This is the talk I presented at Reading Geek Night 27 on Jan 10th; the theme was the power of mobile computing and of real networking, and of how NAT, IPv4, DNS, and the typical provision of network access (eg: browsing over NAT) to the user – rather than network connectivity ie: full bidirectional internet access – is a strategic risk to individual communication, an increased opportunity for censorship, and a threat to the health of the Net at large.
Video
Notes
- I referenced Cory Doctorow’s The coming war on general computation in the Q&A session
- I referenced the tremendously fast networking at TechHub in London, an environment where I am a enthusiastic visitor – plus the beer’s great! More #OpenSourceAle please!
- I alluded during discussion (no video) to Firefox plugins which bypass DNS takedowns; by coincidence they got some coverage on Boing Boing the day after the talk, but the one I was thinking of was MAFIAA-Fire
- I alluded to how measures to improve DNS Security are being undermined by US legislation to enable domain seizure (amongst other badness) – see also.
- One thing I’d like to clarify but which I don’t cover well in the video: the 20Mbit bidirectional bandwidth is when I’m connected to Wifi at somewhere with a fast network, but I am still NAT’ed behind a firewall. All the other ping probes and traceroutes shown are when I am connected over GSM, but yet again NAT’ed behind a firewall.
- What I want to highlight is the full server capability of the modern “smartphone” device – and that it is permanently hobbled by being stuck behind NAT for both GSM and domestic Wifi. Worse, people have come to expect this when in fact your
personal serverphone is more than capable of being fully attached to the Internet, 24×7, working for you.
Slides
Great Talk Alec!
I was just going to glance at the post and listen tomorrow but I got caught up in it and then had to look go look at a few things, Tor, my phone, The coming war on general computation … and now its almost 2am!
Thanks for posting the video!
Some hope from an audience member at Reading Skeptics tonight; his take was that 4g (aka: LTE) networking is going to be so fast, and provide such bandwidth to the handsets, that websites will start to replace apps and that phone-to-website latency will be in the order of 10ms – which is below the threshold of human perception.
For this to work – says he, persuasively – the phone companies will have to rip out much of the latency-inducing intermediate NAT and other session-based crap, moving instead to pure IPv6 solutions.
Whether this will fully presage running webservers on your phones is unclear – still it would be good to have demand so that technology is nudged that way – but it’s a step in the right direction.