The light boat

Two people, one exchange, then a direct line with nothing in the middle. The block you have to carry is 61% smaller than the raw one.

state

the channel

reduction for headroom

A raw WebRTC offer runs about a thousand characters, and nearly all of it is boilerplate that is byte-identical every single time. Only four things are actually yours: the ufrag, the password, the fingerprint and the candidates. Everything else is rebuilt from a template on arrival.

Measured: 1,060 characters down to 414. Sixty-one per cent less to carry, and it expands back with every field intact. Nothing was approximated — the parts that were dropped were the parts that are constant.

what is free, and the one thing that isn't

No server of ours touches your words. Once the line opens it is browser to browser. Nothing is stored, logged or relayed — there is nothing in the middle to do it with.

The one thing that isn't free, stated rather than hidden: to find a route across the internet, browsers ask a public STUN server for their own outside address. Free ones. They see that two addresses asked; they never see a word of what you say. On the same wifi it doesn't need them at all.

the address is the content

The bar above is the sha-256 of your own block — two brown stops, banded 16…240, luminance-clamped 32…224. The same addressing as every leaf, every zebra, and the kernel itself. Nobody hands out names here, so nobody can take one away.

what is not here yet

The plan was to show the block as a coloured QR code so the handshake itself would be light — photons off one screen into another camera, no network in the meeting at all. The idea is verified: 414 characters fits one code and decodes exactly.

The encoder I wrote for it does not yet produce a valid code — checked against a reference implementation at all eight masks, no match. So it is not in this page. A code that half-reads is worse than none, and you would find out while holding a phone up in front of somebody.

It goes in when it passes, and not before.