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Comment by mittensc | Hacker News Reader

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 share their whole drive

Same goes for anything else.

Anyway, we'll get the whole non-nat with IPv6, let's see what that brings

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It brings the requirement for a firewall on every endpoint with a unique address. My Phone often has an ipv6 address (found out this holiday wen I couldn't resolve one of sites because of an orphan ipv6 entry nobody noticed), and has little problems. Perhaps there is also "firewalling" on the router and the phone can't even have incoming connections. Not sure. In any case, the phone seems to do fine.

> Not sure. In any case, the phone seems to do fine.

That's mostly because a phone is very locked down, can you run an accessible ftp server on your phone?

It's also not windows

For android, the answer is yes (without rooting being required).

> without rooting being required

If you want to use the standard port, that's only true as of very recently, though, see https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/218578943#comment17

Also on iOS, though I've only done this over Wi-Fi, and have no idea whether telcos expose open ports to the (IPv6) Internet.

Phone OSs tend to pay a lot more attention to security than the crap they put on consumer-grade routers, "smart" TVs and cheap webcams.

I would invest in a proper firewall for the entire home before opening up anything to the world, IPv6 or not.

> Perhaps there is also "firewalling" on the router and the phone can't even have incoming connections. Not sure.

Correct. Every home wifi router worth its salt will firewall incoming connections by default, whether v4 or v6. It's then possible (unless it's some shitty ISP-provided locked down device) to add specific allow rules, or allow all for a particular client.

egress is typically wide open, although sometimes they lock down particular protocols by default (eg. smtp, bittorrent)

There's no home wifi router for an address assigned by the cell carrier.

> 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.

Well, any 3G or later mobile backbone is SIP+SCTP over IPv6. So in many ways it won already

Weird, I used to remember that going to test-ipv6.com on my mobile (on 4G and 5G) used to fail all the tests. But today it passes.

Well, good to know!

My phone, on 4g, is not IPv6

At home it can be if I connect t to my ip6 ssid, but there’s a stateful firewall which may as well nat.

What your phone shows to app land is entirely different thing. I'm talking about the backbone.

I absolutely plan to NAT my home, I don't see a good reason to do otherwise.

I don't see a reason why my machine addresses should change over time... then again, most shouldn't have direct internet access anyway, a http proxy on firewall should be enough.

> I don't see a reason why my machine addresses should change over time

You can still use fixed addresses locally if you want, its not like IPv6 is forcing you to use the prefix assigned if you just want to communicate locally over never-changing addresses.

You can have your computers be fd01::1, fd01::2, fd01::3, etc, and talk to everything on their local addresses when wanting to stay local. And then when they want to talk on the public internet they can just use whatever public addresses like 2600:1700:53c2:2573:4c:c001:dead:beef based on whatever prefix your ISP gives you.

Its not like your devices have to only have a single IP address.

Source address selection still favors GUA over ULA by default in every major operating system… If you run both you’re almost certainly going to see a lot of GUA addresses in logs where you only allow LAN traffic. Especially if you’re using mDNS/.local for your hostnames. The only way to be sure your internal stuff only ever uses ULA’s is to not give them GUA’s, and now you’re doing NAT.

(I don’t personally run my network as ULA-only, I do ULA+GUA as you describe, but I had to basically give up on being able to reliably tie traffic logs to a known source… hosts in my LAN always seem to use a GUA to talk to each other when discovering over mDNS, which of course means they use privacy addresses by default. My ULA uses DHCP so that I can get stable addresses and know who is who, but it’s useless when things just decide to use the GUA anyway.)

And even if it wins, it won't matter much, since it is only one of many issues with the current Internet that prevents people from connecting to each other. Even with IPv6 you'd still have no way to find the other person and the moment they hop between networks, their IPv6 address won't stay the same either.

Ultimately I think none of this will be solved at the low level, it needs something like Iroh or libp2p where you build a new network on top of the Internet infrastructure, so that you can have things like persistent cryptographic identities and addresses that you can carry with you, largely independent of the underlying network architecture.

On a tangent: compare persistent cryptographic identities with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

It's already won. Over 50% of Internet users are on ipv6.

Source: <https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html>

In the US, it’s currently over 60%: <https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/US>

Firewalls, both at the perimeter and locally, was what patched over this. NAT had nothing to do with it.

You can have firewalls with no NAT just fine. You can also have NAT with no firewall.

NAT is not about security and never was. It's about stretching the IPv4 supply and allowing each endpoint to just get one precious V4 IP.

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