Let's Reverse Engineer Discord • Hacker News Board

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#21

Post by franga2000 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:13 AM UTC

coenhyde wrote: post #14

I don't think Discord makes any claims that the audio is P2P encrypted. There are legitimate reasons why Discord might be dropping malformed packets, apart from an indication that they are spying on you (they may be doing that too). 1) to improve audio quality. 2) to help prevent RCE attacks on the destination client. 3) re-encoding at lower bitrates for low bandwidth clients. I don't really see the issue here unless…

3) is most certainly at play here, as Discord allows clients to set their preferred bitrate (RX&TX), which would not be possible in multi-party calls without re-encoding.

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#22

Post by dyeje » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:13 AM UTC

orliesaurus wrote: post #3

The problem is... There still isn't a clear business model for discord, the advantages of having premium (nitro) are almost non-existing. That's not an excuse for privacy, I know... They tried to create a small competitor to Steam's game marketplace but it didn't work out. They're back to the drawing table. Honestly, that's actually really good for free users, like myself, because we can simply use discord's wide arr…

Discord trying to take on Epic and Steam to create a marketplace was perhaps the worst move I've seen in the past few years. Steam is entrenched and Epic is printing money.

Discord needs to capitalize on its greatest asset: a massive community. To me, the obvious path forward is doing Patreon like features for servers and perhaps trying to break into the streaming market.

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#23

Post by gsich » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

coenhyde wrote: post #14

I don't think Discord makes any claims that the audio is P2P encrypted. There are legitimate reasons why Discord might be dropping malformed packets, apart from an indication that they are spying on you (they may be doing that too). 1) to improve audio quality. 2) to help prevent RCE attacks on the destination client. 3) re-encoding at lower bitrates for low bandwidth clients. I don't really see the issue here unless…

ToS certainly allows it.

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#24

Post by FractalParadigm » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:23 AM UTC

franga2000 wrote: post #21

coenhyde wrote: post #14

I don't think Discord makes any claims that the audio is P2P encrypted. There are legitimate reasons why Discord might be dropping malformed packets, apart from an indication that they are spying on you (they may be doing that too). 1) to improve audio quality. 2) to help prevent RCE attacks on the destination client. 3) re-encoding at lower bitrates for low bandwidth clients. I don't really see the issue here unless…

3) is most certainly at play here, as Discord allows clients to set their preferred bitrate (RX&TX), which would not be possible in multi-party calls without re-encoding.

Could they not just drop the quality of the whole call down to the lowest bandwidth allowed by a user? I feel that would reduce a computational burden on Discord's end, while allowing the lowest client-to-client latency

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#25

Post by PudgePacket » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:26 AM UTC

FractalParadigm wrote: post #24

franga2000 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3) is most certainly at play here, as Discord allows clients to set their preferred bitrate (RX&TX), which would not be possible in multi-party calls without re-encoding.

Could they not just drop the quality of the whole call down to the lowest bandwidth allowed by a user? I feel that would reduce a computational burden on Discord's end, while allowing the lowest client-to-client latency

They could, but if you have 4 people in a call and 3 can receive high bandwidth audio, lowering it just for the 1 person with low bandwidth is the best user experience.

Otherwise people with good networks who have their call quality dragged down will just think Discords voice chat is bad.

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#26

Post by Animats » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:32 AM UTC

Discord privacy policy:

In an ongoing effort to better understand and serve the users of the Services, we may conduct research on our customer demographics, interests and behavior based on the information collected. This research may be compiled and analyzed on an aggregate basis, and we may share this aggregate data with our affiliates, agents and business partners. We may also disclose aggregated user statistics in order to describe our services to current and prospective business partners, and to other third parties for other lawful purposes.

For example, they could do sentiment analysis on corporate chat, track it over time, and see which companies show patterns indicating trouble. Then they could short the stock, buy put options, or suggest to their "current and prospective business partners" that low-ball acquisition offer would be appropriate.

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#27

Post by kiba » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 6:45 AM UTC

znfi wrote: post #19

ip26 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to wander off into metaphor, this seems more analogous to a doorman refusing to allow you to bring your 800lb gorilla (sneakily dressed as your child) onto the elevator.

I guess I could have been more clear. I was not primarily discussing this particular case of what Discord is doing. Instead of I was against the notion that I cannot have any expectations because something is free. If you want to argue that Discords measure in this case are fair then I'm fine with that, but just something like "STFU the service is free" is not enough when it comes to these companies with massive impa…

I don't think people are defending the service just because it's free.

We simply cannot expect something to be had for free without making money to support the service. Unfortunately, one way to monentize the service is to sell user data.

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#28

Post by joshschreuder » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 7:09 AM UTC

dyeje wrote: post #22

orliesaurus wrote: post #3

The problem is... There still isn't a clear business model for discord, the advantages of having premium (nitro) are almost non-existing. That's not an excuse for privacy, I know... They tried to create a small competitor to Steam's game marketplace but it didn't work out. They're back to the drawing table. Honestly, that's actually really good for free users, like myself, because we can simply use discord's wide arr…

Discord trying to take on Epic and Steam to create a marketplace was perhaps the worst move I've seen in the past few years. Steam is entrenched and Epic is printing money. Discord needs to capitalize on its greatest asset: a massive community. To me, the obvious path forward is doing Patreon like features for servers and perhaps trying to break into the streaming market.

They have added more streaming features in recent months, so perhaps this is their pivot.

Their idea of patrons is boosting servers for perks which is sort of similar but the price of boosting is far higher than Patreon sponsorship and there's no way afaik for servers to customise what the booster gets as reward (the whole server gets the reward)

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#29

Post by ghjnut » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 7:11 AM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #7

This is common and necessary for WebRTC SFUs, which perhaps is why Discord does it to support the least common denominator of their web browser based clients. Edit: Yep, I thought I remembered reading this. Their voice servers are WebRTC SFUs. So this is basically state-of-the-art when it comes to voice over WebRTC. End to end encryption in WebRTC is not possible if you are using a SFU. https://blog.discordapp.com/ho…

Didn't know what an SFU was. https://webrtcglossary.com/sfu/

Re: Let's Reverse Engineer Discord

#30

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Jan 13, 2020, 7:14 AM UTC

nightfly wrote: post #8

senectus1 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fuck. Is it really too much to ask for/expect a modicum of decency with these services?

When you are paying $0.00 for the service? And in this case they are dropping malformed data, which could easily protect their users from malware that exploits weaknesses in the media codecs.

Lots of people are paying $5 or $10 a month.