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By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

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11–20 of 188 posts

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#11
A lot of fuss, but if you look at the presentation slide in the middle of the page (https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PyyPpTv1p7g/WU7hMEBnm4I/AAAAAAAAE... for reference) it is clear that MIT is not stifling anything or shutting anyone's mouth.

MIT is just moving to IPv6.

Actually... MIT forcing an entire generation of future engineers to deal with IPv6... That will literally push innovation.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#13
post #4

Projects have broken over this, with no real gain for implementing it. You would expect more rationality from MIT, of all places.

I wonder if they felt like IPv4 addresses were a depreciating commodity and selling them in 5 years would not have brought in as much cash?

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#14
post #8

I'm all for supporting innovation and community services, but I think author is not mentioning other possible causes, like DMCAs, malware and spam (including unintended), which could have damaged the reputation. I just wonder why MIT didn't give more time to move and why it doesn't provide a replacement in eg cloud credits.

Isn't innovation worth more than the cost of malware, spam, and DMCAs?

Edit: In the late 80s the morris worm was launched from MIT, but the network admins of the 80s didn't overreact like this. I wonder why.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#15
post #11

A lot of fuss, but if you look at the presentation slide in the middle of the page ( https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PyyPpTv1p7g/WU7hMEBnm4I/AAAAAAAAE... for reference) it is clear that MIT is not stifling anything or shutting anyone's mouth. MIT is just moving to IPv6. Actually... MIT forcing an entire generation of future engineers to deal with IPv6... That will literally push innovation.

[deleted]

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#16
post #8

I'm all for supporting innovation and community services, but I think author is not mentioning other possible causes, like DMCAs, malware and spam (including unintended), which could have damaged the reputation. I just wonder why MIT didn't give more time to move and why it doesn't provide a replacement in eg cloud credits.

SIPB (MIT's volunteer student computing group) offers free "cloud hosting" to anyone with an Athena account.

http://xvm.mit.edu/

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#17

kudos to this well-researched post. As a student with a server in a dorm room, I really hope they don't take away my public IP address.

There are advantages to being on a private network behind a firewall ... and they could still offer a DNS name and routing to your computer if it was on a private network. It's likely that the only difference is that you'd also have to specify what ports you want exposed to the outside world. This is a win for you from a security perspective - having additional layers of security won't hurt you.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#18
post #11

A lot of fuss, but if you look at the presentation slide in the middle of the page ( https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PyyPpTv1p7g/WU7hMEBnm4I/AAAAAAAAE... for reference) it is clear that MIT is not stifling anything or shutting anyone's mouth. MIT is just moving to IPv6. Actually... MIT forcing an entire generation of future engineers to deal with IPv6... That will literally push innovation.

Moving IPv4 to NAT and moving to IPv6 seems orthogonal.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#19
post #8

I'm all for supporting innovation and community services, but I think author is not mentioning other possible causes, like DMCAs, malware and spam (including unintended), which could have damaged the reputation. I just wonder why MIT didn't give more time to move and why it doesn't provide a replacement in eg cloud credits.

Good question indeed. Why didn't MIT give more time to move, and in fact gave absolutely no notice, such that WMBR, the campus radio station, had to scramble to get their online radio back online again?

Just reading the story now, but I can confirm that college radio stations (and in general radio stations) are build to run and then be forgotten. My campus still uses a rather old copy of Simian which relies not only on IPv4, but filepaths shorter than 255 characters.

Re: By installing NAT, MIT stifles innovation

#20
post #8

I'm all for supporting innovation and community services, but I think author is not mentioning other possible causes, like DMCAs, malware and spam (including unintended), which could have damaged the reputation. I just wonder why MIT didn't give more time to move and why it doesn't provide a replacement in eg cloud credits.

If it went down like it did at CMU, IT polarized into a camp that wanted to maintain the traditional stack and a camp that wanted to tear it down and replace it with contemporary cloud services. When the latter won, they wasted no time in salting the earth of the former's territory.

Disclaimer: I wasn't actually party to any of this, I heard it second hand, corrections welcome.

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