Hi Niall, I know I am reviving a fairly old thread here but have been reading up on RUDP v2.0 and your post was the closest discussion to a question I have regarding robustness Vs ISP blocking and country level “traffic shaping” censorship that the Maidsafe network will inevitably face.
[quote=“ned14, post:14, topic:1851”]
Of course they can. Any network traffic can be blocked. Indeed your ISP is highly likely to throttle and shape any unrecognised traffic… Simply encrypting (obfuscating) everything isn’t the answer - a government or especially ISP could block all unrecognisable packets or add 500ms latency to all of them. The way we’re going to work around this in RUDP v2 is to make the bottom layer wire level transport switchable, so RUDP v2 could use UDP, UDT or even TCP as its bottom layer transport while all upper layers don’t need to care. That way individual users get to choose according to their local network topology and ISP quirks.[/quote]
Has any discussion been given to the idea of being able to disguise RUDP packets as other protocols? For example: Disguising Tor Traffic as Skype Video Calls.
I guess that any such a “chameleon” ability would best if it was very flexible. MaidSafe instances being able to semi-autonomously negotiate, change and update protocol “skins” rapidly and not just be limited to one hard coded type of protocol like skype video calls in the above example. Some protocols are very reluctantly messed with at the ISP level and quickly draw large negative community reactions if they are perceived to be messed with (I am thinking of the multi billion dollar gaming industry and vocal gamers here).