James Knott said the following on 08/06/2010 08:48 AM:
Anton Aylward wrote:
NAT also makes it awkward to reach computers behind the firewall.
Yes. That's the point! From the POV of the people that use it for that - the 'lazy firewall' that I spoke of - this is a BENEFIT. Joe Sixpack doesn't_want_ all those nasty people out there, hackers, governments, his kids friends, the IRS, reaching into his computer.
So, you think the internet should remain broken, so that others can't make best use of it?
Help e here. How do you get from the fact that Joe Sixpack has a non-techie outlook and 'learned disability' resulting from marketing pandering to the lowest common denominator and pushing technology that you are I might think is 20th century version of an "idiot stick" and in do doing abusing and prostituting standards to the idea that I think the internet should remain broken. Here, we're "rational technocrats". Joe Sixpack isn't. He's not interested in "protocols" and "FTP'. To him NAT is just another tick-off item on a feature list. He's not interested in being able to access any machine on his home network and wouldn't understand the issues we're discussion here. He might even be upset with IPV6 because, even though he doesn't understand what it is, he thinks he should have NAT because that's what he's been told by the guys at Best Buy and is a marketing feature on the box of the devices he's bought before. Joe isn't consistent in his thinking and has a lot of prejudices. He's paranoid about government interference, realises that wile the X-files are entertainment, he thinks that they are based on fact. He might not want to access his network from the outside, but the idea that somone else might be able to scares him and he assocaites - than you Nixon for Watergate and the like for destroying confidence in politicians - such things with nebulous three-letter government agencies. That the malware on his computer is from visiting prono sites doesn't occur to him, Ultimately its the Joes who have made the internet the commercial success it is. The mass marketing to the consumer base is what has driven down the price of a range of equipment and made it a commodity. For Joe to adopt IPV6 EITHER it is forced on him (possibly by 'the government' in one way or another) or it is marketed to him as the "new and improved" Internet. But Joe grew up in a consumer culture and "new and improved" doesn't impress him as it did with his grandparents when they saw it on the side of a packet of soap flakes. The benefits of IPV6 we see are probably nothing to do with how it will be marketed to Joe. Like ... this morning I saw an advert for this gasoline that was improved because it had added nitrogen. Excuse me: what's better than 70% of the air the engine takes in? "The Space Merchants", Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's 1952 parody of Madison Avenue advertising and consumerism gone wild may not be accurate, but the treatment of the consumers in it does reflect a large portion of society. The Internet-as-we-know it succeeded because it was allowed to go commercial. We have out low cost PC and network equipment because they have been made consumer commodities. Many vendors have 'broken' bit of the RFCs. I recall Interop "bake offs" where some vendors went off in a huff because their "improved versions" of things like point-to-point and the IP stack would not interoperate. Others hijacked matters and defined "new standards". NAT was one of them. You can find many people speaking out against it as far back as the beginning of the 1990s, but the vendors made it a marketing feature. Now consumers accept it as a valuable feature. Because they've been told so as part of a marketing pitch. So pleases top saying that I'm advocating breaking the 'Net when I'm telling you the root cause and the hurdle that IPV6 will have to overcome. Its not a technical issue. If it was just technical we'd have switched over a long time ago. Its not address exhaustion. If it was we'd have switched over long ago and NAT would never have gained the wide use it has. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org