What are some notable uses of P2P these days? You don't hear about it much any more.
I believe P2P rose to prominence two decades ago as a response to the cost of bandwidth. I wonder if similar methods could effectively overcome the cost of compute for LLMs. Here are two projects I found from a quick search:
Im using it for Payload[1] in for LAN and WAN transfers (if possible). Reduce operational costs (especially if you run on public clouds and have to pay extortion rates for egress) and also you must use it to capitalize on latency/throughput in LAN. Moving data from A->server->B means your need multiple servers on the edge, which means you kinda need to depend on mega-corps. If your destination is closer it’s easier for your application infra. I’d like to reverse the question, why send all data through another machine in the cloud if you don’t need to?
That said, p2p being flaky and bad is real. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because middlebox engineers say ”let’s add these layers of garbage and nobody will notice unless they use p2p but its so bad who uses it anyway”. Well, yeah. It’s worse because of you! Philosophically, I also think p2p is a necessary precondition to a decentralized internet without tiers (ie client and server separation).
Anyway, rant aside, you have to currently have a relay backup if you need availability. P2P will fail often even with the smartest hole punching algorithms. This makes things more complicated, because you need a hybrid solution. However, it’s not as complicated as WebRTC, that thing is an overengineered mess. It works, but I don’t like the complexity it brings.
Cloud bandwidth is still crazy expensive if you use big cloud, and a lot of people think that’s all there is.
There are a lot of things that do P2P under the hood, usually with cloud relay fallback so it always works. You just don’t hear much about it because it’s not a selling point, just an under the hood detail.
Anyone know how this compares to Tinc? I don't much know what development on it is like these days, but it for me is one of the best "set it and forget it" things I regularly use to keep my devices talking to each other.
I'm aware that with things like this you're supposed to use the latest and greatest like Wireguard or whatever, but nothing really does the p2p thing as easy as Tinc, and given secondary encryption measures (e.g. I'm sshing and httpsing to those machines) I'm just not worrying much about it right now.
Tinc will exchange endpoint information over the network, so clients will connect directly to other clients without having to set up every connection explicitly. For example, if A is configured to connect to B, and C is configured to connect to B, then A can connect to C to exchange packets directly without you having to configure that. https://tinc-vpn.org/documentation-1.1/How-connections-work....
Tinc will also do a layer 2 tunnel if you want (tap) while wireguard is only layer 3 (no broadcast/multicast).
The big con of tinc (and most VPN solutions) compared to wireguard is performance. Wireguard is a small kernel module which can process traffic very fast.
They do different things, I hear? I know Wireguard works closer to the kernel, but it's more of a traditional "VPN" otherwise, and you'd have to add "mesh."
This seems to go into a similar direction like ZeroTier, but actually open source. There is almost no discussion of this in the western hemisphere, but I'd be interested what people think about it.
Like other products in this category, this is for private networks, internal to your company or self. I don't think it's an intended use case to connect to computers not in your control.
It's useful when you have computers that talk to each other over the internet, likely without public interfaces, and using protocols that may or may not be secure.
This is exactly that by thought was. This solves nothing what the traditional VPN or TOR is used for. It's like running an exit node from your hope IP address. You do not want to do that.
can't quite figure out exactly the ins and outs but it seems to masquerade as wireguard. which would make VPNs redundant as it would itself be a VPN.
this would mean, for instance, torrents that are wireguarded between peers by default. sure you will see tons of IPs connected via wireguard but who is going to bother intercepting them?
VPNs in their basic sense are legal in China, many large companies provide them/use them and so on. VPNs designed to bypass the Firewall without government approval are a subset of VPNs which the police do not like.
I would assume EasyTier devs use it to connect their devices within China so the great firewall isn't involved. Attempts to cross the firewall with EasyTier are detectable without things like Tor's pluggable censorship evasion transports.
Yeah – the shadowsocks developer is Chinese and the government went after them for working on an iOS VPN app back in the day on GitHub. That was a while ago, before the CCP had direct control over the App Store with law.
>China relied on two U.S. companies--Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks--to help carry out its network upgrade, known as "CN2," in 2004. This upgrade significantly increased China’s ability to monitor Internet usage. Cisco also sold several thousand routers (IHT) used to censor web content, and "firm’s engineers have helped set it to spot ’subversive’ key-words in messages."
What's ironic about that? Cisco sold them networking equipment and the CCP used it to censor.
