183 pointsby babuskov8 hours ago19 comments
  • duckduckman6 hours ago
    I think what we’re seeing here isnt Valve messing up but rather the middle east conflict expanded to cyberspace and spilling over to impact civilians. Look at the timing and affected countries. China isnt also exactly known for free internet.

    WebRTC works as fallback. WebRTC is encrypted and cant be used for much else.

    STUN in the otherhand is unencrypted and the protocol itself can be used for DDoS reflection/amplification. I would not be surprised if this is somehow weaponized and/or blocked/analyzed in real time that then breaks the connectivity.

    • numpad04 hours ago
      STUN/TURN is basically icanhazip for WebRTC. STUN gives you your public IP:port. TURN is the same, but the returned IP:port is the one that had been dynamically allocated to you at time of querying, rather than the actual ones.

      WebRTC clients take that STUN/TURN response and send to peers through out-of-band, through e.g. a lobby server chat mechanism, to set up the connection. This allows NAT table entries to be created as if they are outbound connection at both ends.

      You can't make P2P connection with STUN/TURN alone. STUN/TURN is just a tool required for WebRTC.

      • bob10292 hours ago
        TURN is the last resort and isn't just signaling. It carries the traffic as well.

        If you can make all the STUN servers fail from the perspective of the clients, you could hypothetically force them to use TURN servers that are more centralized and easier to spy on. STUN negotiates pipes n:n. TURN is closer to n:1.

        • michaeltan hour ago
          > force them to use TURN servers that are more centralized and easier to spy on

          Webrtc traffic is encrypted as it travels through the TURN servers, isn't it? Sure, you get some which-ip-contacted-which-using-what-service metadata, but any active middleman able to mess with STUN traffic already has that.

          It could just be that someone's fucked up a setting somewhere. I mean, the reason WebRTC has loads of options for 'interactive connectivity establishment' is because it's common to see users behind NAT, users whose NAT cant be traversed with STUN, IPv6 being broken, UDP getting blocked, TCP ports other than port 443 getting blocked, etc etc.

          If a country's ISPs use CGNAT to avoid giving users precious IPv4 addresses, and world events made the ISPs turn the security settings up to 11, STUN just stops working.

          • bob1029an hour ago
            The traffic is encrypted, but this makes it a lot easier to acquire if you have some way to break it.
    • ars5 hours ago
      I think you have that backwards, WebRTC doesn't work, and STUN does.
    • sylware37 minutes ago
      IPv6 and minimal assembly-written network code going without niche and complex features.
    • Georgelemental6 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • nine_k6 hours ago
        Regular people here are as opposed to military servicemen. The people who did not sign up for going to war.
        • underdeserver6 hours ago
          These are dudes, likely some of them teenagers, playing Street Fighter and Tekken.

          Who signed up for what?

          • nine_k6 hours ago
            The network shenanigans that apparently affect the p2p gaming is allegedly by the militaries of many countries, related to the Iran war. Much like GPS disturbancs in Northern and Eastern Europe are due to the war in Ukraine. Dudes delivering pizza have to suffer them, even though they never signed up to take part in the war.
          • RamRodification6 hours ago
            > Who

            These dudes and dudettes playing video games

            > what?

            Military service

      • duckduckman6 hours ago
        Fair enough. Edited for clarity.
      • croes6 hours ago
        > impact regular people

        aka civilians

        • Drupon5 hours ago
          Regular people in Isntreal aren't "civilians"
      • 7bit3 hours ago
        Calm down, he meant civilians. No need to stir up drama.
        • RobotToaster39 minutes ago
          [flagged]
          • 7bit25 minutes ago
            That has NOTHING to do what's being discussed here. Stop trying to escalate the topic.
      • decremental6 hours ago
        [dead]
  • jofzar8 hours ago
    I know I'm just preaching to the choir here but my favourite thing about open source/published source libraries/applications is discussions on bug reports/pr's like this.

    It's just something so heartwarming of multiple people coming together to describe their symptoms, workarounds and theories of what could be causing it.

    • cedws5 hours ago
      GitHub discussions used to be so much higher quality though when the platform was for professionals. Now, I see so many discussions that devolve into practically being reddit/4chan threads. Another reason to leave.
      • sph5 hours ago
        Only on those posted to social media including Hacker News. There is no devolving into memes for niche discussions only interested parties know about.

