Speak Freely, one of the older Internet telephony applications, recently1 announced that it was shutting down with a FAQ, among other things, decrying the proliferation of Network Address Translation on the net at large. Now, this is something I've been complaining about for a while, and I was annoyed to find that when my parents got DSL that they got a NATed address. I suppose that it does protect the average user who can't be bothered to patch their Windows install from some classes of attack. It can't, however, protect them from bugger mail readers or incautious downloads (which I would guess that about 50% of the people who don't bother to run Windows Update are prone to). I also suspect that the attackers that NAT does any good against would break like water against my Dad's UltraSPARC running Linux.
So that was the entry (however badly written that I was going to write once I got the coding done. However, I feel I should toss in a link to Simson Garfinkel's inflammatory article on the adoption of IPv6. I'm not sure why I'm increasing his pagerank, but I do want to say that I'm pretty sure he's vastly underestimating the potential market forces behind a wider address space, vastly underestimating the cleverness that people will apply to get it deployed, and vastly overestimating the costs.
Of course, I may be underestimating the lengths that traditional one-to-many media will potentially go to preserve their worldview...
1Well, in August. But they're shutting down in three days.
