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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

Totally silly question, but isn't the NAT-upon-NAT(-upon-NAT) a bit of protection in the sense of additional privacy, and hence a good thing? Doesn't this mean the website cannot directly tie back an incognito user back to a specific IP but instead to just a pool?

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For a purely "consumer" internet, yes. But I'd like to think that at some point we move back to a more decentralised model, where addressibility in more contexts than a response to a request become important again. To some degree the NAT issues have even killed a lot of this, making P2P more difficult and unreliable than would be otherwise.

Depends, but really IPv6 and IPv4 seems to be more or less comparable in practice. If you use an app with a login, you are basically screwed anyway. Even on a random website, you can be reliably fingerprinted: https://amiunique.org/

> Doesn't this mean the website cannot directly tie back an incognito user back to a specific IP but instead to just a pool?

Do you have cookies on or off in your web browser settings? If they're enabled then you're being tracking regardless of your IP.

I have my router reboot every night and so I get both a new IPv4 address and a new IPv6 prefix everyday. If I have cookies disabled, then ad folks will have to find other ways to track me beside those two.

Yes, but you could also randomize your IPv6 address constantly too.

Downside of CGNAT and NAT at home is difficulty of getting some services to work, or hosting a server.

It still boils down to everyone gets an identifying number, whether it's an ipv4 address or an ipv6 block.

Any randomized ipv6 address from that block is still as "unique" an identifier as an ipv4 address.

Also, creating/using P2P applications. I needed to look up UDP hole punching and now I wish I hadn't.

out of curiosity, what did you end up going with? I had to host a UDP game server recently and couldn't find a good solution. If only ngrok supported UDP...

It was just research. I'm interested in audio&video over IP, I already had a good grip on HLS, RTP, and a few others, and wanted to dive into WebRTC, RTSP, etc. I don't know but all of this feels like there's a simpler solution (like HLS vs DASH) waiting to be discovered.

DMZ it and firewall up the host.

ISPs log all of the translations and can reverse a (public IP, source port, time stamp) tuple to the user.

> ISPs log all of the translations

On my personal router?

They don't need that much granularity; it is enough to being able to point fingers at someone responsible.

But otherwise, it is possible to enumerate devices behind NAT (obviously, only those that communicate with the world in front of NAT) and assign traffic to them.

No, at their CGNAT layer. They know which customer it came from. They don’t care which device in your house it came from.

"a bit of protection in the sense of additional privacy, and hence a good thing?"

The more dysfunctional is your internet connection, the more prova you youve got

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