alt Hacker NewsI think what we’re seeing here isnt Valve messing up but rather the middle east conflict expanded to cyberspace and spilling over to impact civilians. Look at the timing and affected countries. China isnt also exactly known for free internet.
WebRTC works as fallback. WebRTC is encrypted and cant be used for much else.
STUN in the otherhand is unencrypted and the protocol itself can be used for DDoS reflection/amplification. I would not be surprised if this is somehow weaponized and/or blocked/analyzed in real time that then breaks the connectivity.
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I think you have that backwards, WebRTC doesn't work, and STUN does.
We do P2P in our networking software and this is why we do it all in band instead of using STUN, TURN, or other common methods. Those get blocked and they’re also often insecure.
STUN has mitigations now against being weaponized but it’s still a shit protocol. The fact that neither STUN nor TURN contain any way whatsoever to accomplish any kind of rendezvous without yet another signaling path boggles my mind given how easy it would have been.
IPv6 and minimal assembly-written network code going without niche and complex features.
> impact regular people
I'm sure it was unintentional, but this phrase implies a pretty ugly sentiment
>China isnt also exactly known for free internet.
Be careful, HN is a crazy china and leftie and MENA glaze site now.
STUN/TURN is basically icanhazip for WebRTC. STUN gives you your public IP:port. TURN is the same, but the returned IP:port is the one that had been dynamically allocated to you at time of querying, rather than the actual ones.
WebRTC clients take that STUN/TURN response and send to peers through out-of-band, through e.g. a lobby server chat mechanism, to set up the connection. This allows NAT table entries to be created as if they are outbound connection at both ends.
You can't make P2P connection with STUN/TURN alone. STUN/TURN is just a tool required for WebRTC.