Re:The end of the cloud is coming
by Piskvorrr on Monday November 06, 2017 @04:43AM
(#15634384)
NAT is not a security mechanism, nor is it a necessary part of routing ("variability"). At the very best, it's a band-aid - mostly cosmetic and provides psychological comfort.
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But it provides some privacy. Identifying users solely by IP doesn't work well with ipv4. Even if you have a subnet in ipv6, you're still the only one using it.
Band-aid again. Identifying users by IP was never a reliable technique; and with most services, I'm still the only human using my public IPv4 address, NAT or no NAT.
If worried about privacy, you have a whole raft of identifying mechanisms to cope with before the IP address as an identifier even appears on the horizon, and there are tools to obfuscate your source address; NATing it away only makes things more complicated without a commensurate increase in privacy (worse, provides a false sense thereof).