131–140 of 197 posts
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> A lot of this feels like a requiem for the days when the only people on the Internet were "high-computer-skill" type folks. FWIW I (writer of blog post) am 21 years old and just a bitch lol
Not saying this is what’s going on, but you can ABSOLUTELY have nostalgia for a time that wasn’t your own, too.
Sorry. I implemented the current NAT system in Linux. In particular, avoiding port reservation in favor of squishing more connections into one IP address, as long as the remote address allowed us to differentiate. This, in turn, means incoming traffic from a different address is unroutable. You no longer have a public endpoint . This is "poor man's firewall", but erodes our ability to have a server the way we used to…
IPv4 without NAT was fucked at the design stage. To be fair: Who knew?
I was asked by my employer a while back to investigate this new www thing that has hit the internet (in around 1994 or 5, it took a while to notice) and I said it was a bit crap and no better than WAIS and GOPHER. I was using telnet on a Windows 3.1 PC and telnetting madly via a VAX and a X.25 PAD and what I now know was close to magic!
No one had any idea how things would turn out back then.
I'm actually quite impressed how long IPv4 has managed to work and without NAT (which I do mildly despise, given 30 years messing with this stuff), it would be stuffed.
Thank you for your work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A lot of this feels like a requiem for the days when the only people on the Internet were "high-computer-skill" type folks. FWIW I (writer of blog post) am 21 years old and just a bitch lol
Not saying this is what’s going on, but you can ABSOLUTELY have nostalgia for a time that wasn’t your own, too.
Sorry. I implemented the current NAT system in Linux. In particular, avoiding port reservation in favor of squishing more connections into one IP address, as long as the remote address allowed us to differentiate. This, in turn, means incoming traffic from a different address is unroutable. You no longer have a public endpoint . This is "poor man's firewall", but erodes our ability to have a server the way we used to…
Mate ... How many people are engineers, technicians, mildly interested, not fussed or call the internet "Facebook"? IPv4 without NAT was fucked at the design stage. To be fair: Who knew? I was asked by my employer a while back to investigate this new www thing that has hit the internet (in around 1994 or 5, it took a while to notice) and I said it was a bit crap and no better than WAIS and GOPHER. I was using telnet…
I had a corporate internship in the late 1990s and they blocked external web access.
They did, however, allow external Telnet access. This meant that whenever I had free time and/or was waiting for new projects, I would telnet back to my college server and use lynx to go read my favorite websites.
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Do you have any example where leasing an ipv4 block from a NIC directly costs more than 5$ per IPv4 address per year?
China has very few IPv4 addresses per capita. Here in Hangzhou, China, I have to pay China Telecom 850 CNY per year just to get an IPv4 address. That's not a trivial amount of money for us. And among the three major telecom operators, only one even offers this service.
On the other hand, it's not really that complicated. Cost seems to be around 10USD per month, which is what another user mentioned. And the GDP per capita of china is around 12000 USD per year, so it works out to a bit more than 1% of a salary, not sure if my maths are wrong, but from the perspective of a service provider, it still sounds like a sensible price point.
India has a lower GDP per capita, but I know that they make non profit collective efforts to massively lower prices.
Note also that a substantial part of the value and purpose of IP addresses comes from their cost. There is a PoW/PoS mechanism that associates some cost to some identity (similar to domain names), and this is part of the mechanism by which networks filter malicious traffic and defend against sybil attacks.
So 10$/month might be expensive, but it's probably the right price. If it were much cheaper than that, like 1$/month, or even 0.1$/month, abuse would rise, especially in China which, no offense, but doesn't seem to value the notions of civil law like contracts, Terms of Service or copyright dearly. At least they don't do it out of malice like Russia, it's just a difference of values, but it's probably for the better that IPv4 addresses are 10$/month, if it were 0.1$/month, I would probably just block the whole country.
Sorry. I implemented the current NAT system in Linux. In particular, avoiding port reservation in favor of squishing more connections into one IP address, as long as the remote address allowed us to differentiate. This, in turn, means incoming traffic from a different address is unroutable. You no longer have a public endpoint . This is "poor man's firewall", but erodes our ability to have a server the way we used to…
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I see it now, it's a bundle of both the practical and security aspects. I think the security aspects serve mostly as a marketing tool, potentially serving users who truly need a VPN. But if I see a user that exposes a server without a dedicated IP address, and they use tailscale for this, the way I would describe it is that they are adding a third party node that routes traffic for them (just to provide multiplexing)…
> But if I see a user that exposes a server without a dedicated IP address, and they use tailscale for this, the way I would describe it is that they are adding a third party node that routes traffic for them (just to provide multiplexing), so in terms of security, it's an additional unnecessary man in the middle. If you are listening on a public IP, you can trivially be attacked by anyone on the Internet. If you lis…
If you make your tailscale available to the internet through tailscale, you are still weak to external attackers, putting a VPN in the middle doesn't fundamentally change that dynamic, maybe it shifts it around and it confuses you enough to feel less shifty about it.
But it doesn't decrease your risk, if your HTTP server is weak to a tailscalething.tld/../../etc/ attack, it doesn't really matter that requests to other ports are blocked, (which probably don't even have processes listening anyways)
> 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…
> A lot of this feels like a requiem for the days when the only people on the Internet were "high-computer-skill" type folks. FWIW I (writer of blog post) am 21 years old and just a bitch lol
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> But we'd still end up with server-client cloud architectures, even if we had started with IPv6 in the beginning. Skype was originally peer-to-peer for comms, but ended up with "super-nodes" because of NAT limitations (not sure if STUN/TURN/ICE had been invented by that point). BitTorrent is still peer-to-peer. A number of folks ran Mincecraft servers at home, but you'd only be able to have one on the default port.…
Yeah I feel like a lot of the people criticizing this are still being client-server brained. There's a lot of use cases that "everyone is a server" would open up without turning everyone into a sysadmin and they'd likely get turned into user-friendly software like BitTorrent or Skype or early Spotify.
I remember times before NAT and SSL You could share things easily, sure, but anyone could get hacked pretty easily and very targetted. After NAT, sharing was still easy lots of 'piracy' apps, various messengers with NAT passthrough Both before and after you needed to be technical, you can't ask someone that doesnt know about computers to set up an FTP server, and if they did it would be a nightmare and they'd likely…
> 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.