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- Hacker News
- I think its funny everyone thinks that ISPs, Device Manufacturers, and Cloud Providers are going to let your connect back directly to your "home" with IOT devices.
Absolutely not. They can charge your $9.99/mo so you can connect their craptastic app to their craptastic cloud so you can "use their app from anywhere".
by exabrial - Author is right about everything. Also: IPv6 doesn't fix this, it just introduces a new problem. IPv6 machines end up with local firewalls + stateful firewalls on the router. That router doesn't let in inbound cons. There is a part of UPnP that lets you add "pin holes" (it works like you expect) -- but the drawbacks are its kind of obscure, poorly implemented, and not guaranteed to be enabled.
The idea of router sounds simple and like it should implement some standard protocols. But in practice -- a lot of it is a mishmash of proprietary, ad hoc shitware. Something I never hear spoken about is the deep packet inspection filter component of the router firmware. It's a part of the router that decides on what traffic is allowed / not, and almost no company publishes this part. So you're not even in control of your own Internet traffic, tiny blobs of code written by some company get to decide if something is allowed or not.
If that sounds sus AF and kind of a bad idea -- well, it is. You can always run 100% open software with open-wrt. But the thing is -- the Internet isn't just your part of it. It's a network of networks, and all those shitty routers, with all that shitty firmware, is deeply ingrained within the entire Internet. That's millions of devices that would need to be replaced to fix the issue.
by Uptrenda - The consequences are so much more significant than people seem to realize.
Because of NAT, hierarchy (centralized servers) is the foundational design pattern of the internet, and anyone who wants any semblance of anarchy (decentralized networks) must use a workaround that is itself hierarchical and costly. We are all interconnected, but only a wealthy few can truly speak fist.
- I remember times before NAT and SSL
You could share things easily, sure, but anyone could get hacked pretty easily and very targetted.
After NAT, sharing was still easy lots of 'piracy' apps, various messengers with NAT passthrough
Both before and after you needed to be technical, you can't ask someone that doesnt know about computers to set up an FTP server, and if they did it would be a nightmare and they'd likely share their whole drive
Same goes for anything else.
Anyway, we'll get the whole non-nat with IPv6, let's see what that brings
by mittensc - The designers of the internet made one fundamental mistake, namely applying meatspace norms to cyberspace.
In the "real world", you don't really need that much security. Your actual security comes from the fact that all the worst criminals are already locked up, most of the would-be criminals are afraid of being locked up, and if somebody does actually commit a crime, they will get locked up and won't be able to do it again for a good while. A lot of real-world security is about post-factum detection (think alarms, CCTV, panic buttons etc), because in the real world, detection and prevention are two sides of the same coin.
This only works because if a real-world crime happens, the criminal by definition is in the same location as the victim, and law enforcement cares most about the community they serve. If the criminal is across the world, as is the case in cyberspace, even if it's a friendly country, it's often "not their problem". This means internet systems need actual security, and NAT provides exactly that.
If not for NAT, we'd all need a firewall, and things would be almost if not exactly the same. In the real world, "leave things relatively open, because locks are mostly for keeping honest people honest" is a valid strategy. This strategy doesn't work on the internet.
by miki123211 - Calling NAT the original sin is a serious exaggeration. Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) is a truly evil concept that restricts the freedoms of the CGNATed users. But regular NAT is fine as long as you can control it. "No one wanting to bother with port forwarding" is largely a matter of shitty UX on the home gateway side and laziness on the side of the operator. Same with UPnP.
If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
by elric - > There’s lots of things you can blame for killing the open Internet, but I think NAT was one of the earliest. Running a server used to be trivial: run an executable, tell people your address, done... It also trained everyone to think client‐server is natural. “My device talks to The Cloud which talks to other devices” feels normal, when that feeling originated as an artifact of address scarcity.
A lot of this feels like a requiem for the days when the only people on the Internet were "high-computer-skill" type folks. Most people will gravitate to "user-friendly" solutions: Gmail and other managed email providers were popular because they didn't stop working when you shut down your computer to save electricity, when your server's hard drive crashed, when you upgraded your computer to something with a faster processor, more RAM, and a newer operating system. It was hard enough to educate laypeople about URLs and email addresses (AOL keywords, anyone?), let alone a combination of random numbers in an IP address, or convincing people to register domain names.
Yes, NAT shoved fences into a network that was all about connecting everybody. But we'd still end up with server-client cloud architectures, even if we had started with IPv6 in the beginning. ISPs would have just sold highly restrictive firewalls as part of their home-install basic boxes, and we'd still have ended up with those fences.
by solatic - Sorry.
I implemented the current NAT system in Linux. In particular, avoiding port reservation in favor of squishing more connections into one IP address, as long as the remote address allowed us to differentiate.
This, in turn, means incoming traffic from a different address is unroutable. You no longer have a public endpoint. This is "poor man's firewall", but erodes our ability to have a server the way we used to.
I was a young engineer solving a specific problem, without considering the larger picture. It wasn't the only thing, but I feel it definitely moved the internet to a client/server infrastructure and a key equality was lost.
by RustyRussell