From personal experience, the great firewall picks up on wireguard usage when tunneling to my home computer (not in China) and throttles the connection. I am guessing that this would have similar limitations when using wireguard.
The primary use case here seems to be connecting bunch of your own devices so they have direct connectivity over a VPN, just like Tailscale and Zerotier, etc.
I don't know why people focus on Tor and censorship associations. The meaning of a VPN is just a virtual network between devices, not anonymization.
Given its integration of WireGuard, this might be an open-source competitor more to Netmaker than ZeroTier. Not sure how scalable EasyTier is for a business use-case...
What are some notable uses of P2P these days? You don't hear about it much any more.
I believe P2P rose to prominence two decades ago as a response to the cost of bandwidth. I wonder if similar methods could effectively overcome the cost of compute for LLMs. Here are two projects I found from a quick search:
Serving: https://petals.dev/
Training: https://github.com/learning-at-home/hivemind
> What are some notable uses of P2P these days?
Im using it for Payload[1] in for LAN and WAN transfers (if possible). Reduce operational costs (especially if you run on public clouds and have to pay extortion rates for egress) and also you must use it to capitalize on latency/throughput in LAN. Moving data from A->server->B means your need multiple servers on the edge, which means you kinda need to depend on mega-corps. If your destination is closer it’s easier for your application infra. I’d like to reverse the question, why send all data through another machine in the cloud if you don’t need to?
That said, p2p being flaky and bad is real. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because middlebox engineers say ”let’s add these layers of garbage and nobody will notice unless they use p2p but its so bad who uses it anyway”. Well, yeah. It’s worse because of you! Philosophically, I also think p2p is a necessary precondition to a decentralized internet without tiers (ie client and server separation).
Anyway, rant aside, you have to currently have a relay backup if you need availability. P2P will fail often even with the smartest hole punching algorithms. This makes things more complicated, because you need a hybrid solution. However, it’s not as complicated as WebRTC, that thing is an overengineered mess. It works, but I don’t like the complexity it brings.
[1]: https://payload.app/
Personally (as I mentioned elsewhere) I still use Tinc for my devices because I prefer "set the thing up once and never much think about it again;"
The loss of a "central server" or whatever never matters.
Cloud bandwidth is still crazy expensive if you use big cloud, and a lot of people think that’s all there is.
There are a lot of things that do P2P under the hood, usually with cloud relay fallback so it always works. You just don’t hear much about it because it’s not a selling point, just an under the hood detail.
Nintendo Switch multiplayer
*shudders*
How would this compare to Nebula (performance wise)?
https://github.com/slackhq/nebula
Anyone know how this compares to Tinc? I don't much know what development on it is like these days, but it for me is one of the best "set it and forget it" things I regularly use to keep my devices talking to each other.
I'm aware that with things like this you're supposed to use the latest and greatest like Wireguard or whatever, but nothing really does the p2p thing as easy as Tinc, and given secondary encryption measures (e.g. I'm sshing and httpsing to those machines) I'm just not worrying much about it right now.
Firs time I'm hearing about tinc, looks great. How does it compare to wireguard? Pros and cons?
Tinc will exchange endpoint information over the network, so clients will connect directly to other clients without having to set up every connection explicitly. For example, if A is configured to connect to B, and C is configured to connect to B, then A can connect to C to exchange packets directly without you having to configure that. https://tinc-vpn.org/documentation-1.1/How-connections-work....
Tinc will also do a layer 2 tunnel if you want (tap) while wireguard is only layer 3 (no broadcast/multicast).
The big con of tinc (and most VPN solutions) compared to wireguard is performance. Wireguard is a small kernel module which can process traffic very fast.
They do different things, I hear? I know Wireguard works closer to the kernel, but it's more of a traditional "VPN" otherwise, and you'd have to add "mesh."
This seems to go into a similar direction like ZeroTier, but actually open source. There is almost no discussion of this in the western hemisphere, but I'd be interested what people think about it.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "no discussion in the western hemisphere"? Zerotier is fairly well known in the US.
But EasyTier is not.
Anyone familiar with the Chinese tech scene can explain what this is at the bottom?
# Zhejiang ICP No. 2024137671-1
It takes you to some government website but it is not clear whether this is a business registration or something else.
You need a government license to operate a website in China, and that's their license number.
Wait, really? Even like a personal website? Is it hard to get?
A bit similar to Germany where you need an Impressum for your website, even for personal websites (though I might be wrong on that).
Similar discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/119ycfv/how_do_you...
It's a totalitarian dictatorship after all.
