Nathan Ward wrote:
On 17/02/2007, at 3:23 PM, Alastair Johnson wrote:
Jonny Martin wrote:
At the risk of taking this thread somewhere it shouldn't - do we even care about end to end connectivity anymore?
For the majority of people? No. End-to-End has been gone for a long time, as you correctly point out.
I wonder how many large ISPs are currently looking at NATing their dialup pools. Given that most people still using dialup these days don't actually need end-to-end connectivity, and it's low-bandwidth/low-connection volume (and reasonably easy to implement on the NAS, rather than needing giant NAT boxes), it's a quick win to reclaim some address space if you're really hurting.
Indeed. It's also likely that many of those customers are running older machines, and are more susceptible to attacks of some flavor directed at their network interfaces. If they are behind a NAT, these customers are more likely to be protected.
This is becoming less true as every protocol under the sun tries to deal with "breaking through" NAT. Programs need to talk to someone that's not behind NAT to provide a temporary port forward. These machines they talk to are now high value targets as they contain lists of large numbers of computers that are running a particular piece of software and a way to connect back to them even through a connection tracking firewall or NAT box.