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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I just wondered why STUN/TURN was needed in particular, if you can communicate details over IRC, having an external service for this when other p2p communication methods can be made using IRC seemed strange.

But then I remembered DCC (and xDCC) are unusable these days because of NAT. So STUN wouldn't help, but you need the TURN relay.

I really can't wait until IPv6 is everywhere; I believe it will allow p2p to have a second renaissance.

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I used DCC for years behind NAT, just forwarded a port range and configured my client to always use that port range. It takes a minute to set up, but then it's seamless.

I have UPNP turned off, but can't it do similar, automatically?

I always wonder why P2P applications don't just use Tor hidden services to communicate:

- NAT hole-punching for free

- end-to-end encrypted for free

- peers identified by a hash of their public key, so no CA or similar required

- no metadata leakage

It seems like the perfect solution, but hardly anyone does it.

https://ricochet.im/ is a chat program that works this way, but the client is pretty minimal.

You forgot "slow as molasses".

That said, it made the tor-specific sites simple not just because JS was banned, but that's not video chat, isn't it?

As the sibling comment mentioned, it's a very slow network and known Tor entry nodes are blocked in certain countries. The network could become faster if more people around the world ran relays, but it's becoming more difficult to even run a simple bridge due to hostile ISP and website activity.

So I used to live in the woods where not a single ISP would give you a public address and used TOR to ssh back into the house.

You might be able to play freeciv or text chat this way but it’s just way too slow and jittery for video. This is part of the design of the thing and will probably get worse over time as security improves.

I say this all the time about IPv6. I started running a dual stack with an HE IPv6 tunnel in 2002 thinking I was getting ahead of the curve. 18 years later and I'm still way out front :(

I don't think the IRC server admins would be very happy if I started b64 encode live audio and video streams over their irc daemons ;)

STUN/TURN is not a requirement, but most users will have issues if you don't add those services to the mix.

Still need STUN servers in order to tell you your externally-accessible address, no?

DCC handles that; since the IRC server presumably knows your public IP address.

Gets muddy with bouncers, you generally have an option to override this in bouncers and clients.

P2P exploits will have a renaissance as well, unfortunately.

When NAT no longer provides a de facto "firewall" routers will continue to drop incoming connections by default.

UDP hole punching could still work with a stateful firewall that follows the proposed "best practices for home routers for v6"

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