Could sniffers provide way for low bandwidth broadcasting over the Internet?
Richard Hutnik
packets going from one IP address to another one.
Perhaps someone could illuminate me here. Wouldn't it be possible to
use this ability to have a cheap way to broadcast sound or video over
the Net to a large number of people, without taxing bandwidth? It
would be unidirectional, but so is radio and television broadcasting.
Have one machine do streaming audio and video in an unsecure VPN and
have other people "tune into" this network and pull the stream packets
off the network.
If anyone has more information on this than I, can you fill in the
blanks for me.
Thank you for your time...
- Richard Hutnik
Shawn Mamros
>A concern of privacy over the Internet is that people will steal
>packets going from one IP address to another one.
Which is only possible if either a) one is located between the source
and destination systems, or b) one has control or can take control of
a system located between the source and destination. That also assumes
that the route between source and destination doesn't change in such a
way that you're no longer located along the route.
>Perhaps someone could illuminate me here. Wouldn't it be possible to
>use this ability to have a cheap way to broadcast sound or video over
>the Net to a large number of people, without taxing bandwidth? It
>would be unidirectional, but so is radio and television broadcasting.
>Have one machine do streaming audio and video in an unsecure VPN and
>have other people "tune into" this network and pull the stream packets
>off the network.
What you're proposing is really no different than one source system
supporting a large number of streams. The only difference is that
it starts as one stream, but ultimately splits off into a large
number of streams (to support your "large number of people") at
one or more points somewhere downstream of the source. Doesn't
really make much difference as far as overall bandwidth is concerned;
the stream still has to be split to reach everyone. The old
net.acronym TANSTAAFL ("there ain't no such thing as a free lunch")
definitely applies here.
IP multicast has some of the properties of your scheme, and is
structured in such a way as to keep bandwidth usage as small as
possible. A stream subscription service that used IP multicast
is conceivable technologically, but the logistics required to scale
it up for true mass consumption while maintaining full efficiency
would be difficult to pull off without support from the major ISPs
and backbone carriers, and there's just no financial incentive for
them to do so, at least not as things are structured now.
-Shawn Mamros
E-mail to: mamros -at- mit dot edu
Jukka Aho
> Wouldn't it be possible to use this [packet sniffing] ability
> to have a cheap way to broadcast sound or video over the Net
> to a large number of people, without taxing bandwidth?
A good idea, but it has been already done. It is called
"multicasting". See:
<http://www.nwfusion.com/news/tech/2002/0520tech.html>
<http://www.geckil.com/~harvest/multicasting/>
--
znark
Dexter J
> Richard Hutnik <richar...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Perhaps someone could illuminate me here. Wouldn't it be possible to
>use this ability to have a cheap way to broadcast sound or video over
>the Net to a large number of people, without taxing bandwidth? It
>would be unidirectional, but so is radio and television broadcasting.
>Have one machine do streaming audio and video in an unsecure VPN and
>have other people "tune into" this network and pull the stream packets
>off the network.
Well AkamaiGHost is *sort of* doing this now:
http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/securityfocus/pen-test/2003-07/0082.html
I don't know though - I've been able to get fairly good quality fixed
stream 20kbs RealAudio directly off my new media prototype here such that
it reliably supports about 40 'live' streams per 1mbs of outbound pipe -
theoretically good to 256 http streams per IP - with no 'bottom of the
well', no buffering, no cache copy left on the listener's drive and about 6
seconds to stream lock from anywhere on the planet..
If you have RealAudio 8 or better on anything with a 28.8 modem or better,
you are welcome to test it from where you are.. There's no subscription or
sign up required and it should spin out about 8 hours of tunes before it
decides you've had enough..
It feeding about 20 streams right now (about half my bandwidth) so you can
get a feel for how it works in production if you want to. I'm using it to
hard test secure W2K thin server Apache configuration and services load
balancing..
Just how many simultaneous streams are you thinking of addressing? Local IP
range or International?
--
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