Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46813381

Points: 16

# Comments: 0

if you also like keeping your hands on the keyboard, give it a try; it could click for you, too (pun intended)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655430

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

For example, to intercept network requests to serve them from the peer-to-peer network, a of the document to block rendering of the subsequent document. Then, once the document had finished downloading, the page HTML was manually rendered so all assets (eg JS, CSS, images, etc tags) could be loaded via JS instead of the browser natively. This was both slow and resulted in empty white pages on load. Now? We have the Service Worker API. (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...)

I'm not as familiar with Peer5's tech stack, so I can't speak there. But hi Shachar!

> How does the website possibly detect that I'm on a cellular network when I'm a) use Firefox (which doesn't implement the NetworkInformation API) and b) use a VPN to either a data center or my home server?

Yep. An IP lookup is also done to see which AS the user is on. Eg an AWS IP vs a T-Mobile IP.

We also do this to detect when people tether, as when tethering Chrome will report a Wi-Fi connection via the NetworkInforamtion API but it's Wi-Fi on top of an underlying cellular connection.

> There's also the massive privacy issue: other people will know what websites you visit by simply using the P2P system

All cached data is both fragmented and encrypted. When a node sends data to another peer, it's an encrypted fragment of a file and the sender doesn't know 1) what data it's sending nor 2) which website that data is being sent for.

All content is fragmented, encrypted, and hashed before it's distributed across the network. If a peer ever receives a file piece from a peer and that piece's hash doesn't match the expected hash, it's dropped along with the connection to that peer.

In the past, I built two of the world's largest YouTube to MP3 converters. In doing so, I learned the hard way 1) that distributing content at scale globally is painful and _expensive_ and 2) that I hate ads. So I built Arc.

It's a two-sided content exchange. On one side, websites buy a faster, 10x cheaper peer-to-peer CDN. On the other side, websites make money without ads by contributing bandwidth to the peer-to-peer CDN. Arc connects the two, like Airbnb connects guests and hosts.

As bandwidth capacity grows around the globe, we find ourselves in a world where people can share bandwidth both beneficially and imperceptibly. We see glimpses of that already today: Amazon shares bandwidth with Amazon Sidewalk, Microsoft shares bandwidth with Windows updates, etc. We build Arc for this world -- a post-adblock world -- to give sites a better, more ethical way to support themselves that doesn't bombard users with ads, suck up their personal data, and preserves their privacy.

A few notes:

- For sites that use Arc's CDN, users do not use upload bandwidth and Arc's widget isn't displayed. It's just a faster, 10x cheaper CDN in one