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> it also makes stuff like NAT, congestion control and QoS a lot less robust That's a feature, not a bug. NAT is cancer. It killed the open internet by enablin
by jjoonathan 5y ago
> it also makes stuff like NAT, congestion control and QoS a lot less robust
That's a feature, not a bug. NAT is cancer. It killed the open internet by enabling a particular lazy form of "security" that forced everyone to hand control of their most important data to cloud services.
QoS is worse but has less fallout due to less deployment.
- ksec 5y ago>NAT is cancer. It killed the open internet by enabling a particular lazy form of "security" that forced everyone to hand control of their most important data to cloud services. Sorry I dont follow. What Cloud Services?
- jjoonathan 5y agoAll cloud services. Personal computers and devices are not allowed to talk to each other on the internet. They are only allowed to talk to specially designated servers -- specially designated by virtue of having a public IPv4 and open port. Enforcement happens through liability: if you put data in a cloud service and the cloud service gets hacked, it's the cloud service's fault, but if you run a program on an open port and the program gets hacked, it's your fault, not the program's fault. This is an arbitrary social choice that follows directly from enshrining NAT as a "best practice." Even the term "open port" presupposes that there is something unnatural about plebian computers talking to each other on the open internet! This effectively forces services to be centralized, or at least pushes very strongly in that direction. Of course, we can quibble: what about video conferencing? What about gaming? They use direct connections! Yes, but they pay an extraordinarily steep complexity and reliability price to obtain them and the solutions still wind up using centralized servers. They are exceptions that prove the rule because they allow us to observe how "stepping out of line" is discouraged. It's an accidental line drawn by monkies rather than an intentional line drawn by lizard people, but it's strongly enforced and society-shaping all the same. It's totally wild to consider the social and market consequences of NAT, the unassuming lazy and kludgy security hack. It got out of hand and reshaped the internet, the technology market, and society from the ground up! That's hardly even an exaggeration!
- BlueTemplar 5y agoThankfully, this is going away now with IPv6.
- jjoonathan 5y agoI want to believe!
- BlueTemplar 5y agoWell, IPv6 seems to be today (both in popularity and speed of adoption) where UTF-8 was about a decade ago. So, hopefully in a decade..?
- 10000truths 5y agoUnfortunately not. Most consumer and SOHO routers have reflexive ACLs enabled by default, and your average Joe doesn’t know or care to turn it off.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoOh, interesting, what is it exactly ? Surprising that with over a year of discussions about this subject I only first hear of it ? Would this be the reason why at least tens of millions of consumer routers don't have IPv6 firewalls (technically, opt-in firewalls, but you know how that goes...), and don't have their networks hacked ? Wait, does it even work with UDP, which doesn't have a concept of "connection" ? (Especially IPv6 (no NAT) UDP ?)
- throwawaaarrgh 5y agoNAT is literally the only thing stopping every single personal device in the world from being hacked. It may be a kludge, but it's the best kludge in all of technology. And what do you have against QoS? Would it be better if your VoIP calls stuttered every time you loaded a fat web page?
- 5y ago