Re: Time to move beyond the 32 bit Internet.

On Jun 25, 2014, at 10:43 AM, Niels Dettenbach <nd(_at_)syndicat(_dot_)com> 
wrote:

> The fact that most users are not providing services on the net is not true at 
> all.
Agreed.

I suppose part of this is the definition of a “service”. I think it’s fair to 
say that your average residential user doesn’t have the kind of service 
infrastructure in his or her home that an ISP would provide. But I think that’s 
actually a pretty restrictive definition of a "service”.

To me, networked applications fall into two broad categories: those that need 
an address before a application session opens, and those that have no need of 
an address until the instant an application session opens. The latter are 
obviously clients - the fact that I can readily connect from a web browser to a 
web server through an arbitrarily long sequence of NATs says to me that the 
client’s address is mostly-irrelevant from its perspective, and it could be 
supplied with an address at the instant it decided to create the connection. 
That’s not a service, that’s the client of a service.

However, if I need an address to connect to an application on some remote 
device, that remote application is in some sense a service.

Let’s talk about services that people often do operate from their homes.

My daughter has had a couple o break-ins, and lives in a neighborhood that has 
had trouble with that. It’s not a “bad” neighborhood, but police cruisers seem 
to spend their time in more upscale neighborhoods or the business parts of her 
town, so her neighborhood has had trouble. I installed a surveillance system 
for her. One of the really nice things is that the computer in her home can use 
Dynamic DNS to enable and application on her phone or laptop to access the 
current camera or stored footage from somewhere else. There are several systems 
that allow that. https://www.google.com/search?q=surveillance+dynamic+dns. It 
works through a NAT by configuring the NAT appropriately. In her case, however, 
she has the NAT in her router and a NAT somewhere upstream (in her modem, 
probably, or perhaps CGN if the provider is using that), so that the service 
doesn’t actually WORK. IPv6 would solve that issue cold, although it would 
perhaps highlight security issues (so who is looking at her surveillance 
footage?).

And then there are things on one’s phone or notebook. Think Skype, FaceTime, 
Voice/Video in general, gaming, photo exchange, p2p-anything. These services 
today have large infrastructure “in the cloud”, because NATs pretty much force 
the thing in the home to be a client of something somewhere else. However, that 
has some direct impacts - if every user has the option of sending at mumble 
kbps or mbps, the cloud infrastructure has to be able to receive at that rate 
and retransmit to one or more other users at that rate. Count noses, and then 
say “MBPS”. 

Now, imagine a different model. Your membership in, say, Skype-or-whatever 
gives you the opportunity to ask a server somewhere “what address is my buddy 
at right now”, or perhaps “buddies". The infrastructure cost drops like a rock, 
and connections between users of the service become direct. Did you say that, 
maybe, privacy was important and you wanted to “go dark”? OK, encrypt the 
session and give only your buddy the key. Skype wants to deploy a service in 
which a client can share with an arbitrary number of buddies simultaneously? 
Hey, if you have the bandwidth, whatever, Skype simply gives you the addresses 
of several buddies. So these things in which a system in a house has to be a 
client of some kind of expensive infrastructure suddenly become SERVICES in the 
sense that they have an address when someone needs to connect to them, and one 
connection goes end to end.

A classic example of that is Free’s IPv6 video service. I don’t live in France 
and I haven’t used it, so I’m propagating hear-say here. But as I understand 
it, it is a lot like youtube, but the rotating storage is provided by the Free 
subscribers that share videos using it, at no cost to Free.

If the defining characteristic of a service is that someone ELSE connects to IT 
when THEY decide to do so, I think you will find that the typical residential 
user runs services all the time, and they would work at least as well and 
probably better without the middleware. They just don’t know it, and they 
depend on some pretty heavy-duty stuff “in the cloud” to make it possible.

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