[blep_]

I can't decide how I feel about NAT. It's a ridiculous hack that shouldn't exist, but it also probably had the side effect of saving us from a world where ISPs charge per internet-connected device, because there's no obvious way to do that in a world where they have no visibility into your LAN routing.

[zackmorris]

Ya I was perhaps a bit harsh.

NAT is a great idea in principle to connect networks in a scalable way. There are various UDP hole punching techniques that (depending on the devices) can be used repeatedly to get through multiple layers of NAT. Vs something like UPnP, which from what I understand, has poison pills which prevent it from communicating past 1 layer of NAT. So some of the features I complained about were probably engineered intentionally through a great deal of effort, and I might have even supported those efforts at the time. They just didn't know the negative effects those solutions would have on the open internet for stuff like networked games and P2P file sharing (which the status quo just loves).