3 ms·

I have to say ngrok was one of the services I've used in life that truly made me go "ohh holy shit." This was several years ago, but it was such a pain point sh

I have to say ngrok was one of the services I've used in life that truly made me go "ohh holy shit." This was several years ago, but it was such a pain point sharing local dev things with other folks, and this made it absolutely so trivial. It felt a bit like when I used prettier for the first time in my code -- instantly I knew I couldn't live without having it in my life. I hope him/they are making good money from the project!

granshaw 5y ago
I’m old enough to remember a time where carrier grade NAT wasn’t freaking everywhere and everyone actually had a static dedicated IP address You could start a multiplayer game of StarCraft just by putting in your friends IP. It was wonderful and how the internet was meant to be
- anderspitman 5y ago
  While I agree with the sentiment, there are real issues with a truly p2p internet. Even if we switched to IPv6 overnight, everything would still be locked down with firewalls. And what if someone decides to DDoS your blog or geo-locate your IP to figure out what town you live in? In order to get to a p2p world, I think maybe the best balance point is for most people to connect to the internet through a local tunneling/VPN company which also provides them with a public inbound IP. This has many benefits including: * Hides all your behavior from your ISP, turning them into a dumb pipe and encouraging net neutrality. * Since VPNs don't necessarily require hardware, it's much cheaper for VPN companies to start up and compete with each other. This can also have the effect of decentralizing a lot of power into many small local companies, as opposed to large (inter)national ISPs. * Allows new protocols like IPv6, HTTP/3, etc to be adopted more quickly because VPN companies can implement them for all their users at once. Unfortunately this technology might need a rebranding first, as a lot of VPN companies these days feel quite scammy and make some dubious claims about what they accomplish.
  - stavros 5y ago
    We had a truly P2P internet, it was fine. We did get nuked at the start, but then we started using firewalls and all was good.
    - anderspitman 5y ago
      You really think it would still work today though? I want to believe you.
      - hackmiester 5y ago
        This is how IPv6 works today.
      - stavros 5y ago
        Yeah, why not? As long as you use a firewall that blocks all incoming ports by default and only opens the ones you want, it would be fine.
        anderspitman 5y ago
        A p2p internet with no open ports is pretty pointless. And the average p2p application user isn't likely to understand the ramifications of opening ports, even if good tools are provided to do so (which I'm skeptical). So I don't really see how this improves much on the CGNAT world we're headed into. I think tunneling is a safer and easier approach for most people. They never have to expose their IP or ports, and the application on the private end of the tunnel can run in a sandbox to protect the rest of the user's stuff.
        stavros 5y ago
        How will the application in the tunnel open a port? And why would the p2p application not sandbox? Seems like a double standard.
        5y ago
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  It was also a bit of a nightmare of abuse, and a golden age of worm attacks. If you annoyed the wrong person on IRC suddenly your internet was DOS'ed offline.

granshaw 5y ago

I’m old enough to remember a time where carrier grade NAT wasn’t freaking everywhere and everyone actually had a static dedicated IP address You could start a multiplayer game of StarCraft just by putting in your friends IP. It was wonderful and how the internet was meant to be

anderspitman 5y ago
While I agree with the sentiment, there are real issues with a truly p2p internet. Even if we switched to IPv6 overnight, everything would still be locked down with firewalls. And what if someone decides to DDoS your blog or geo-locate your IP to figure out what town you live in? In order to get to a p2p world, I think maybe the best balance point is for most people to connect to the internet through a local tunneling/VPN company which also provides them with a public inbound IP. This has many benefits including: * Hides all your behavior from your ISP, turning them into a dumb pipe and encouraging net neutrality. * Since VPNs don't necessarily require hardware, it's much cheaper for VPN companies to start up and compete with each other. This can also have the effect of decentralizing a lot of power into many small local companies, as opposed to large (inter)national ISPs. * Allows new protocols like IPv6, HTTP/3, etc to be adopted more quickly because VPN companies can implement them for all their users at once. Unfortunately this technology might need a rebranding first, as a lot of VPN companies these days feel quite scammy and make some dubious claims about what they accomplish.
- stavros 5y ago
  We had a truly P2P internet, it was fine. We did get nuked at the start, but then we started using firewalls and all was good.
  - anderspitman 5y ago
    You really think it would still work today though? I want to believe you.
    - hackmiester 5y ago
      This is how IPv6 works today.
    - stavros 5y ago
      Yeah, why not? As long as you use a firewall that blocks all incoming ports by default and only opens the ones you want, it would be fine.
      - anderspitman 5y ago
        A p2p internet with no open ports is pretty pointless. And the average p2p application user isn't likely to understand the ramifications of opening ports, even if good tools are provided to do so (which I'm skeptical). So I don't really see how this improves much on the CGNAT world we're headed into. I think tunneling is a safer and easier approach for most people. They never have to expose their IP or ports, and the application on the private end of the tunnel can run in a sandbox to protect the rest of the user's stuff.
        stavros 5y ago
        How will the application in the tunnel open a port? And why would the p2p application not sandbox? Seems like a double standard.
        5y ago
qbasic_forever 5y ago
It was also a bit of a nightmare of abuse, and a golden age of worm attacks. If you annoyed the wrong person on IRC suddenly your internet was DOS'ed offline.