At long last, many of the 'hacks' for dealing with the ugly world of NAT etc have become standardized. E.g. "ICE" provides a negotiation protocol to make a cou

At long last, many of the 'hacks' for dealing with the ugly world of NAT etc have become standardized. E.g. "ICE" provides a negotiation protocol to make a couple arbitrary machines able to talk to each other directly, including the NAT hole punching part of things. In the limited % of cases where there's no known way to punch a hole through NATs, an automatic fallback (using a relay server) is provided as a part of the protocol. It's not elegant, at least we don't have everybody re-inventing the wheel. And, good results when ICE is used can become part of the criteria now used to judge the quality of NATs and other evil middlebox devices.