Everybody gets WebSockets

Indeed.

I have my IoT system across multiple networks, some of which I do not control the router. One possible solution was to have my VPS machine provide tunnels in a star topology. It's pretty sucky for the star center, because they end up getting all the traffic. And it's also pretty hard.

Another solution was to dyndns, port forwarding, router redirection, poking through NATs and all that... for each location I'm in. That's bad. Real bad.

Perhaps I could do some point-to-point trickery... but that doesn't work when both machines are NATted.

Tor Hidden Services provides a way to automatically breach the network seamlessly, and provide a routable address to that machine, no matter where that machine is. I take it to a cafe in Washington DC? Within 10 seconds, it's back on Tor. South America? 10 seconds.

The topology, once done, looks like a humongous ethernet hub, with no promiscuity mode. And each node is the 16 char hash.

Then, I can code against .onion addresses. They just work, and I know if I establish a connection, I can send data.

I'm already sending MQTT telemetry data from one network to my broker in another house 30 miles away. And it's sending pictures and metadata both. And it just works.

EDIT response:

>What kind of throughput & latency do you usually see?

Latency is a bigger one, obviously. It depends on the construction of the bridge. If I'm not using any overlays (OBFS3, OBFS4, scramblesuit, etc) then initial lag times can go in excess of 30 seconds. Once that initial connection is established, then lag times go down to about 200-300ms range.

Using overlays, because the network blocks various vanilla types of Tor, can take a lot longer. That's because those overlays are beat on by China and Iran. Sometimes they will dead-route packets (5% of the time). Initial transit I've seen up to 1 minute, with avg ping times around 500 ms.

Throughput is a different beast. The only network I haven't saturated was my 1GBps desktop at work. I can stream movies directly with the speeds I routinely get. Just that initial bridge construction will make you think something went wrong.

(responded here because "I'm responding too fast")

It's not ideal for sure but you can use DNS to divvy it up by adding several IPs to your domain name.

Not to diminish your TOR advocacy, but check out tinc.

I like Cloudflare a lot, but I am worried about their prevalance.

Similar to other companies I give up a good control of my life to, Cloudflare essentially becoming a new internet backbone is ever so slightly terrifying.

Cloudflare itself is a "single point of failure." (Though massively unlikely with their incredible infra).

Cloudflare could shut off all of it's servers, or it's nameservers could go haywire, and there would be a massive internet outage. Much like when AWS goes down.

As you know, when terminating a WebSocket connection due to releases CloudFlare now signals this action to both client and origin server by sending the 1001 status code (aka "going away", see section 7.4.1 of RFC 6455), so both sides are aware that the WebSocket termination is only a transient event, and that they can expect to immediately re-establish a connection again on retry.

We're working on additional refinements to the release process to minimize disruptions.

(I work at CloudFlare.)