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It's 2020, and people are elated to discover that it is possible to transfer a file directly between two systems on the Internet.

True story: I was giving a guest lecture on network virtualization at UCI and demoing ZeroTier. One student came up afterwords and asked me how traffic could flow between systems without "a cloud." Evidently the idea that data could just go directly from point A to point B was utterly, completely foreign to the point that they weren't aware that the Internet could be used this way.

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I blame NAT.

Treating end-users like second-class netizen consumers trained people to "need" the cloud to do perfectly normal peer-to-peer things.

I'm not sure I would blame NAT. You can easily disable that.

What you can't disable is the asymmetry of consumer internet connections (upload << download) and the fact that most consumer devices are not running (or connected to the internet) 24/7.

> I'm not sure I would blame NAT. You can easily disable that

This is predominately USA mentality. In the rest of the world widespread use of carrier-grade NAT predates mobile networks by decades.

Many residential ISPs don't hand out public IPv4 addresses or require extra payment for them. Some of those ISPs got their first IP block (or even single address!) from someone and never bothered with whole "ask IANA for addresses" thing. It is multi-layer NAT all the way down.

Hmmm I suppose my view is strongly biased then. I've lived outside the US most of my life and have always had my own IPv4 address at home.

And sure, as IPv4 addresses are now exhausted, carrier-grade NAT is getting increasingly common. But I would have said the issue started way before that.

> In the rest of the world widespread use of carrier-grade NAT predates mobile networks by decades. […] Some of those ISPs got their first IP block (or even single address!) from someone and never bothered with whole "ask IANA for addresses" thing.

Do you happen to have a source here? Because carrier-grade NAT predating mobile networks by decades is news to me.

Also security: if consumer PCs were open to the internet, they would be constantly getting breached in even bigger numbers.

Consumer PCs are not the real issue by and large, IoT crap that can't even be updated is way more problematic. Having NAT by default helps screen out attacks to those devices.

Not NAT. Firewalls. You don't need NAT to have a firewall.

Yup. There is no NAT in my home, but there is a firewall. Every device in my home has public IPs, but some of them aren't allowed to talk to the outside world or are restricted on who can / can't talk to them and how.

If I may ask, what's your setup? What router (and what software on it) are you using?

A huge part of the internet cannot just disable NAT. I experience carrier grade NAT from my LTE connection. I only get a single public IPv4 assigned from the two ISPs available at my apartment. How to I "disable" NAT when I only get a single IP but have many devices to connect?

Anything that requires a manual step will be at a huge disadvantage compared to something that doesn't. People have better things to do with their life than read router manuals.

That's true. But this is a general problem. Even if you weren't sitting behind a NAT, you would still have to harden your firewall and so on if you wanted to run a server at home. So it's definitely not without work either way.

Carrier grade NAT...

Sure, when you're talking about mobile devices. (Or has it already become a thing with DSL, too?) In any case, the issue started much earlier, I'd say.

maybe its not very common everywhere but here in Germany i have seen multiple ISPs deploying DS-Lite which means you will get CGNAT for IPv4 networks. whats worse is while if you demand a public IPv4 address you will get it you also wont get IPv6 connectivity anymore. why? no idea... Interestingly, if i happen to use my own DOCSIS modem i get a true DualStack solution so this is not a technical problem for them per se. However, doing so they will force you to use VoIP instead of the IMHO way more stable PacketCable you would get with their modem...

I have fiber with carrier grade NAT for some reason...

I blame Windows taking 20 years to include ssh.

My ISP really hates servers to the point that they block ports below 1024 iirc, even though it have a real dynamic public IP

This is all about charging business customers 3-4X more for the same service. They don't want businesses to get residential class connections. Business links are unblocked.

Similar to one of my family members: she thought the Internet is a "thing" you just put stuff to, and it was available to all. She had no idea Facebook has an actual computer somewhere receiving her queries.

"Drop.io was nominated for the Technical Achievement Award at the South By Southwest 11th Annual Web Awards in 2007." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop.io

It keeps happening.

yay for UCI! Really interesting product in ZeroTier by the way.

But yes, I think there is a massive gap in knowledge here. It's apparent that a lot of the students aren't really interested in CS, just trying to get a degree and a solid job. I think with the competitiveness of college these days kids have lost the freedom to be curious or actually learn about the things that interest them.

I also think there's a wide divide in the quality of teachers, and its a well known problem among the department.

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