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> There is really no reason for most devices to be publicly reachable. Everyone keeps holding this up as a positive, but it's absolutely not. Most devices aren'
by stavros 10mo ago
> There is really no reason for most devices to be publicly reachable. Everyone keeps holding this up as a positive, but it's absolutely not. Most devices aren't servers.
Ever tried to call someone over the internet? Well, now you need a publicly reachable device.
Please, stop spreading this ignorance. You rely on your devices being reachable from the internet every single day, you're just not aware of it, because you're using a barely-working pile of duct tape and string that sort-of allows peer to peer connections to happen, after some arcane STUN/TURN/whatever magic.
If you wanted to send someone a file in the Olden Days, you'd just click on their IRC username, the client would open a connection to them and you'd send the file. Now you need to use iCloud or some nonsense, because apparently people believe that peer-to-peer connections aren't needed and shouldn't even work.
- fluoridation 10mo ago>Ever tried to call someone over the internet? Well, now you need a publicly reachable device. Uhh... Is this the '90s? People don't type in IP addresses (or phone numbers, back in the day) to connect with other people anymore. They connect to a common, publicly reachable server that deals with peers being behind NAT.
- stavros 10mo agoHow do you think this works, exactly?
- jdiff 10mo agoNow you've got significant additional latency, which is why this is very often not what actually occurs in these situations if it's at all avoidable.
- aboardRat4 10mo agoIt doesn't really matter. Any communications provider must keep call records for the FSB, so routing them through central servers and recording there is the only option anyway.
- jdiff 10mo agoOf course it matters. STUN isn't theoretical, it's in actual, practical use across a great many things. There's plenty of things that aren't "calls" in a telecommunications sense. Discord, Telegram, Zoom, Slack, Jitsi, and far more. And there are plenty of other things entirely that use the same tactics to get direct peer-to-peer connections.
- aboardRat4 10mo ago>Discord, Telegram, Zoom, Slack, Jitsi All of them are blocked for not complying with government's regulations where I live.
- jdiff 10mo agoThat is a quite extreme outlier, then. Hardly relevant to the global IPv6 and peer-to-peer conversation we're having here, and your objection still only applies to one narrow use of the technology under discussion.
- aboardRat4 10mo ago>That is a quite extreme outlier, then. Hardly relevant to the global IPv6 and peer-to-peer conversation we're having here It's China with it's 1bn of internet users and 2bn+ devices . If you're happy to exclude half of the internet from your "global peer-to-peer conversation", then you don't need ipv6 either, just use the Chinese IPs for your own purposes, there are plenty of them. Actually this is the attitude I am seeing from the ipv6 zealots all the time: blatant disregard of reality. Nobody wielding and non-negligible amount of power wants peer-to-peer communication. Companies don't want it, governments don't want it, large masses of people who want a person with a vested interest to be responsible for the link quality don't want it. What ipv6 zealots don't realize is that ipv6 will not bring them their coveted p2p, because, guess what, incoming connections are to peasant computers are blocked by ISPs by default.
- 10mo ago
- patmorgan23 10mo agoMay I introduce you to our Lord and Savior the Domain Name System.
- arianvanp 10mo agoMost video calling software uses STUN NAT hole punching and not central relay servers. You are definitely publicly routed when you call through Google Meet or WhatsApp or FaceTime
- stavros 10mo agoTo be fair, I think Google Meet with multiple participants still uses a relay server, instead of N^2 streams, but I may be wrong.
- lazylizard 10mo agohttps://atscaleconference.com/calling-relay-infrastructure-at-whatsapp-scale/ https://atscaleconference.com/calling-relay-infrastructure-a... if i read this right, whatsapp calls go thru relay servers?
- brewmarche 10mo agoI’m wondering, wouldn’t a default deny inbound firewall still need hole punching with IPv6? You wouldn’t need STUN to find your global address but if you use varying ports you’d need to communicate the port first, and you’d also need to time the simultaneous open. So a coordinating party is still needed somewhere. Getting rid of TURN relays (if you’re affected by symmetric NATs) is of course a huge plus.
- stavros 10mo agoNo, you'd have something like UPnP open a port on the firewall, I imagine. It depends on the setup, which can now be much more flexible, since the firewall can run on the machine itself. You also have the benefit that multiple machines can listen on the same port, so you don't need a proxy any more.