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— Browsing Safely ( Resumable Uploads over the Fragile Internet
In this day and age, people are sharing more photos and videos every day. Although the internet has dramatically improved worldwide in recent years, it is still fragile as ever. If you don’t believe me, try uploading an extremely large content online and you’re likely to see a failed upload on an occasion.
To further complicate matters, the snapWONDERS offerings is available on the Clearnet and the Dark Web. Each introducing their own different set of problems for different reasons.
The Fragile Internet
At snapWONDERS we process a lot of digital media with a focus on deep digital media analysis, format conversions, scrubbing & regeneration. From time to time, we see evidence that the Internet is fragile. Firstly, let us cover the different offerings available over the Clearnet and the Dark Web and a brief overview explaining the differences:
The Clearnet
We're on the Clearnet via a webservice over https, which may be accessed in the conventional way over the internet via Wifi or cables, or mobile connectivity. You can access this by using the browsers most are familiar with such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Safari etc. This is the Internet that most are familiar with.
website: https://snapwonders.com
The Onion Router (Tor)
We're on the Dark Web via a hidden service which means you would need to traverse 6 nodes through the Tor circuit to reach it. The nodes in the circuit are provided to enable anonymity as you surf the web. However, this comes as a cost which is noticeable in terms of the slower browsing experience, and frequently dropped sessions when any of the nodes in the circuit is disrupted.
Onion URL: http://swonderstzr43aczpcwdoyc25vwxngyromja7pyb5sf26ap3v535sxqd.onion
Invisible Internet Project (I2P)
We're on the Invisible Internet Project (I2P) which was created with privacy in mind. In short, I2P is a fully encrypted private network layer that protects your activity and location.
I2P URL: http://snapwonders.i2p or http://6ymp5jqysizmejdwaqiehcsgjoyb4s7sbgssquishk66drujomka.b32.i2p
Each of these different ways to access the snapWONDERS offerings has a myriad of problems especially when uploading large media content. These are mainly disruptions from WiFi fallouts, mobile intermittent disconnections, networking issues, or unreliability of stable nodes in the Dark Web considering each of the nodes are likely located at different locations in the world.
There is nothing worse than waiting and watching a upload slowly upload, only to be interrupted near the end and you have to repeat. It’s extremely frustrating. We know as we’ve received feedback on occasion on this very point.
It’s reached a point where we decided to take some action on the feedback received. After conducting some research, it was nice to learn that there are solutions out there that help combat this very problem.
Introducing Tus – Open Protocol for Resumable File Uploads
The goal of the Tus is to solve the problem of unreliable file uploads. It is a new protocol that enables resumable uploads, and completely built on HTTP. From a technical perspective, this keeps things rather simple, and in a hindsight it’s rather impressive!
Furthermore, the Tus offerings enable users to momentarily pause or interrupt their own uploading, only to resume at a later point and continue uploading from where they last paused.
If your uploading got disconnected, whether via network outage or something else like a browser crash. Then again, it’s no problem – when you are connected again, you simply resume uploading from where you last had stopped. That’s pretty cool!
Visually the snapWONDERS uploader screen has remained unchanged and continues to look the same:
However, included into the uploading screen, we’re pleased to announce that we fully support the resumable file uploads. Thank you for the feedback we received which had prompted us to take action to solve this annoyances.
