Comment by elric
1 hour ago
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 insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
>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.
I don't NAT being a janky ad hoc firewall does anyone a service. It shields the devices enough to keep the developers oblivious about security, but not enough to stop them from connecting to arbitrary hosts. This perpetuates the humongous botnet ecosystem.
>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 wanted to keep that garbage.