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.<p>WebRTC works as fallback. WebRTC is encrypted and cant be used for much else.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>You can't make P2P connection with STUN/TURN alone. STUN/TURN is just a tool required for WebRTC.
TURN is the last resort and isn't just signaling. It carries the traffic as well.<p>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.
<i>> force them to use TURN servers that are more centralized and easier to spy on</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
IPv6 and minimal assembly-written network code going without niche and complex features.
I think you have that backwards, WebRTC doesn't work, and STUN does.
We do P2P in our networking software and this is why we do it all in band instead of using STUN, TURN, or other common methods. Those get blocked and they’re also often insecure.<p>STUN has mitigations now against being weaponized but it’s still a shit protocol. The fact that neither STUN nor TURN contain any way whatsoever to accomplish any kind of rendezvous without yet another signaling path boggles my mind given how easy it would have been.
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Regular people here are as opposed to military servicemen. The people who did not sign up for going to war.
Fair enough. Edited for clarity.
> impact regular people<p>aka civilians
Calm down, he meant civilians. No need to stir up drama.
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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.<p>It's just something so heartwarming of multiple people coming together to describe their symptoms, workarounds and theories of what could be causing it.
Title does not match GitHub issue: "Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other middle east countries"
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.
> <i>in Israel and possibly other middle east countries</i><p>Why did you leave this part of title out? For clicks?
You've been here long enough to understand that would exceed the title character limit.
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?
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.
What an absolute dud of a submission, I can't believe this got so many upvotes. I guess people saw "Valve" in the title and figured it must be important, even though the content of the issue doesn't even line up with the title.
The title make it seems like it's broken everywhere...
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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)
The company makes $50,000,000 for every employee each year. It can afford more employees.
The number of developers needs to grow log(n) to the number of users to handle all error reports. Valve is way under the log(n) of user.
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.<p>I kind of hope at least they'll fix such issues permanently before the steam machine release.
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.<p>I wish they offered remote; I'd happily work there doing those sorts of unglamorous bug fixes. High-reliability engineering is my jam.
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.<p>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.
They <i>say</i> they have a flat structure. People who have worked there, despite some axe-grinding, indicate otherwise.
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
@dang, title should be updated:<p>`Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other middle east countries`
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"
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.
Hm, I have always wanted to use this to play couch co-op remotely but is this even the same "service" that provides that?<p>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.
Paging Fletcher Dunn
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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)
Don't these systems usually use a splitter, thereby adding zero latency?
You think IDF-grade packet inspection causes lag?
I blame Bricks and Minifigs
As SteamOS user for years i can say "typical Valve"
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.<p>It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.<p>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?<p>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.
> It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.<p>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.
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.
> just like we were lowkey lucky that the world was briefly ruled by a somewhat democratic country<p>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"?
Steam is also a child gambling company that sells loot boxes to kids but it could be a lot worse. From the perspective of someone getting ripped off it doesn't matter whether it was Gaben who scammed you, but he and his empire could still be a lot worse overall.<p>You're allowed to say what you just said in that post without getting taken away at night and your family never talking about you again. Or a drone taking you out while you sleep. Palantir logs all our comments and it would be trivially easy for them if there weren't still some lingering democratic handrails holding them back.<p>You're also typing on a computer on HN, so you're a "beneficiary of the empire" regardless of where you live. As someone who apparently reads leftist theory you should know to look at the big picture on world-historical questions rather than getting emotional, like the people who say USSR was just as evil as WW2 Germany because it also killed gormillions of people.<p>Democracy in the US is dying and may not last another generation. It was something that helped imperial workers and limited the power of the ruling elite, like unions. Unions, like democracy as a whole, are dying. Unions were also corrupt and complicit in imperialist war crimes during the Cold war. Unions in the West have always been connected to labor aristocracy and imperialism. That said, unions as a whole are still a good thing. We should still mourn the decline of labor unions and miss the days when they kept the elite in check and allowed so many working people to live a decent life.<p>Steam is also likely to become an ordinary ripoff company one day soon. I will miss this historical aberration among pure ripoff services. Just like I will miss being able to vote and dissent without drones zapping me.
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<p>Hell, they even <i>buy</i> timed exclusive access to certain games<p>And yet. Steam persists
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.
Having worked in the games industry for long time, everyone is constantly trying in vain to escape the 30% tax.
> Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee<p><a href="https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-be-able-to-sell-in-game-items" rel="nofollow">https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-...</a><p>Unless you're inside Fortnite, where Epic takes a 63% cut of any 'in game item' you sell, and you don't have a choice of storefront inside the game.<p>Rules for me, but not for thee, so sayeth Timmy Tencent as he collects his next ten cents of revenue from a twelve year old.
The epic games launcher that famously takes 46 seconds to launch. It’s cost them 100s of millions and they refuse to fix it.
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.
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:<p><a href="https://gameselect-knvxf8av.manus.space/" rel="nofollow">https://gameselect-knvxf8av.manus.space/</a>