Sealed Sites

What it is

Any room can be shown as a site: turn on “Show this room as a site” in its settings. Its files are the site: a front page (index.html, or the first page), its other pages, images, styles, scripts and documents, and the links between them. They’re stored, synced and backed up like any files in a room, sealed with the room’s key. No web server exists anywhere for it.

Who can visit

Exactly who the room’s doors let in, nothing new: the people you invite; anyone who pays at the room’s Lobby with a Toll or a Ticket; anyone you give a door to. A Base can show itself as a site too, as its intranet, and its front desk shows who reaches it.

Where it runs

On the visitor’s device. Their app opens the room’s files with their own door and shows them in a sealed frame: an isolated part of the browser that can’t reach their vault, any other room, Terebyte’s own pages or the network. Everything a site normally runs in a browser runs there, using the site’s own files. A form on the site goes to the room’s board as a sealed message once the visitor says yes to it; everyone with a door to the room can read the board, and Terebyte can’t.

The honest limits

• Search engines never see it.
• A visitor’s device opens the pages, so a visitor can copy what they’re shown.
• Answers that need your side, live, need your own device awake.
• A site’s pages can’t load anything from outside its room: no outside scripts, fonts or images.
• In Chrome and browsers built on it, a page written to get around this could still reach the internet through WebRTC (the way browsers make calls), which would show its author the visitor’s address. Open sites only from people you trust with that.