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

sad to see it go

[NumLk]

I used this software several years ago. While it does exactly what it does, the biggest problem was the sever lack of an installed base. Once Yahoo started integrating voice chat into their IM client, I really had no use for it. Its unfortunate though, since I always felt the sound quality was inferior on Yahoo (and the others that have since come along), but I'd imagine that was due to those clients compressing more to save bandwidth.

That's too bad

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

SF is a great program. It's not graphical bloatware, it supports many compressions, it's somewhat modular ... I've spent countless hours getting a stable 2-way voice comm over a 33.6 dialup link, back in the days, and it actually worked at some point (the rest of the time it didn't, which prompted me to change from AOL to an Internet provider. Thanks SpeakFreely!)

When I discovered I could have a voice converstaions with anybody in the world, I was so excited I picked up my phone to tell my friend in Canada :)

In Europe ISPs do not NAT their customers!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Customers using a cable modem or dsl modem get a live wild-side IP and a unique hostname such as:
node139a2z.xs4all.nl
by which they're already DNS addresable.

Most commodity OS's and even the cheap (horrific!) home-router products I've seen have port forwarding capablity,so there's really no such problem as he describes here.

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

Liam.

I know I enjoy the added security of a NATed firew

[stratjakt]

There's no added security to NAT. A nat box that blocks incoming connections is no more secure than a router that blocks incoming connections.

Ipchains used to let udp packets addressed to your internal net pass through untouched. All a hacker need do is guess your internal address space (all signs point to 192.168.0.*) and he could bombard your innards with all kinds of silly shit. And most exploits are emailed/downloaded trojans, not viruses in the old sense.

What NAT is, is convenient. I have my router box equipped with NAT and DHCP. I can bring home a laptop or plug something in, and presto! I'm online. No calling ISP and asking for another IP, no hoops to jump through.

I could pay for extra IPs from my ISP, but why? I dont serve anything from home, and neither do most home and small business users - thats what colos are for.

NAT is just way too convienient and sensible. It's like just plugging a phone into an extension, vs running it's own line.

And it works 99.9% of the time for me. Transparent proxies (ya mofo i violate RFCs by even transparently proxying http, i'm fucking crazy man, crazy!!) fill the gap for the 0.999%, leaving 0.001% of stuff a pain in the ass, and I can avoid that pain in the ass stuff since it's all warez clients, err p2p applications.

So, I don't mourn the loss of SpeakFree. Open source needs to be able to adapt to survive, too. NAT is here to stay.

Why should every device be accesible?

[fermion]

I have to disagree that not having every computer connected directly to 'The Internet' is a bad thing. The first definition from google for the internet, taken from the american heritage dictionary, is
An interconnected system of networks that connects computers around the world via the TCP/IP protocol..

This means that the Internet is made up of networks which may themselves may be made up of networks, etc. These networks use a common protocol. Most would say that not every device on the network, or even every sub network on the network has to be connected to the Internet. It is quite arguable that there are benefits, both personal and for the commons, to not have every device connected to the Internet.

What is for sure is that for the Internet to run, everyone who uses it must contribute to it's well being. There has to be enough devices connected directly to the Intent to process and forward all the packets in an efficient and timely manner. I personally pay a number of services that manage such activity on my behalf. My personal machines, which are not in the primary bussiness of routing packets, are behind a NAT, which is.

Being behind a NAT allows me to manage my network with less effect on the rest of the community. There are still many security issues, and i can still flood others if I get infected, but it is a first step. I would argue that assuming every computer on every network to be directly addressable from every other computer on the every other network might not be the best design decision. It certainly fits in well with the TelCo desire to sell at least one IP per device, as they tried to do in the past with telephones, but other than that I do not see the benifit.