bencord0

RIP Professor MacKay

I remember him giving this talk to my physics class when I was in University. It was so inspirational to me that the UK just might be able to go 100% renewable.

From what I remember, the calculation worked out how we could do it all with Solar. I don't think he quite saw how close we are to achieving the goal, not with Solar, but with Wind within the next decade.

I think we all got distracted by docker in 2013. nspawn containers can be socket activated, but doing the same in docker is still tricky.

Also, we're all collectively still thinking of containers in terms of tiny-VMs instead of highly customized, tcp processing daemons, aka. websites.

WebSockets and WebRTC are two very different protocols and have very different use cases.

WebSockets is an extension to a HTTP request that permits a bi-directional, persistent link between a client and server. You can exchange chunked messages, reliably and in-order using TCP. Once the WebSocket is established, you have free reign over what datastream is sent.

WebRTC is an extension of RTP (a UDP based protocol) that adds a layer of safety (to both users and to network infrastructure). The key requirement for "real-time" communications mandates that reliable and in-order delivery must be sacrificed in favour of getting low-latency data transfers.

Another benefit of WebRTC is that browser-side javascript has no control over the exact datagram being sent over the wire (called RTCWeb, all WebRTC communication is encrypted between peers using SRTP). This eliminates a whole class of UDP based attacks. The client (or intermediate proxies) must not be able to send a specially crafted UDP packet to arbitrary hosts and trigger a distributed reflection attack.

Having said that, WebRTC can be used to transport arbitrary data, you just can't send an arbitrary packet.