Comment by zerof1l
5 hours ago
All the network traffic from that browser is routed through a server. My IP inside that browser was in India and on CloudFlare network. I don’t particularly trust Puter. Why not route traffic through my actual browser?
5 hours ago
All the network traffic from that browser is routed through a server. My IP inside that browser was in India and on CloudFlare network. I don’t particularly trust Puter. Why not route traffic through my actual browser?
Because the web browser can't make arbitrary network connections. Even if it was implemented intercepting at the HTTP layer (which would probably be much more difficult than just intercepting the low level socket operations) you wouldn't be able to properly manage CORS headers, cookies and various other things.
>Why not route traffic through my actual browser?
Because you can't. Not even an Extension is able to. Browsers don't want you to bypass their content enforcement. I wish we had at least one hacker friendly browser.
Extensions can't, correct but I wanted to bring up a special case regarding this
Isolated web apps a chrome feature for developing apps that run in chromium based on HTML (but tbh only really used in Chromebooks) do support raw TCP sockets so if this was ported to an IWA you could have Firefox on a Chromebook without an external server needed.
Chromium CEF could also embed the Puter proxy inside it too as a standalone application. No luck on Mobile though.
The TCP proxy exit node we're using is running on Cloudflare, you can check that your traffic is still TLS encrypted by OpenSSL (also compiled to webassembly). The browser does not have a native API to send raw TCP so the proxying is done by the http://github.com/MercuryWorkshop/wisp-protocol protocol. You can check your packets in dev tools, look for a socket connection with "puter.cafe" as the host for our TCP proxy. This application is meant to be a demo for it actually (why it says at the bottom that its powered by puter networking). That is the only server side component of this.
I was reading your landing page at https://developer.puter.com/networking/ and was very confused by how you were achieving the "with no server or proxy" part, until much further down the page:
> "the connection is tunneled over a single WebSocket to a Puter relay"
Come on, it's both a server and a proxy, and it doesn't stop being those things just because you're calling it a relay.
I wrote that and I think you're right. We were trying to convey that you don't need to set up anything, but the wording could definitely be better. I'll change it.
apologies yes there is a wording error here, the correct wording is no CORS proxy, the reason why this is important is because cors proxies are inherently insecure (this is different because the TLS is done in your browser with a webassembly library).
no servers is referring to you not needing to host servers in the same as the term "serverless". Such is the ways of modern tech terms I fear
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Puter's networking is open-source and e2e encrypted. Also, a regular browser doesn't give access to raw TCP sockets used for this, so it wouldn't be possible to route through your browser.
So it's just the three accounts you have now? (Show by @coolelectronics now and 7 months ago [1], show from you/@ent101 2d ago [0], 2025[2,3,4], 2024[5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D], 2023[E], @george0812 2022[F])
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31611016
what do you mean? we're a team of 10 and have 390 contributors. We post regularly, including me.
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this should be documented with highlight to prevent anyone trying to leak some personal information.
i never did some wasm but seems it runs quite fast on my macmini m1