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Comment by caractacus | Hacker News Reader

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caractacus·

Just what does the 'powered by Telefonica' bit mean?

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https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/10/16/mozilla-and-telefon...

Presumably offering routing servers and transit. Plus Telefonica bought TokBox[1], whose tech powers the backend

[1] https://tokbox.com/

Does this affect the end to end encryption mechanism of WebRTC (at least for Internet users)?

In other words, can Telefonica make it easy to spy on all Firefox Hello talks, or only on the browser-to-phone ones? (which is to be expected, I guess).

From my understanding of the WebRTC spec, as long as your TURN/STUN server is trusted (which it is, the CA and relay are both run by Mozilla) it doesn't matter if the network is untrustworthy.

WebRTC by itsself is not MITM resistant

Telefonica has many developers working on Firefox OS, it probably means that the want to show up.

Telefonica is a global telecommunications company. (I've never seen them in the US, but they are very common in latin america) Not sure what they have to do with a web video chat system.

Now that is scary, as I don't want to give all my personal data to some random company's server in Europe? Firefox is cool with me but Telefonica, not so much.

Your personal data isn't going anywhere. The server is only used for establishing the connection when clients are behind NATs (which in today's environment you usually always are). If I understand WebRTC correctly, once the link is established, all communication is peer to peer.

> If I understand WebRTC correctly, once the link is established, all communication is peer to peer.

In general, it's peer-to-peer, but for clients that can't communicate peer-to-peer for whatever reason (usually due to certain NATs), a relay server is used as an intermediary. To the user it's transparent, so they can't easily tell if it's peer-to-peer or not.

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