        Don’t blame Github for getting spammed whenever an issue reaches the front page.

        • hmry3 hours ago
          I wish HN would ban posting links to issue trackers with comment sections, like lobsters has done. Although the spam volume from HN and reddit is pretty small compared to that from youtube reaction video influencers
        • cedws5 hours ago
          Not only. I see it across all of GitHub. Spam, +1 comments, feature begging are all particularly common.
          • ZeWaka4 hours ago
            Feature begging on GH has been a thing since forever, I remember plenty of it 10 years ago.
            • RobotToaster35 minutes ago
              Hell, I remember feature begging on developer mailing lists myself 20+ years ago. (To be fair I was 13 at the time)
              • wongarsu9 minutes ago
                To be fair, a lot of the users spamming and feature begging on github today are 13 right now
              • 9 minutes ago
                undefined
      • phrotoma22 minutes ago
        Eternal September.
      • throwaway20373 hours ago

            > when the platform was for professionals
        
        When was that?
      • OsrsNeedsf2P5 hours ago
        I feel like it's gotten more professional. 10+ years ago people were dropping the hard R in pull request reviews, now everyone is acting like LinkedIn-speak and Stars will get them their next job
        • rezonant4 hours ago
          ...What? Is this the Linus Sebastian misconception of what the hard R is?
          • stavros4 hours ago
            Yeeeah I'm pretty sure I've never seen a hard R on a PR.
    • 7 hours ago
      undefined
  • throwaway20375 hours ago
    Title does not match GitHub issue: "Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other middle east countries"
  • RossBencina7 hours ago
    Wild hypothesising here on HN but if you read to the end of the GH issue users have been reporting that STUN has been failing (i.e. no P2P link establishment, fallback to high-latency relay servers.) Multiple users have been able to work around the issue by manually substituting older Valve WebRTC dlls. I'd love to read a postmortem from the Valve devs.
    • 7 hours ago
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  • raincole3 hours ago
    > in Israel and possibly other middle east countries

    Why did you leave this part of title out? For clicks?

    • etiam3 hours ago
      You've been here long enough to understand that would exceed the title character limit.
      • raincole3 hours ago
        I just tested it. Copied&pasted the original title into submit form.

        Nope. Right within the limit.

        • 7bit3 hours ago
          It's so funny when people come up with these arguments so confidently and then seeing them getting disproved so quick. Bro was never more glad there's anonymity on the internet
          • hackboyfly2 hours ago
            Your comment reads like a tweet. But I agree with you!
    • mschuster912 hours ago
      Or maybe because if there is one thing the world doesn't need, it's yet another thread devolving into flamewars about the Israel/Palestine conflict?
      • raincole2 hours ago
        Then don't make this thread. One can't discuss an issue about Israel/middle east's internet connection while pretending the war doesn't exist. Technical issues don't float in a perfect vacuum sphere.
        • mschuster912 hours ago
          > Technical issues don't float in a perfect vacuum sphere.

          I agree. But if there is a chance to not immediately draw in the wrong crowd... I prefer if people take it.

  • babuskov8 hours ago
    The rabbit hole started as a major P2P issue in Israel and possibly other middle east countries and further investigations revealed it seems to be a worldwide problem.
  • thenthenthen7 hours ago
    Mmm im in China and played a third party game through steams Spacewar dev game (enabling steam p2p i think) like 3 weeks ago and it worked fine.
  • 0xb4k45 hours ago
    The title make it seems like it's broken everywhere...
  • chandler55557 hours ago
    interesting, people speculated that Street Fighter6 went from P2P to relay a few months ago on one of the updates. never wouldve thought it would be actually a valve issue
  • komali27 hours ago
    Valve fascinates me because the devs there occasionally seem to be simply the best on earth in a given field, but despite that, bizarre bugs will persist for a long time. My favorite was how steam in home streaming from a PC to a steam deck wouldn't work if the steam deck had an Ethernet and wifi connection - one of the connections had to be disabled or the stream would always crash.

    Maybe they need a few average devs there to spend time sweeping up behind the paragons that are pushing the envelope into these features existing at all.

    • 3form3 hours ago
      The company is very small, and they're doing a lot with what they have. Steam alone is full of arcane features that I keep discovering. There's a lot of backend stuff. They're making games and hardware.

