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Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

dreamstation.systems

41–50 of 197 posts

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#41
post #20
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyway, we'll get the whole non-nat with IPv6, let's see what that brings I'll believe it when I see it. So far it doesn't look like IPv6 will win anytime soon.

Well, any 3G or later mobile backbone is SIP+SCTP over IPv6. So in many ways it won already

My phone, on 4g, is not IPv6

At home it can be if I connect t to my ip6 ssid, but there’s a stateful firewall which may as well nat.

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#42
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just use an ipv4 address. It works I swear

In regions where IPv4 addresses are scarce, you may not even have a single public IPv4 address. I'm fortunate to have one, but still needs NAT.

IPv4 costs are tiny compared to the cost of providing an internet connection.

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#43
post #4

Related comment from another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49454785 > Even more ironic is that NAT got normalized as a security feature — “your devices are hidden!” — which is one of the things that made people resist the thing that would fix it. That tracks. I briefly looked into the Tailscale website and I thought maybe I was wrong, maybe it's not a NAT/ddns toolchain, maybe it's something more comple…

The fact that it's a VPN is also pretty important, despite the utility of it also dealing with NAT headaches for you.

The main selling point is acting as a relatively efficient private overlay network, giving you a consistent private network even as devices move between different internet connections. (Something that NAT makes a bit harder but you don't get for free even if NAT isn't a factor)

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#44

I'm still not convinced that IPv6 is a good thing. I think that we should have doubled down on sharing IP addresses. Both for consumbers (NAT) and for servers (NAT, TLS/HTTP reverse-proxying). It just solves all problems with IP address exhaustion. And the fact that consumers can't just directly connect to each other is a feature.

IPv6, in a way, takes the concept of a MAC address and puts it on steroids. This became evident to me when I learned about EUI-64 addresses. And then my brain melted when I learned that any interface can be assigned an arbitrary number of unique addresses with varying purposes or contexts because the address space is truly *that big*. When I consider that quality of IPv6’s design, it communicates to me an old and ide…

> the mere fact that Layer 2 and Layer 3 addresses are distinct concepts.

If it weren't you couldn't have the same IP over several interfaces.

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#45
The designers of the internet made one fundamental mistake, namely applying meatspace norms to cyberspace.

In the "real world", you don't really need that much security. Your actual security comes from the fact that all the worst criminals are already locked up, most of the would-be criminals are afraid of being locked up, and if somebody does actually commit a crime, they will get locked up and won't be able to do it again for a good while. A lot of real-world security is about post-factum detection (think alarms, CCTV, panic buttons etc), because in the real world, detection and prevention are two sides of the same coin.

This only works because if a real-world crime happens, the criminal by definition is in the same location as the victim, and law enforcement cares most about the community they serve. If the criminal is across the world, as is the case in cyberspace, even if it's a friendly country, it's often "not their problem". This means internet systems need actual security, and NAT provides exactly that.

If not for NAT, we'd all need a firewall, and things would be almost if not exactly the same. In the real world, "leave things relatively open, because locks are mostly for keeping honest people honest" is a valid strategy. This strategy doesn't work on the internet.

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#46
post #23

Calling NAT the original sin is a serious exaggeration. Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) is a truly evil concept that restricts the freedoms of the CGNATed users. But regular NAT is fine as long as you can control it. "No one wanting to bother with port forwarding" is largely a matter of shitty UX on the home gateway side and laziness on the side of the operator. Same with UPnP. If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly…

>If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet. This might not be a good thing. Perhaps if there had been no protection for those odious operating systems, they'd have died the horrible deaths they earned decades ago. We should only want to protect things we intend to keep, after all, and none of us…

All of the current OS choices are insecure by design. The all operate programs with the ambient authority of the user. While this was fine for the corporate world of AT&T in the 1970s, and the classroom in the 1980s, it's insane to use it in the era of ubiquitous persistent megabit Internet connectivity, and mobile code.

I know of zero systems that can survive exposure to the raw Internet, unpatched and without administrative oversight, with uptimes of years.

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#47
> There’s lots of things you can blame for killing the open Internet, but I think NAT was one of the earliest. Running a server used to be trivial: run an executable, tell people your address, done... It also trained everyone to think client‐server is natural. “My device talks to The Cloud which talks to other devices” feels normal, when that feeling originated as an artifact of address scarcity.

A lot of this feels like a requiem for the days when the only people on the Internet were "high-computer-skill" type folks. Most people will gravitate to "user-friendly" solutions: Gmail and other managed email providers were popular because they didn't stop working when you shut down your computer to save electricity, when your server's hard drive crashed, when you upgraded your computer to something with a faster processor, more RAM, and a newer operating system. It was hard enough to educate laypeople about URLs and email addresses (AOL keywords, anyone?), let alone a combination of random numbers in an IP address, or convincing people to register domain names.

Yes, NAT shoved fences into a network that was all about connecting everybody. But we'd still end up with server-client cloud architectures, even if we had started with IPv6 in the beginning. ISPs would have just sold highly restrictive firewalls as part of their home-install basic boxes, and we'd still have ended up with those fences.

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#48
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure. In any case, the phone seems to do fine. That's mostly because a phone is very locked down, can you run an accessible ftp server on your phone? It's also not windows

For android, the answer is yes (without rooting being required).

Also on iOS, though I've only done this over Wi-Fi, and have no idea whether telcos expose open ports to the (IPv6) Internet.

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In regions where IPv4 addresses are scarce, you may not even have a single public IPv4 address. I'm fortunate to have one, but still needs NAT.

IPv4 costs are tiny compared to the cost of providing an internet connection.

Not every place is the same.

Re: Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

#50
post #23

Calling NAT the original sin is a serious exaggeration. Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) is a truly evil concept that restricts the freedoms of the CGNATed users. But regular NAT is fine as long as you can control it. "No one wanting to bother with port forwarding" is largely a matter of shitty UX on the home gateway side and laziness on the side of the operator. Same with UPnP. If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly…

> If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet. Its definitely the opposite. People started ignoring security because its "natted" anyways, even though NAT was never supposed to be security-critical. Thats what firewalls are for.

People (by which I mean average computer users) didn't "start ignoring security", they never bothered to unignore it in the first place. Early Windows editions didn't even ship with a firewall at all, people were rawdogging the internet out of the box without ever stopping to consider the consequences.
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