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Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

orchidprotocol.com

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Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#191

This sounds like a great project. I have some thoughts on how to communicate about it when it is ready to go. With the general public, you might start with some things they are unhappy about with the present internet, and for each of them explain how things would be better for them if they used Orchid. For the more techy minded, you could do a list of similar things like tor or IPFS, and for each of them explain how…

A further thought. You should focus on comparing it with Tor, like maybe making it the first one to compare with, since it is both similar and well-known. And then maybe add on other ones.

Another thought: compare early on with Ethereum and IPFS. Yeah, they are really different things, but as soon as you say web decentralization, people who are not techies but read about such things will think of them, so you need to explain early on how this is different so they get pointed in the right direction.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#192
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you solve the problem of penetrating NATs and firewalls without relying on a central coordination server?

If I understand your question correctly, and you are looking at "how do we do hole punching and NAT traversal without a way to get your canonical external IP address", in addition to techniques that don't require that kind of functionality (such as modern routers with UPnP port forwarding support), other nodes on the network can run something analogous to ICE servers (we have yet to decide if it should literally be S…

Do you have a reference implementation of using WebRTC as a networking layer?

As far as I've researched, I've not seen anything which would enable reliable NAT traversal which wouldn't also make the network traffic trivially identifiable.

STUN works only for certain types of NAT and requires servers which aren't behind NAT. TURN is an external proxy, so can easily be identified by monitors of the network.

The concept of Orchid seems nice but the actual implementation seems very hand-wavy.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#194
post #5

Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working…

Hi Jay! Are you guys planning to take advantage/contribute of/to the libp2p project (https://github.com/libp2p)? Looks to me that some of the introduced standards/formats (e.g. multihash, multiaddr) could be adopted. This again would lead to an increased significance of libp2p. Regards, Marc

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#196
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand your question correctly, and you are looking at "how do we do hole punching and NAT traversal without a way to get your canonical external IP address", in addition to techniques that don't require that kind of functionality (such as modern routers with UPnP port forwarding support), other nodes on the network can run something analogous to ICE servers (we have yet to decide if it should literally be S…

Do you have a reference implementation of using WebRTC as a networking layer? As far as I've researched, I've not seen anything which would enable reliable NAT traversal which wouldn't also make the network traffic trivially identifiable. STUN works only for certain types of NAT and requires servers which aren't behind NAT. TURN is an external proxy, so can easily be identified by monitors of the network. The concept…

>The concept of Orchid seems nice but the actual implementation seems very hand-wavy.

Yes that was also my conclusion.

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