NewNode - decentralized CDN from FireChat developer

The other day I came across a mention of a certain NewNode:

NewNode is an SDK for mobile development that makes any application invulnerable to any censorship and DDoS, and dramatically reduces server load. P2P network. Can work in theory without internet.

It looked rather chaotic, but interesting, and I climbed to understand. 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 was and what part of it was the main one. I retell below.

dCDN

Developers from 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 can 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 congestion and network clutter.

Protocol

Further, 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 the pdf you can understand that it works using:

• 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 the 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 access to Bittorrent DHT in the protocol was equated with the Bittorrent user base.

Work without the Internet, obviously, is inherited from FireChat technologies, but it is not clear to what extent. In the only line about offline, access to “your content” is declared, 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. Over the three and a half years of the project's existence, 4 contributors have been noted in it, but in fact all the code was written by one developer - Greg Hazel. Here, of course, I became discouraged - all this ambitious tinsel turned out to be essentially a pet project of one developer. But something gives me hope.

Separate connections began to line up even on the site, and after rummaging through the github, I finally remembered. The CEO of Clostra, who develops the project, and one of the contributors is Stanislav Shalunov, one of the developers of FireChat and the author of Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT), which is used by Bittorrent, Apple, and probably something else. Now he is also an investor, and it looks like he plans to seriously develop his protocol and make it generally accepted (or at least generally known, as happened with LEDBAT).

What else bothers

In addition to the complete dependence on one developer, there are other oddities around this project.

• No one writes about him anywhere. Not on HN, not on blogs or twitter. Complete information vacuum. I don’t even know how the person who wrote the description from the beginning of the post found out about him.
• If the idea is really good, using Shalunov's personal brand and authority, it could have been promoted long ago and acquired the support of major players (or a major community). There is none of this.
• Clostra is a very murky studio. Very straight forward. They have an extremely crappy-looking site where they present their only product, Keymaker (well, NewNode), all without examples, reviews, screenshots, and other bullshit required for a landing page. There's just inspiring text in blurry wording and icons from the nearest stock. You can’t study the team, vacancies, or even learn something about this office. They have a twitter, which apparently is run by a bot, and a Facebook that was abandoned at the time of creation. But with all this outward obscurity, in several places they emphasize the fact of their cooperation with civil services, especially with the Department of Defense. There are three reviews about getting a job with them, where two are sharply negative (for example, "Don't waste your time with Clostra. Something stinks about this scam", and one is very positive. In general, at first glance, such a project does not come from a scam distinguish.

Let's see what happens from all this, I personally will be interested in following such an ambitious project. If NewNode succeeds, it can change the way mobile applications and their traffic work quite a lot, and if it fails, someone more responsible and capable can pick up the idea.

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Source: habr.com