Only if these endpoints service incoming public requests.
As I said, NAT puts encumbrances on application design. One of them is "end-user machines only initiate TCP sessions; they don't listen for them." This fits badly to a number of application domains including peer-to-peer protocols generally, games, chat systems, VoIP, and so on. The workarounds have been extensive and expensive. Ever worked with STUN?
Yes, but not on internal LANs which is the whole point of the discussion.
Private networks are IP networks that are air-gapped from the public network. We're talking about networks which have been assigned private-network (RFC 1918) addresses due to IPv4 address exhaustion and ISP market segmentation — but which gateway onto the public network via NAT and expect to access public-network resources. These are not secured from the public network ... especially since current client software (i.e. web browsers) promiscuously makes requests to all sorts of endpoints without checking with the user first.
A lot of this actually exists for OSI Layer 8 and 9 reasons (the "financial" and "political" layers of the network design). Justifying NAT on the basis of security is a rationalization, since neither does it provide security that couldn't be had without it (via a plain firewall), nor was it actually deployed for security reasons.
From the security point of view, I do NOT want general public to be able to distinguish and target separate machines on an internal 'net (at least without putting in some effort for it :-/)
If security was the only concern, we'd shut the damn thing down and reimplement it in Haskell. It ain't.
But on the other hand, it's a security problem when a security-sensitive service (say, a money-making web server) can't distinguish between an abusive client and an innocent one because they happen to be located behind the same NAT. Denying service to a NAT address that emits abuse allows the abusive client to dictate whether the innocent client gets any service. This is unacceptable to a for-profit service, especially if the two clients and the NAT are not actually under common administration, which they typically aren't today. If all hosts are distinguishable by address, then the security-sensitive service can accept traffic from a good client and reject traffic from a bad one. IPv6 helps with that, by abolishing address-exhaustion as a justification for NAT.
end-user machines only initiate TCP sessions; they don't listen for them
That's not a misfeature of NAT -- it's adjustable at the router/firewall. Games, chat, etc. work perfectly well given the appropriate configuration of your router.
We're talking about networks which have been assigned private-network (RFC 1918) addresses due to IPv4 address exhaustion and ISP market segmentation — but which gateway onto the public network via NAT and expect to access public-network resources.
Correct, except for the reasons why they were assigned private-network a...
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.