I suspect that sites trying to do this sort of thing might quickly find themselves at the top of hostile domain lists as similarly happened to all those sites that embedded crypto miners a couple years ago. At the very least the scripts will soon be in the blocklists for ad blocker extensions if they’re not already.
It’s cool tech, I’m sure, but using visitors’ resources for the site’s own benefit like this will probably not go over well in the long term.
Arc plays nicely with adblocks. And users are always presented (via Arc's graphical widget that sites can't hide) the option to learn about Arc and opt out in two clicks/taps if they so choose.
Yep! Browser-to-browser peer-to-peer connections are established over WebRTC, data (fragmented, encrypted file pieces) flow over the WebRTC data channel, and the data is encrypted in transit with DTLS.
Wasn't another YC company trying to do this, and was generally met with harsh feedback? (peer5).
p2p isn't bad - looking at peertube, or torrents, etc.
It's forced p2p to make a commercial entity some bucks that is significantly problematic. Browsers are user agents, and should not become commercial agents.
Action item for browser vendors: make webRTC request a user initiated action (like microphone/video access)
Hey! I'm Ansgar. I build Arc. The impact is negligible. Notably, Arc never uses cellular connections -- both to preserve battery life and never use cellular data. Wi-Fi (or ethernet) only. And all activity ceases as soon as the tab with Arc is closed.
It’s cool tech, I’m sure, but using visitors’ resources for the site’s own benefit like this will probably not go over well in the long term.