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Moan: stupid Apple iMessage and Facetime (revisited)

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Weaver:
Earlier rant on this subject: https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,22108.msg379638.html#msg379638


--- Quote ---I suspect that (Apple’s) Facetime and iMessage use the internet all the time even when the corresponding parties are in the same LAN, which is utterly insane. (Apologies if I have got this wrong.) Fixing it would be trivial. That stupidity means that sending a picture or even worse a video clip using iMessage is incredibly slow because of my crummy 1.1 Mbps upstream speed when it only has to travel 5 m across the room. (Yes, I know, use Airdrop, which uses a weird mixture of Bluetooth and 802.11*, possibly for good reasons.) Some of this is the applications’ fault obviously. However more adventurous core networking educates app developers and core networking software devs can inspire change and the exploitation of new opportunities.

--- End quote ---

It is completely insane. Now because of my very limited upstream ( < 1 Mbps ), it’s painful to send stuff to Janet even though we’re in the same room. It would be so easy to fix. Try just sending to the IPv6 address of your peer, first taking a look at the globally routable IPv6 addresses that you both may have. If you both have one, compare the high 64 bits of each, and if they’re equal, then you’re good to go, and you can just send stuff between those addresses. If you don’t both have such a routable address, try pinging the other person’s IPv6 link-local address, they’re pretty much bound to have one, I would think. If that fails, then you’re not on the same LAN, or you’re perhaps on a WLAN with inter-client isolation, like many guest networks, where you can only access the internet and nothing else on the LAN. It would be rather better to sort-of ‘ping’ the other machine with some sort of distinct, identifiable protocol, one that identifies it as being an iMessage check, or whatever.

Unfortunately, you have to go to the central Apple servers at first, in order to get the other machine’s IPv6 addresses, which each machine can report in, initially and every time they change. A report should be a complete list of all interfaces’ IPv6 addresses, with additional fields added per interface, identifying what kind of link it is (eg 4G, 5G, WLAN/FTTP, WLAN/xDSL etc.), with scope, and with preference values giving est speed down/up and the cost per byte, plus any quota info, so that expensive or all-you-can eat links can be identified and software can make a choice to rule out some link types and prefer others.

Alex Atkin UK:
It annoyed me no end when Skype moved to the server model, it made it much harder to achieve a HD connection.

Mind you it was always buggy, it would sometimes have trouble going HD even on the LAN with two clients right next to each other communicating directly.

Basically since CG-NAT started to roll out, everything moved to server-based as peer to peer could not be guaranteed to work (not that it ever could mind you, but uPNP was common so it usually did).  Why it can't just be a fallback option for when direct fails I do not know, so they can snoop on your data probably?

XGS_Is_On:
uPNP isn't such a thing on corporate networks. Most of those paying for Skype and in turn Teams are corporate customers. The transactions on a local, layer 2 network are tiny in comparison to those across the Internet that will consume bandwidth on the WAN regardless. Bandwidth for Apple, Microsoft, etc, is really cheap and web sockets to hook clients together aren't a big overhead.

Folks working from home for corporates will likely either have a VPN that sends everything through the corporate network, be using a cloud security solution that fires 443 through a third party firewall solution or will have endpoint security software on the machine that isn't interested in allowing applications to listen to random sockets.

Haven't had uPNP running here since 2020 and haven't noticed any loss or degradation of functionality.

craigski:
Apple FaceTime is P2P between devices, if the network will support it.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/seca331c55cd/web

Alex Atkin UK:

--- Quote from: XGS_Is_On on April 26, 2023, 03:29:36 PM ---uPNP isn't such a thing on corporate networks. Most of those paying for Skype and in turn Teams are corporate customers. The transactions on a local, layer 2 network are tiny in comparison to those across the Internet that will consume bandwidth on the WAN regardless. Bandwidth for Apple, Microsoft, etc, is really cheap and web sockets to hook clients together aren't a big overhead.

Folks working from home for corporates will likely either have a VPN that sends everything through the corporate network, be using a cloud security solution that fires 443 through a third party firewall solution or will have endpoint security software on the machine that isn't interested in allowing applications to listen to random sockets.

Haven't had uPNP running here since 2020 and haven't noticed any loss or degradation of functionality.

--- End quote ---

I guess that makes sense, but why drop P2P support entirely if they could just fall back to relay based when required?

My guess is they completely rewrote the code and couldn't be bothered with the expense to re-implement it.  But the video quality after the change was so bad I just stopped using it entirely.

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