71–80 of 132 posts
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It reminds me the days of Google flourishing in early 2000s: they added more and more wonderful stuff (such as mail, or maps) while improving their flagship offering, search, more and more. A lot of people were their sincere fans.
But then what happened....
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> WebRTC is encrypted generally even if you leak metadata like IP address. Yes, WebRTC does end-to-end encryption by default. The IP is "leaked" because the peers directly connect to one another, so they will naturally require each others' IP address (which is required to talk to one another). There are both upsides and downsides to direct P2P connections. 1. Pro: The minimal number of parties can analyze the call. 2…
WebRTC is end-to-end encrypted to the peer. So you're right, when you do actual peer to peer WebRTC between you and another user in a browser, you have end-to-end encrypted communication. When you go through a server, it's just another peer. So the word end maybe doesn't fit anymore, because it's a server that is the peer and they can decrypt the stream. Transcoding is pretty common at that stage because it's helpful…
That being said for big calls you start wanting to do selective forwarding and you probably need to drop down to a lower layer in the WebRTC stack to manage this and allowing the Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) to be allowed to drop chunks without messing up the connection. However it is definitely possible to do all of this over WebRTC with full E2E encryption (see Jitsi Meet).
> "With a traditional WebRTC implementation, both the patient and therapist’s devices would talk directly with each other, leading to exposure of potentially sensitive data such as the IP address... When using Calls, you are still using WebRTC, but the individual participants are connecting to the Cloudflare network. If four people are on a video call powered by Cloudflare Calls, each of the four participants' device…
A traditional form of griefing is "get your victim's IP address from a direct-connecting service like Skype and DDOS them while they're doing something latency-sensitive"
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We only tolerate capitalism since it brings better results for consumers and society. If a “winner” is allowed to take over and have too much control, this condition fails, and it’s time to do some of: 1. break up monopolies, 2. regulate corporate behavior, and/or 3. nationalize industries. And let the cycle start again.
Well, why hasn't that happened yet then? I'm all for dreaming about a utopic perfect world-- I too wish we could just have it. But here we are still, and it just doesn't seem to be changing. I do think we should point the finger at companies like Amazon and Microsoft before Cloudflare though. We would also likely not have those companies without capitalism to begin with. Or computers. Which actually sounds pretty nic…
It hasn’t happened because revolving doors, fascism, etc. The state, tasked with doing these things, is not doing them.
> I do think we should point the finger at companies like Amazon and Microsoft before Cloudflare though.
Luckily, I have more than one finger to point. There is certainly enough blame to go around. But if you try to argue against criticizing Cloudflare because others also deserve blame, then you’ve lost me.
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> WebRTC is encrypted generally even if you leak metadata like IP address. Yes, WebRTC does end-to-end encryption by default. The IP is "leaked" because the peers directly connect to one another, so they will naturally require each others' IP address (which is required to talk to one another). There are both upsides and downsides to direct P2P connections. 1. Pro: The minimal number of parties can analyze the call. 2…
Regarding Pro #4: Wouldn't you still need a signaling server to establish that P2P connection and handle network switches and reconnections and such?
1. IPFS PubSub can be used for sharing this info (although you do still need to bootstrap the IPFS DHT).
2. You can share blobs over text chat. (Including services like Jami which are distributed)
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> So we're supposed to go use one of thousands of other tiny cloud platform providers? Capitalism requires competition. If it’s only natural that one company grows larger and better than all others, then this is bad for consumers, and in this case bad for all of us, since it limits who can even be on the internet in any meaningful way.
But doesn't competition... well, compete? That implies winners. There can only be so many winners. I do not at all understand how anyone is walled off from being on the internet, if anything I feel like it's massively insanely easier to do that today than it was twenty years ago. It's not like capitalism doesn't have its faults, but using competition to forge winners is literally what it's meant to do. At least in my…
It seems to me that competition does not imply winners. At least not permanent winners. The difference between capitalism and a traditional competition being that a traditional competition has an end point (at which point a winner can be declared), whereas capitalism has no ending point and thus can only have a winner for a time.
Imagine a sporting competition that started with 20 teams in a league and every year the bottom team was eliminated until after 19 years there was only 1 team left. We would not want to leave the competition in that state, we would want to introduce more teams to sustain a level of competition. And if the introduced teams consistently had no chance of winning due to the dominance of the top team, then we'd likely change the rules to level the playing field.
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> So we're supposed to go use one of thousands of other tiny cloud platform providers? Capitalism requires competition. If it’s only natural that one company grows larger and better than all others, then this is bad for consumers, and in this case bad for all of us, since it limits who can even be on the internet in any meaningful way.
But doesn't competition... well, compete? That implies winners. There can only be so many winners. I do not at all understand how anyone is walled off from being on the internet, if anything I feel like it's massively insanely easier to do that today than it was twenty years ago. It's not like capitalism doesn't have its faults, but using competition to forge winners is literally what it's meant to do. At least in my…
Or when there's no real difference in product so there can't really be a winner (sugar water/Pepsi/Coke).
Should we be reading deeper into this?
They really do want to be the center of everything it seems. I wish they would stop trying to be the Cisco of Networking in the sense of trying to convince a lot of people to let them handle critical network functions for a ton of networks. All it will take is one major outage for everyone to see this is a bad idea. Why trust a cloud provider who could go down and take half the Internet with it? Why centralize it tha…
I think the question you need to ask is: who can build, maintain and operate the needed infrastructure for "task x" better? Cloudflare or you? For many (most) use cases, CF will operate at a resilience and stability and professionality level far above what they can achieve themselves.