      Perhaps some of this is contracted, similar to the Linux compat and drivers, but it's still impressive to me, compared to the orgs like Spotify, order of magnitude larger with barely any features at all. (I understand there's legal, huge backend, and I didn't see many bugs over time, but still)

      • trumpdong10 minutes ago
        The company makes $50,000,000 for every employee each year. It can afford more employees.
    • mhitza6 hours ago
      My favorite bug family, that somehow to sneak in every time, is how their react frontend (or whatever the store runs) manages to semi-crash and the controller inputs are no longer recognized.

      I kind of hope at least they'll fix such issues permanently before the steam machine release.

      • philistine5 hours ago
        That is the bane of my existence. Steam's UI is so slow to react due to its web roots, that I feel like people must be insane to think that Steam is somehow this great app. It's terrible.

        I shop on GOG.

        • csande174 hours ago
          Steam was rewritten in React relatively recently. I think most people formed their opinion of Steam back when it was mostly developed in VGUI, the same in-house native UI framework Valve used in games for stuff like the Half-Life 2 title screen and the TF2 server browser.
    • stackghost7 hours ago
      Valve famously has a very flat org structure so it's possible that that problem just isn't sexy enough for someone to pick it up on their own, without being told by a higher-up.

      I wish they offered remote; I'd happily work there doing those sorts of unglamorous bug fixes. High-reliability engineering is my jam.

      • sph5 hours ago
        People keep blaming the flat org, as if conventionally-organised companies never had any bugs or never focused on very visible and marketable features rather than bug fix.

        In fact, the flat org allows a random person to work on a niche bug management doesn’t seem to care about, which wouldn’t be possible if you had a boss breathing down your neck.

      • PeterHolzwarth7 hours ago
        They say they have a flat structure. People who have worked there, despite some axe-grinding, indicate otherwise.
        • formerly_proven5 hours ago
          grug tribal animal, tribe always there even when chief say is not
  • 3 hours ago
    undefined
  • ai_fry_ur_brain5 hours ago
    This is basically the plot to the movie Zone of Interest, which was inspired by modern day Israeli society.

    We have kids complaining online about 40ms ping on their video games, and right down the road kids are online complaining about how they're being hunted for sport.

    • po1nt5 hours ago
      Unnecessarily political. Israel children are not the one who are cheering the war, nor fighting in it.
      • ai_fry_ur_brain4 hours ago
        I never said they were.. I was pointing out how the themes from the Zone of Interest match the reality they were inspired by.
  • sammy22555 hours ago
    Is this a bug on Valve? Or is it simply a case of "My ISP is fucking with my internet traffic and they won't admit it please help me"
    • bigibas1232 hours ago
      Reading the github thread points to a case of: "My country's governemt mandated it's ISPs fuck with my internet traffic, but steam P2P stuff used to not be affected but now is" across mutiple countries. People have found it works again if they roll back some of steam's dlls so Valve can probably fix ir.
  • picofarad8 hours ago
    Hm, I have always wanted to use this to play couch co-op remotely but is this even the same "service" that provides that?

    Looks like they tracked it to a steam update in March, and there's a workaround for at lest 3 games that involves all players copying steamwebrtc.dll to the game's ./binaries folder.

  • tamimio3 hours ago
    [dead]
  • xyst8 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • make37 hours ago
      Government-controlled inspection wouldn't be solved by switching to older DLLs (unless the code itself is compromised, which is unlikely for video game code)
    • IAmGraydon7 hours ago
      Don't these systems usually use a splitter, thereby adding zero latency?
      • sillysaurusx7 hours ago
        How do they inspect traffic when most is https?
        • RossBencina7 hours ago
          In this case we're talking about P2P traffic, which is generally not HTTPS. The linked issue references WebRTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC
        • Gigachad7 hours ago
          Encrypted by Cloudflare, so they just use the keys to decrypt it again.
          • koito175 hours ago
            Many organizations, surprisingly, still do things like using Kubernetes with TLS terminated at the ingress. In that case, you just need the splitter in the same network as the nodes hosting the ingress controller. Or inspect the unencrypted traffic within the cluster.

            It takes a non-trivial amount of work to set up a service mesh (and mutual TLS between services), so many k8s clusters end up with unencrypted traffic inside the cluster network.

