[JDEV] [Fwd: Cool idea! (Jabphone ;-)]

[Marty Saxton]

I'm a relative newbie to jabber, so forgive me if I'm re-hashing old issues.
I think we all agree that "Presence" is the key to a wide range of
peer-to-peer appliciations beyond instand messages (e.g., voice over ip,
video phone, file sharing, peer hosted games).  The problem is that all
these application result in binary data that can't (efficiently) be pumped
through the existing jabber client/server[/server]/client xml stream.  Is
there anything in jabber (existing or proposed) that can facilitate direct
peer<->peer connections?  I can think of two problems that need to be
addressed:

1) The security risk of exposing your IP address to others.  It requres a
greater level of trust between peers to expose IP's to each other.  At the
very minimum "expose IP to peer" must be a standard jabber option for each
peer in your roster. 

2) Firewalls (IP masquerading, NAT, PAT, whatever):  two peers both behind
firewalls generally can't establish a direct peer to peer connection.  Has
anyone proposed a generalized peer<->proxy<->peer solution for binary data?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.jabber.org/jdev/attachments/20000722/fb236775/attachment-0002.htm>