a far worse experience than dedicated conference hardware/software, commoditize conference technology?

And for that matter, why did the wide variety of already-existing browser-based conferencing tech not do this?

Personally I'm more excited about ideas like P2P downloading, and using DHTs to disseminate information.

Re: WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

#70

Post by jeffehobbs »

thebigshane wrote: post #35
vectorpush wrote: post #30

Look, you're kidding yourself if you think that WebRTC is going to liberate you from the prying eyes of government surveillance. As a developer, I'm very excited about the possibilities that WebRTC enables (websockets just can't cut it in many instances), but computer science is not a panacea for political apathy. P2P is nothing new, and anybody who cares to secure their online communications can already do so with e…

Please explain how I can have a secure online conversation with my mother easily. (Easy for me, easy for her). Is it going to involve setting up my own trusted server somewhere? Is it going to involve downloading some large undocumented project and have to build myself (on my box and her box)? Is it going to require troubleshooting arcane protocols, firewalls, and xml files? I haven't seen an easy way to have secure…

Apple's FaceTime is end-to-end encrypted, "the FaceTime conversation stream is encrypted from end to end, and each FaceTime session has unique session keys for each user".
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