Yes, all websites need it. Non-commercial sites afaik have a simpler process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license
Aren't you making yourself vulnerable to unknowingly sending (potentially loads of) illicit traffic from your ip address into the world?
I'm not sure if I'd be up for that, to be honest...
Like other products in this category, this is for private networks, internal to your company or self. I don't think it's an intended use case to connect to computers not in your control.
It's useful when you have computers that talk to each other over the internet, likely without public interfaces, and using protocols that may or may not be secure.
This is exactly that by thought was. This solves nothing what the traditional VPN or TOR is used for. It's like running an exit node from your hope IP address. You do not want to do that.
can't quite figure out exactly the ins and outs but it seems to masquerade as wireguard. which would make VPNs redundant as it would itself be a VPN.
this would mean, for instance, torrents that are wireguarded between peers by default. sure you will see tons of IPs connected via wireguard but who is going to bother intercepting them?
this is more like zerotier/tailscale - sorta a virtual LAN
it’s like someone saw Tor and said "but what if we removed all the safeguards?"
> A simple, decentralized mesh VPN with WireGuard support.
How does it square up against DPI censorship techniques that successfully block WireGuard?
This is a Chinese project (hosted inside China), so probably not very well.
Au contraire, it is usually developers of Chinese origin that build some of the widely used anti-censorship techniques & protocols.
Ironically, it was American companies that sold firewall tech to the CCP: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-internet-providers-and-g...
Yes, but they don't host those projects inside China. This site is hosted inside China and has an ICP number.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this project (and website) essentially illegal in China?
VPNs in their basic sense are legal in China, many large companies provide them/use them and so on. VPNs designed to bypass the Firewall without government approval are a subset of VPNs which the police do not like.
OK so real VPNs are illegal. Then you have a subsets of VPNs that are regulated by the CCP and therefor legal. And useless for many use-cases.
I would assume EasyTier devs use it to connect their devices within China so the great firewall isn't involved. Attempts to cross the firewall with EasyTier are detectable without things like Tor's pluggable censorship evasion transports.
Why would hosting this website and creating this project be illegal in China?
They're not offering this as a SAAS or something...
Distribution of software that subverts censorship laws.
[dead]
I don't think the issue is about the developers being Chinese at all.
I think the problem comes mainly from the CCP having direct power to pressure the developers.
In any case, I have to say Chinese tech has surely evolved impressively.
Yeah – the shadowsocks developer is Chinese and the government went after them for working on an iOS VPN app back in the day on GitHub. That was a while ago, before the CCP had direct control over the App Store with law.
>China relied on two U.S. companies--Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks--to help carry out its network upgrade, known as "CN2," in 2004. This upgrade significantly increased China’s ability to monitor Internet usage. Cisco also sold several thousand routers (IHT) used to censor web content, and "firm’s engineers have helped set it to spot ’subversive’ key-words in messages."
What's ironic about that? Cisco sold them networking equipment and the CCP used it to censor.
Surely not publicly on government-licensed websites.
From personal experience, the great firewall picks up on wireguard usage when tunneling to my home computer (not in China) and throttles the connection. I am guessing that this would have similar limitations when using wireguard.
The primary use case here seems to be connecting bunch of your own devices so they have direct connectivity over a VPN, just like Tailscale and Zerotier, etc.
I don't know why people focus on Tor and censorship associations. The meaning of a VPN is just a virtual network between devices, not anonymization.
This looks cool.
If every node is both a server and a client then will a lot of traffic use my node/server as an exit node?
I see there is a separate list of public servers. Presumably, these are people running EasyTier nodes/servers who are willing to allow strangers in?
If I start my own node and I wish to connect to the mesh is that part of the reason for pubic nodes?
How does this compare to Tailscale?
Rust vs Go is one difference. What else?
Tailscale: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale
Can this be a replacement for Hamachi?
Yes. There is also ZeroTier, but it is proprietary (as is Hamachi)
Very interested, I cant seem to access the documentation page: https://doc.oee.icu:60009/web/#/625560517/103293282
Do I need to run the service first?
Github link: https://github.com/EasyTier/easytier.github.io/tree/main
To the web page source. But the software itself is under https://github.com/EasyTier/EasyTier
Given its integration of WireGuard, this might be an open-source competitor more to Netmaker than ZeroTier. Not sure how scalable EasyTier is for a business use-case...
Not trying to be xenophobic here, but “peer to peer VPN” and a domain ending in “.cn” seems a bit odd, no?
[dead]