Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vel0city 77 days ago
> I've never seen a piece of software that takes advantage of that except maybe for games

Maybe we haven't seen many products available on the market to take advantage of it because the current standard of NATs make such things practically unworkable?

Its pretty much impossible to ship smart home stuff that is hosted locally (i.e. not without it connecting to some cloud service) because people want to access these smart devices from outside their home. They're not likely to configure a VPN to connect home, they're not going to configure NATs in any workable fashion (or may be unable to, such as CGNAT), the applications probably don't want to have to handle having NAT hairpinning issues, etc.

So instead we continue down everything that's popular being something that requires a cloud proxy/relay (because that's the only way things actually work for most people), when in reality if things could just be public we could do a whole bunch more and empower people to easily host things themselves.