Bad Hosts
Metadata
Highlights
- Ah, but what if I sent an HTTP request to your public IPv4 address? It would arrive at your router, which wouldn’t have any idea where to send it — your laptop? the Apple TV? the washing machine? Confused and/or suspicious, the router would simply drop or refuse my request.
NAT as one-way mirror.
- This is all coming out of my own experience, my own thought experiments, as I sketch out protocols and apps, “ways of relating” across a network; and every time I muse about something decentralized, I bump up against this barrier: a person connected to the internet from home cannot host a small service of their own.
There are workarounds for NAT, ubiquitous hacks, but they all require centralized intermediaries. Think of video chat. While we’re chatting, the video is flowing straight from my computer to yours — in a sense, we are each hosting a small internet service for each other! But we can’t initiate that connection ourselves. It requires a third host, one with a public IPv4 address. That host “punches a hole” through our one-way NAT mirrors and ties us together.
The connection is ephemeral. Our video chat ends, and my Wi-Fi router’s heart flutters, and you are lost to me again.
- The workarounds are fine as far as they go, but NAT tricks can’t get us the one thing we really want, the foundational internet thing: the ability to simply listen for connections. Therefore, whole classes of possible services and relationships don’t exist; a whole alternate internet history.
As home internet users, we can only speak and request, not listen and serve.
- Today, as home internet users, we are not hosts; and perhaps we are missing out, therefore, on a degree of etiquette, and conviviality, and satisfaction.
- I find it melancholy: all these powerful computers, my laptop and yours, not to mention the servers in my office, your supercomputer smartphone — they could be doing interesting things together, shuttling data around in interesting ways. Back when most (of the relatively few) internet users could host freely, none of them had a gigabit connection at home; now, many internet users have bandwidth and processor cycles to spare, but we can’t host. Technological irony.
title: “Bad Hosts”
author: “robinsloan.com”
url: ”https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/bad-hosts/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
Bad Hosts
Metadata
Highlights
- Ah, but what if I sent an HTTP request to your public IPv4 address? It would arrive at your router, which wouldn’t have any idea where to send it — your laptop? the Apple TV? the washing machine? Confused and/or suspicious, the router would simply drop or refuse my request.
NAT as one-way mirror.
- This is all coming out of my own experience, my own thought experiments, as I sketch out protocols and apps, “ways of relating” across a network; and every time I muse about something decentralized, I bump up against this barrier: a person connected to the internet from home cannot host a small service of their own.
There are workarounds for NAT, ubiquitous hacks, but they all require centralized intermediaries. Think of video chat. While we’re chatting, the video is flowing straight from my computer to yours — in a sense, we are each hosting a small internet service for each other! But we can’t initiate that connection ourselves. It requires a third host, one with a public IPv4 address. That host “punches a hole” through our one-way NAT mirrors and ties us together.
The connection is ephemeral. Our video chat ends, and my Wi-Fi router’s heart flutters, and you are lost to me again.
- The workarounds are fine as far as they go, but NAT tricks can’t get us the one thing we really want, the foundational internet thing: the ability to simply listen for connections. Therefore, whole classes of possible services and relationships don’t exist; a whole alternate internet history.
As home internet users, we can only speak and request, not listen and serve.
- Today, as home internet users, we are not hosts; and perhaps we are missing out, therefore, on a degree of etiquette, and conviviality, and satisfaction.
- I find it melancholy: all these powerful computers, my laptop and yours, not to mention the servers in my office, your supercomputer smartphone — they could be doing interesting things together, shuttling data around in interesting ways. Back when most (of the relatively few) internet users could host freely, none of them had a gigabit connection at home; now, many internet users have bandwidth and processor cycles to spare, but we can’t host. Technological irony.