Quote:
Originally Posted by inquisitive
How does this chat roulette work? How is it any different from any webcam site?
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You mean, technically ?
Basically, it uses the P2P capacities of the last versions of Flash. So when it connects you with someone, all it does is make a "handshake" with the 2 users, each one knowing the IP address and port of the other one, after what the two computers are "directly" connected together. If it fails too much, it has a fallback mode in which the video feed is transferred through chatroulette's own servers.
This has an interesting "hidden feature" : if you take the IP address of the person you are talking to (by sniffing your own network connection for example), you can geoip it. That's how chatroulettemap works. It's not 100% working however, because you don't know if the IP you're connected to is really the one of the person you're talking to (for example, he may be routing his connection through a VPN service like Ipredator, in such a case you'll see Ipredator's IP, and if you geoip it you'll find a location in Sweden even if the person you're talking to is in any other country)