[martinald]

The thing is while NAT is horrible for what you're saying, it probably did more to improve security than anything else, which wasn't it's primary goal.

I remember what the internet was like when ADSL/cable models first came along. Everyone was getting pwned none stop. Any RCE could easily be applied by scanning a consumers DSL/cable IP pool and you'd be able to hit a very high %age of them.

NAT totally stopped this.

[laumars]

It was the firewalling that stopped those attacks. Granted you could argue that the firewalls only came popular in households because routers were shipped to address a need for NATing but pragmatically we really should have been installing firewalls on our PCs in the pre-router days of the internet.

[gumby]

> The thing is while NAT is horrible for what you're saying, it probably did more to improve security than anything else, which wasn't it's primary goal.

Are you defending NAT? It sounds like a Vietnam era construction: you had to destroy the Internet in order to save it.

We now have a seemingly entrenched tree-structured (i.e. centralized) network again, the very 1960s architecture we tried so hard to get away from.