            • fc417fc8024 hours ago
              > It takes a non-trivial amount of work to set up a service mesh

              I feel like configuring wireguard between a group of physical hosts is fairly trivial. After all I do it semi-manually in order to access my LAN when I'm elsewhere and I'm certainly no expert sysadmin.

    • RossBencina7 hours ago
      You think IDF-grade packet inspection causes lag?
  • patspam5 hours ago
    I blame Bricks and Minifigs
  • wook__7 hours ago
    As SteamOS user for years i can say "typical Valve"
  • gacgacgac7 hours ago
    My unpopular opinion: Valve is basically a parasite or a landlord. They've been so successful it's hard to imagine a world without them, and they say "you gotta give the parasite its due" and we believe them and comply.

    It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.

    And their engineering culture is... odd. They hire senior people and then let them all fuck sound aimlessly. Their APIs are terrible, their infrastructure is all over the place, they still have patch Tuesdays. But because they are the landlord that owns every house in town, what are you going to do, not pay rent?

    Gabe is out there cruising the world in a billion dollar yacht, eating thousand dollar meals. All that came off the backs of developers who actually make the games.

    • usea7 hours ago
      > It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.

      This is true, but "treat their customers ok" goes a long way. When everybody else severely abuses their customers, the one company that doesn't generates a lot of goodwill.

    • faidit5 hours ago
      Eh, Steam is kind of like the liberal democratic US empire. It may be evil in a lot of ways but it could actually be a LOT worse. We may actually historically be very lucky to have had a non-shittificationmaxxing games platform for a couple decades, just like we were lowkey lucky that the world was briefly ruled by a somewhat democratic country.. Enjoy both while they last, may not be around long.
      • applfanboysbgon3 hours ago
        > just like we were lowkey lucky that the world was briefly ruled by a somewhat democratic country

        This is just what you tell yourself to feel comfortable about living as a beneficiary of the empire. From the perspective of those invaded, there is no difference. Do you think in Vietnam they thought "I'm glad it is a democratic nation dropping dropping 7.5 million tons of bombs on us and raping our villagers, it would be so much worse if they were authoritarian!". Do you think in Cuba they think, "I'm glad it is a democratic nation that is blockading our entire economy, condemning us into poverty". Do you think in Iran they think "I am glad it is a democratic nation that assassinated our leader and bombed our school"?

    • CursedSilicon6 hours ago
      I'd question the idea that they treat developers poorly. Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee

      Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games

      And yet. Steam persists

      • fc417fc8024 hours ago
        I lack an informed opinion on the matter but I have to wonder what you think the one thing has to do with the other? Developers have very little choice but to go where the customers are.
        • CursedSilicon2 hours ago
          Why aren't the customers going to Epic Game Store? It's the PC, after all. It's explicitly not a walled garden
          • zamadatix12 minutes ago
            The Epic Game Store is just kind of mid. The app feels spammy, the game selection is less, and it doesn't really offer anything over the existing options beyond the monthly free game gimmick. If they want customers to head there it needs to be better, not just good enough.
          • fc417fc8022 hours ago
            Who knows? Presumably because Steam hasn't done anything to drive them off, they've generally been satisfied with the service, and the titles they want are available. At least that would be my guess based on my personal experience but I assume Valve has a much better grasp of their audience than I do.
      • dontlaughan hour ago
        Having worked in the games industry for long time, everyone is constantly trying in vain to escape the 30% tax.
      • jfim2 hours ago
        The Epic store is horrendously slow though. I bought a few games there but in practice the client is just so slow that I avoid it if I can.
      • brador2 hours ago
        The epic games launcher that famously takes 46 seconds to launch. It’s cost them 100s of millions and they refuse to fix it.
    • astlouis446 hours ago
      Totally agreed. I'm building a Steam competitor, that's web-based (WebGPU/WASM) as well as cross-platform. Light on games atm, but the goal is to replicate over time virtually every feature Steam has to offer, as well as more. You can check out a preview of the portal here:

      https://gameselect-knvxf8av.manus.space/

      • koolala4 hours ago
        What lets you host Monkeyball like that. Are you going to port Xonotic to WASM?
        • dminikan hour ago
          Starting a sustainable steam competitor with piracy sure seems like a great idea!
      • 4 hours ago
        undefined