The other day I came across a mention of a certain NewNode:
NewNode - SDK for mobile development, which makes any application indestructible for any censorship and DDoS, and dramatically reduces the load on the server. P2P network. Can work in theory without internet.
It looked pretty messy, but interesting, and I got into it. There was no place for a description of the project in the repository, so I had to go to the Clostra website (rather strange) and re-read the local landing page several times to understand what kind of technology it is and what part of it is main. I retell below.
dCDN
The developers at Clostra believe that traditional CDNs do not deal well with network congestion, are vulnerable to possible censorship and hacking, and also require a lot of labor and money to scale. They offer an alternative - a decentralized CDN, within which applications will be able to exchange content without the ability to get in and control traffic from outside. Also, in their opinion, the massive use of dCDN will not cause network congestion and clutter.
Protocol
Next, it turns out that NewNode is a peer-to-peer protocol on which dCDN is already being built. It promises high speed, which usually causes problems for decentralized networks.
Formally, the protocol is not described anywhere, but from pdfki you can understand what it uses:
- LEDBAT
- Bittorrent DHT
- Device-to-device connections from FireChat
A separate item indicates the property of networks on NewNode to deploy and repair automatically (the latter, most likely, implies instability of the mesh network from mobile devices). Also, since the developers hope to implement protocol support in all possible applications, the traffic generated by NewNode will not unmask the user. DDoS protection is declared and the phrase is highlighted separately:
Take advantage of BitTorrent's 250 Million user base
In general, it is not clear what they wanted to say with this and how the appeal to Bittorrent DHT in the protocol was equated to the Bittorrent user base.
Working without the Internet is obviously inherited from FireChat technologies, but it is not clear to what extent. The only line about offline claims access to "your content", which most likely means forwarding incoming data through a neighboring client with the Internet over a mesh network.
Repository
It contains SDKs for Android, iOS and macOS / Linux. For three and a half years of the project’s existence, 4 contributors were noted in it, but in fact all the code was written by one developer - Greg Hazel . Here, of course, I got depressed - all this ambitious tinsel turned out to be, in fact, a pet project of one developer. But something is reassuring me.
Separate connections began to be built on the site, and after rummaging through the github, I finally remembered. The project’s CEO Clostra and one of the contributors is Stanislav Shalunov, one of the FireChat developers and the author of Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT), which Bittorrent, Apple, and probably something else go for. Now he is also an investor, and it is very likely that he plans to seriously develop his protocol and make it generally accepted (or at least generally known, as happened with LEDBAT).
What else is confusing
Besides being completely dependent on one developer, there are other oddities around this project.
- Nobody writes about him anywhere. Not on HN, not on Blozhik or Twitter. Complete information vacuum. I don't even know how the person who wrote the testimonial from the beginning of the post found out about him.
- , , , ( ). .
- Clostra — . . , Keymaker ( NewNode), , , , . . , - . , , . , Department of Defence. , (, «Don't waste your time with Clostra. Something stinks about this scam», . , .
Let's see what comes out of all this, personally, it will be interesting for me to follow such an ambitious project. If NewNode goes off, it can dramatically change the way mobile applications and their traffic work, and if it fails, the idea can be picked up by someone more responsible and capable.
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