5 ms·

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

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.
        anderspitman 5y ago
        With tunneling you never open incoming ports. Everything gets tunneled through an outgoing connection from the client to the tunnel server. Maybe we're talking about different things? Oh p2p apps can and definitely should be sandboxing. That's not a unique feature of tunneling. The exposed IP and trickiness of educating users on opening ports are much bigger issues. That said, if you're willing to accept the risk of exposing your IP, all we really need is wider UPnP support. But just like IPv6 it's been around forever but hasn't taken off. It's really a chicken-egg problem. We're not going to get IPv6, UPnP, fast upload internet speeds, simple sandboxing on all major OSes, etc, until we can prove that people want p2p apps and there's money to be made by supporting them. But p2p apps are difficult to build without those things, unless you use tunneling... Note that you can get maybe 90% of the way there by using NAT traversal[0]. But you still need relays (tunneling) for the last 10%. Given the other benefits, I think going straight to tunneling makes sense. [0]: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/ https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/
        stavros 5y ago
        Yeah I'm a bit confused as to what you mean by tunneling. If you mean something like CloudFlare tunnels or ssh -R, how is that different from having the application open a firewall port automatically?

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.
      - anderspitman 5y ago
        With tunneling you never open incoming ports. Everything gets tunneled through an outgoing connection from the client to the tunnel server. Maybe we're talking about different things? Oh p2p apps can and definitely should be sandboxing. That's not a unique feature of tunneling. The exposed IP and trickiness of educating users on opening ports are much bigger issues. That said, if you're willing to accept the risk of exposing your IP, all we really need is wider UPnP support. But just like IPv6 it's been around forever but hasn't taken off. It's really a chicken-egg problem. We're not going to get IPv6, UPnP, fast upload internet speeds, simple sandboxing on all major OSes, etc, until we can prove that people want p2p apps and there's money to be made by supporting them. But p2p apps are difficult to build without those things, unless you use tunneling... Note that you can get maybe 90% of the way there by using NAT traversal[0]. But you still need relays (tunneling) for the last 10%. Given the other benefits, I think going straight to tunneling makes sense. [0]: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/ https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/
        stavros 5y ago
        Yeah I'm a bit confused as to what you mean by tunneling. If you mean something like CloudFlare tunnels or ssh -R, how is that different from having the application open a firewall port automatically?