On 02/14/2011 01:33 PM, Justin Krejci wrote:
> 
> I don't know if circumventing or quietly violating a company's EULA/AUP
> with NAT is a good argument on why NAT is good. Without knowing the
> details of the case referenced (a quick search on what Security Now
> turned up a GRC archives page and I did not find "NAT" anywhere in the
> shows list) I can only make conjecture. I would hate to have to pay for
> each computer I connect to my ISP and if a company did that I would find
> another who didn't. Vote with my feet.

I don't think it violates anyone's EULA, it just made it impossible for
them to realistically have anything to gain with it. And as we've seen
by the near monopolistic control of these companies, it can often be
very difficult to vote with a dollar due to the massive startup costs
for these companies.

If there were a reasonably priced ISP giving out static IPs, I'd be
there in a second, but due to the cartel-like control, I haven't found one.

> 
> Can you cite the show specifically or point out any relevant links or
> sources to the case you reference? 
> 

Steve Gibson talks about it a little bit in Episode 285, but the
detailed description was from Episode 284 of Security Now. From the
transcript:

LEO:  Yeah, thinker.  And this, he said, in these days the ISPs wanted
to charge you for each user in the house.  And I do remember those days
where basically each one would have a static IP address, and you would
have to pay the full freight, or maybe a slightly discounted rate.  He
said, we were starting to create routers at the time.  Or it was his
suggestion to put NAT in.  And he said, I knew, but I didn't tell
anyone, that this would effectively make it impossible for ISPs to
charge per user.  They'd have to charge per household because of course
the NAT would hide all the additional users.  He said, I never mentioned
that feature.  I just said it'd be a good thing to put NAT in these routers.

STEVE:  And that's what connection sharing is, of course.

LEO:  Right.  And so he says, you can thank me for the fact that you are
paying what you're paying for your Internet access.  He had some other
very interesting things to say.  We decided to invite him in for a full
hour interview for our triangulation show because he's a fascinating
guy.  And what I like about him, yeah, he created history 40 years ago
with VisiCalc, but he's not sat on his laurels.  And he's doing
something very interesting right now, really about taking back the
Internet, that I thought was fascinating.  He said the Net Neutrality
conversation is misguided.  That's not what we need.  He said there's a
way to handle this.

STEVE:  The other thing, too, is that by putting NAT in all these
routers, not only were we preventing ISPs from charging per user, but we
did hugely slow down the depletion of the IPv4 address space.  Because,
you know, we've got, I mean, I'm sure probably all of our listeners have
many different machines behind their single IP that's out there, their
public IP.  And we always are talking about 192.168.x.x addresses, which
we're all sharing, but which are kept separate.



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