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ELI5 to me: what is 'port forwarding' with regards to VPNs (from someone who uses a VPN and might be missing out on the party?) No technical answer please, jus

ELI5 to me: what is 'port forwarding' with regards to VPNs (from someone who uses a VPN and might be missing out on the party?) No technical answer please, just spell it out like I'm five.

supertrope 3y ago
Port forwarding allows you to host content with the VPN provider’s IP address showing. Some people were hosting very illegal content, serving malware, or running scams. This resulted in hosting providers cancelling Mullvad’s accounts, police inquiries, or those IP addresses being banned for all their customers. https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/ https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-f... Like Tor when you provide a front for other people to hide, you get associated with their dirty laundry.
eva_cananim 3y ago
The biggest real reason the people use VPN services is probably because they are downloading lots of copyright-infringing torrents. With port forwarding, reprehensible people downloading rubbish hollywood movies using bittorrent can download from lots more peers. For ipv4, a home internet box normally gets one internet ip address. The traffic to and from the three smartphones, two computers and two smart TVs uses one ip address on the internet side. The process of combining the traffic is called NAT. Commercial public VPNs mostly have lots of customers using each VPN server. There may be a thousand customers behind the one ip address of a particular vpn server. It's a big NAT. (I know of only one commercial VPN service that gives out real ip addresses.) A computer behind NAT can connect out to a port on a remote machine, it can connect out to the https port on facebook.com or whatever. Bittorrent clients both connect out to a remote port and listen for incoming connections. Two people who are both behind NATs without port forwarding can't connect to each other. Their bittorrent clients can't reach each other. In the year 2001 there were lots of people on dialup or with a single PC on a cable modem. They had real ip addresses, not 192.168.0.x They could connect to each other. In 2001 about two thirds of machines swapping mp3 files using emule, winmx, bittorrent etc had reachable listening ports. These days, on public torrents, it's in the ball park of 1 in 6 peers are connectable. 1 in 10 in Asia where people are commonly behind CGNAT, both on home and cellphone network ISPS. Around 1 in 2 on private trackers. A majority of the bittorrent clients can't connect to each other, it mostly keeps working because a minority of otakus upload tens of terabytes, but there are lots of torrents with one or two seeds where the unconnectable torrent clients get nothing.
- zen_1 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, who gives out real IPs?
  - ajp11 3y ago
    swissvpn.net
    - KomoD 3y ago
      That is not worth it, 10 CHF ($11) per month, minimum 6 months, only one concurrent connection
aborsy 3y ago
Consider the traffic, not from your computer to VPN to the internet, but from the internet to VPN to your computer. You will require that all traffic received by a particular port at an IP address at the VPN provider be forwarded to your computer. In this manner, if you have a website with sensitive content, you can make it available to the Internet, with a VPN IP address. The IP address of the owner of the website is hidden behind the VPN.

ELI5 to me: what is 'port forwarding' with regards to VPNs (from someone who uses a VPN and might be missing out on the party?) No technical answer please, just spell it out like I'm five.

supertrope 3y ago

Port forwarding allows you to host content with the VPN provider’s IP address showing. Some people were hosting very illegal content, serving malware, or running scams. This resulted in hosting providers cancelling Mullvad’s accounts, police inquiries, or those IP addresses being banned for all their customers. https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/ https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-f... Like Tor when you provide a front for other people to hide, you get associated with their dirty laundry.

eva_cananim 3y ago

The biggest real reason the people use VPN services is probably because they are downloading lots of copyright-infringing torrents. With port forwarding, reprehensible people downloading rubbish hollywood movies using bittorrent can download from lots more peers. For ipv4, a home internet box normally gets one internet ip address. The traffic to and from the three smartphones, two computers and two smart TVs uses one ip address on the internet side. The process of combining the traffic is called NAT. Commercial public VPNs mostly have lots of customers using each VPN server. There may be a thousand customers behind the one ip address of a particular vpn server. It's a big NAT. (I know of only one commercial VPN service that gives out real ip addresses.) A computer behind NAT can connect out to a port on a remote machine, it can connect out to the https port on facebook.com or whatever. Bittorrent clients both connect out to a remote port and listen for incoming connections. Two people who are both behind NATs without port forwarding can't connect to each other. Their bittorrent clients can't reach each other. In the year 2001 there were lots of people on dialup or with a single PC on a cable modem. They had real ip addresses, not 192.168.0.x They could connect to each other. In 2001 about two thirds of machines swapping mp3 files using emule, winmx, bittorrent etc had reachable listening ports. These days, on public torrents, it's in the ball park of 1 in 6 peers are connectable. 1 in 10 in Asia where people are commonly behind CGNAT, both on home and cellphone network ISPS. Around 1 in 2 on private trackers. A majority of the bittorrent clients can't connect to each other, it mostly keeps working because a minority of otakus upload tens of terabytes, but there are lots of torrents with one or two seeds where the unconnectable torrent clients get nothing.

zen_1 3y ago
Out of curiosity, who gives out real IPs?
- ajp11 3y ago
  swissvpn.net
  - KomoD 3y ago
    That is not worth it, 10 CHF ($11) per month, minimum 6 months, only one concurrent connection

aborsy 3y ago

Consider the traffic, not from your computer to VPN to the internet, but from the internet to VPN to your computer. You will require that all traffic received by a particular port at an IP address at the VPN provider be forwarded to your computer. In this manner, if you have a website with sensitive content, you can make it available to the Internet, with a VPN IP address. The IP address of the owner of the website is hidden behind the VPN.