Now, see. that's what I said as well. But the rest of the team was tired of me trying to name the hosted iroh "n0des", which I'm now ready to admit was a stretch. And so now here we are spelling n0q as noq. c'est la vie.
disclosure: I work on the team behind noq. Can't emphasize enough that the quinn maintainers are really lovely people, and quinn is an excellent project.
delighted to hear! iroh-blobs is Rüdiger's love letter to BLAKE3, and hot dang has he taken this piece of machinery quite far. Much of this is covered in the post, but some highlights:
* fetch any sub-sequence of bytes, verified on send & receive
* fetch sub-sequences of bytes in collections (sets of blobs / directories)
* store on disk, inlining small blobs into the database for faster lookups
* fan in from disk & the network
* "multi-provider" fan in that can re-plan a fetch on the fly
* should land support for WASM compilation (browsers) soon! https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs/pull/187
We're hard at work on making the API more ergonomic, but as a foundational protocol it's truly impressive. Rudi has been working with the BLAKE3 authors on both perf testing & the hazmat API.
sibling comment with links to docs is the more accurate, but to summarize, it's some of both:
* all connections are always e2ee (even when traffic flows through a relay)
* relays are both for connection negotiation, and as a fallback when a direct connection isn't possible
* initial packet is always sent through the relay to keep a fast time-to-first-byte, while a direct connection is negotiated in parallel. typical connections send a few hundred bytes over the relay & the rest of the connection lifetime is direct
yes, to an extent. It will time out if the connection completely dies for more than the timeout interval, but all connections are designed to survive changes to network changes like IP address or network interface (eg: switching from WiFi to ethernet, or cellular)
ah very sorry, I can see how this isn't all that clear. In the comment you've mentioned when I say "custom protocol" I mean a custom QUIC ALPNs: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7301
When we talk to mainline it's for discovery, which is separate from iroh connections, which always uses QUIC. Specifically: our fork of quinn, an implementation of QUIC in rust. Iroh is tightly coupled to quinn, and isn't swappable. Getting no_std support for us basically boils down to "can we get quinn to support no_std?". For that, see: https://github.com/quinn-rs/quinn/issues/579
Yeah, no_std is going to be very hard. We need a no_std implementation of QUIC that can be wielded by mere mortals first, which I don't think we'll be able to start on for at least a year.
Right now we can get down to an ESP32, which we think is a decent start.
(disclosure: I work on iroh): you're selling yourself short! All of this is accurate, except for maybe the BGP stuff :)
Dumb Pipe & Sendme me are indeed demos, we do provide a set of default, public relays to use for free. The relay code is also open source, and if you want to pay us we can run a network for you.
We try to provide a few different options for discovery, the one we think has the most general utility is a custom DNS server, but both local mDNS and Bittorrent Mainline are also pluggable options.