End Of the Line for SpeakFreely: NATed to Death

Arun writes "John Walker (of AutoDesk and Fourmilab fame), primary author of SpeakFreely, has decided to EOL the program (a pioneering network telephony effort), come January 15th, 2004. He cites difficulty in maintaining a decade-old code base, lack of appropriate developer support and a fundamental change in the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet upon which SF is dependent as motivating factors behind his decision. While the last release of the program will continue to be available from SourceForge, the main web site, mailing list, and web forum will be shut down on the aforementioned date." He's got some good points too, like how once IPv6 is more common, most users probably won't go back to one address per machine. I know I enjoy the added security of a NATed firewall, and without a really good reason, I won't be quick to give it up.

Comments

IETF tools for media through NAT

[__aadkms7016]

The IETF midcom group has been working on solutions for passing media streams through NATs and other middleboxes for a few years now. One protocol, STUN, is already a standards-track RFC, and the group has other tools in progress. These tools work with the IETF multimedia suite (SDP, SIP, RTP, etc).

Re:In Europe ISPs do not NAT their customers!

[frohike]

Here in the netherlands at least, both the major broadband providers (UPC adn KPN)give all customers a generically routable IP.

...

Does anyone have different experience elsewhere? The States, for instance? I'd like to hear.

Not only do most (all?) of the US broadband providers give you a globally routable IP, many of them actually get angry with you if you try to use NAT, because they want to have a one IP to one machine mapping for charging your account. Comcast in particular even has language in their AUP that says they may take legal action against you if you try to use NAT to install more machines (which is totally stupid, but there it is).

I've got a lot of respect for Walker in other areas, but this NAT rant is just barking up the wrong tree. NAT boxes are installed by users so that they can get more functionality out of the limited IPs available to them, not by ISPs to limit the users. I know Cox cable will help you install a NAT network, but they by no means require it or lock it down. At any time you could simply plug your machine straight into the internet and be just like everyone else. Or get a better NAT box!

On the other hand, saying that the internet is transitioning to a client/server architecture at the hands of corporate overlords isn't a big stretch at all (limited upstream, blocking HTTP ports, etc) but it has nothing to do with NAT.

Anyway, as others have said, if he is just tired of writing the program for a perceivably uninterested audience, he should just stop and turn it over to an SF project, like he's done. No need for this NAT rant...