Alice's Adventures on the Internet, Continued, ...

Illustration from Project Gutenberg's The Tenniel Illustrations for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland by Sir John Tenniel.

This is a follow-up to Alice's Adventures In The Wonderland Wide Web. This time she goes down the rabbit hole of WebRTC which stands for Web Real-Time Communication: "a free and open-source project providing web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication (RTC) via application programming interfaces (APIs). It allows audio and video communication and streaming to work inside web pages by allowing direct peer-to-peer communication, eliminating the need to install plugins or download native apps" and TURN which stands for Traversal Using Relays around NAT (and where NAT stands for Network Address Translation).

I discovered this while trying to find out how Raspberry Pi implement their Raspberry Pi Connect which, to me, sounds like a security nightmare that would be hard to wake up from, ... I found this blog post by R.S. Doiel entitled A quick review of Raspberry Pi Connect.

I want to understand these things so that I can see how we could use a decentralised peer-to-peer system to develop and deliver software. See Eron Woolf on Why Open Source is Failing. The idea I have is that such a network could be used to authenticate users and automatically ensure that the necessary accounting principles are respected.

I found my mind wondering to MIT's Scratch project and the possibilities of connecting Scratch applications together by web sockets, ... 

 
... and Squeak/Smalltalk: https://squeak.org/ on which the prototype of Scratch was implemented.
 
And I discovered that Google has released Blockly under the Apache-2.0 licence and the code is available at https://github.com/google/blockly. It's pitched as a developer education project, see https://developers.google.com/blockly/guides/get-started/why-blockly. In its most abstract form it is an abstract syntax editor for domain-specific languages, with a GUI which can embedded in a web page. See https://developers.google.com/blockly/guides/get-started/what-is-blockly.
 

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