NAT/PAT as a standard is very limited in its ability to protect against incoming messages.
Of course, since it's not its function. Firewalls exist for a reason.
The problem is that there isn't a distinction between "internal networks" and "public servers" or between "public servers" and home machines. They're not merely a bad metaphor, but an actively misleading one.
I disagree. "Home machine" is a silly name which doesn't mean much, but the distinction between internal networks and public servers is rather obvious to me.
The internet /requires/ all devices be addressable.
No, I don't think it does. IP protocol requires an IP address, but that's not the same thing as requiring devices be addressable. Network bridges and intrusion-detection boxes, for example, are devices that are commonly set up as non-addressable.
If your home machine can access any website, it does so by making itself distinguishable from others on the same internal network and leaving itself exposed to return messages.
Let's leave home machines out of it and talk about boxes on an internal LAN. The mapping between IP addresses and machines can be established by middleware and doesn't have to be long-term or permanent. In some cases (e.g. VMs, high availability environments) the end point of a connection can change without the public server being aware of anything at all.
At LW London last week, someone mentioned the possibility of a Google Glass app doing face recognition on people. If you've met someone before, it tells you their name, how you know them, etc. Someone else mentioned that this could reduce the social capital of people who are already good at this.
A third person said that something similar happened when Facebook started telling everyone when everyone else's birthday was. Previously he got points by making an effort to remember, but those points are no longer available.
Are there other social skills that technology has made obsolete? And the reverse question that it only just occured to me to ask, are there social skills that are only useful because of technology?
I'm not really sure what sorts of things I'm looking for here. "Ability to ask for directions" seems like one example, but it feels kind of noncentral to me, I don't know why. But I'm mostly just curious.