Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

blog.chromium.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 183 posts

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#171

Post by dragonwriter »

temp453463343 wrote: post #141
IgorPartola wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's never going to happen b/c there is too much legacy infrastructure and the benefit is marginal. It is going to have to happen, or there will be no internet. > All current home routers are configured to do NAT, so you're not going to be able to have a Skype 2.0 be P2P b/c then you'd need to explain to millions of people how to reconfigure their routers. Current home routers will be replaced within a year or tw…

You're also assuming that there won't be NAT with IPv6; I don't know that that is a safe assumption. "Current home routers will be replaced within a year or two." Yeah right! My grandma isn't gunna be changing her router. And she'll be pissed if her stuff stopped working. At then end of the day, if you have the choice between making a NAT friendly product that everyone can use and a non NAT friendly product that has…

NAT doesn't protect you from security problems, it just makes it harder to connect directly to you, requiring an intermediate exchange that is on a accessible server, resulting in more points that can be compromised.

It reduces, rather than increases security, since now the communication can be compromised by a security hole at either end (and NAT doesn't stop the machines behind it from being compromised) or at the exchange intermediating between them (which, most likely, neither party has any control over or detailed knowledge of the security practices in place on.)

And major ISPs are deploying IPv6 now: no mandate required.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#172

Post by lhnn »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #158
chrisdone wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Nothing comes even remotely close in sound quality.” — Mumble?

With Skype I can play games with a group and put the mic in always on mode. No feedback, no audio from speakers, and no keyboard clicks. It's pretty damned amazing to be honest. Ventrilo and Mumble do have far superior support for massive number of people in a chat room. If you're participating in large MMO raids or Eve Online type festivities the Skype doesn't have the necessary features. For my ~5 player parties Sk…

I have about 5 guys that play, and the "chat room" design of Mumble makes a lot more sense for our use case (which could be different from yours). We hop in the server whenever we want, just to hang out, then use it for games when we are all in.

It's also secure, FOSS, cross-platform, and implements a consistent UI. Skype has none of these.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#173

Post by nagisak »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #143
kyro wrote: post #66

Yes, please, please, please kill Skype. Kill it mercilessly. Using it has been the worst experience I've ever had with an application. I've been in a long distance relationship for a few years now and Skype has sadly been our main mode of video communication. The app crashes when I search chat history, can take upwards of 90+% of my CPU, literally forcing me to shut down every other application I have running. The fo…

I'm the opposite. I don't want to use anything except Skype for voice chat. Nothing comes even remotely close in sound quality. If I had the same cpu/crash issues as you I'd be loudly cursing it's name. Luckily I don't and until something can provide better quality I won't be using it.

Well this is still in beta and already poses threat to Skype.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#174

Post by amckenna »

homosaur wrote: post #98
TranceMan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fail to get my point, why do you think that that the US has has little issue with allowing encryption to be used these days? How strong is your 'locked' box? It's only a bunch of 1s and 0s.

Maybe because they realize that treating encryption as munitions is totally unenforceable and strong encryption is basically public knowledge at this point? I know everyone has a cousin in the NSA that knows someone who knows someone who knows how to break Triple DES in 3 minutes, but there's no evidence that is actually real. Even if the NSA or whoever is years ahead of the public in math research (they aren't, BTW,…

Not to be pedantic but Triple DES could be broken relatively easily by the government, which is why it was replaced with AES. I completely agree with what you are saying in the post, I just wanted to bring up that Triple DES is considered insecure.

Sources: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1003/1003.4085.pdf http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358718/p465-merkle.pd...

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#175

Post by amckenna »

TranceMan wrote: post #86
sdp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encrypting data certainly increases the barrier to entry for spying.

No it doesn't, it means if somebody doesn't really want to spy on you they just will not waste their time....

Yes it does. Adding encryption, even if it can be broken through sheer computational power, still increases the price tag associated with spying, therefore increasing the barrier to spying.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#177

Post by temp453463343 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #171
temp453463343 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're also assuming that there won't be NAT with IPv6; I don't know that that is a safe assumption. "Current home routers will be replaced within a year or two." Yeah right! My grandma isn't gunna be changing her router. And she'll be pissed if her stuff stopped working. At then end of the day, if you have the choice between making a NAT friendly product that everyone can use and a non NAT friendly product that has…

NAT doesn't protect you from security problems, it just makes it harder to connect directly to you, requiring an intermediate exchange that is on a accessible server, resulting in more points that can be compromised. It reduces, rather than increases security, since now the communication can be compromised by a security hole at either end (and NAT doesn't stop the machines behind it from being compromised) or at the…

"requiring an intermediate exchange that is on a accessible server"

Exactly. So the onus of security is pushed off solely onto the centralized intermediary. In my example it's the Skype servers.

They can very easily firewall and filter all the connections. They can have a much stricter filter then what you have on your computer. (ex: packets have to very strictly conform to a certain standard generated by the client side program)

Centralized servers are also more secure because you don't have any access to the server code and it becomes virtually impossible to look for exploits.

Also if any bug IS found, then patching it is trivial b/c it's at one central point. If worse comes to worst you just shut down the server and now all your clients are safe.

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#179

Post by cmatthieu »

We are in the process of adding persistent chat and conferencing to Twelephone (http://twelephone.com). These features, in addition to our existing audio/video calling and presence using Twitter as a directory service, should put our free service near feature parity with Skype. We're using HTML5 WebRTC with encrypted peerconnections and soon datachannels. Stay tuned...

Re: Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling

#180

Post by dragonwriter »

temp453463343 wrote: post #177
dragonwriter wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAT doesn't protect you from security problems, it just makes it harder to connect directly to you, requiring an intermediate exchange that is on a accessible server, resulting in more points that can be compromised. It reduces, rather than increases security, since now the communication can be compromised by a security hole at either end (and NAT doesn't stop the machines behind it from being compromised) or at the…

"requiring an intermediate exchange that is on a accessible server" Exactly. So the onus of security is pushed off solely onto the centralized intermediary. In my example it's the Skype servers. They can very easily firewall and filter all the connections. They can have a much stricter filter then what you have on your computer. (ex: packets have to very strictly conform to a certain standard generated by the client…

No, the onus of security isn't pushed off on to the intermediary. The communication can still be compromised by compromise of either endpoint. The intermediary is an _additional_ point of failure.

With P2P communications between Ann and Bob, a compromise of Ann's machine or Bob's machine compromises the communication.

With NAT preventing P2P communication between Ann and Bob and requiring them to communicate through intermediary Charlie who is publicly accessible, compromise at Ann's, Bob's, or Charlie's location compromise the channel.

Systems can be compromised without hosting publicly-visible servers, as has been demonstrated in every remote browser-based exploit ever.

So, Charlie's system may be more secure than Ann or Bob's systems, but that doesn't matter because it doesn't _replace_ Ann and Bob's systems, which are still part of the communication channel. More points of vulnerability always means less security, even if the new point of vulnerability is, considered alone, more secure than the most secure existing node.

Post reply on HN