Have you ever chained three Cisco 2600 routers together and then successfully ping’d clients on each end? Do you know what BGP is? OSPF? Do you know the difference between routing and routed protocols?

I know you don’t, because people who do don’t make the claims you’re making.

No they fucking don’t, that’s not what routers do. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

And don’t fucking tell me NAT is for security, either.

Skype won’t be supporting anything at all very soon.

What happened with Vonage is something that could happen with any kind of instant messaging, including things like Discord.

With everything directly addressable (not just static addresses, but directly addressable), an IM/VoIP service can simply connect to the recipient. No servers are necessary in between, only routers. That doesn’t work with NAT (CG or otherwise), so what you have to do is create a server that everyone connects into, and then that forwards messages to the endpoint. This is:

• More expensive to operate
• Less reliable
• Slower
• A point for NSA eavesdropping (which almost certainly happened)

This is largely invisible to end users until free services get enshittified or something goes wrong.

Yes, it’s only tangentially related to static addresses, but it’s all part of the package. This is not the Internet we should have had.

And at least in the US (in single family homes) its crazy unlikely that your router is behind any NAT

Your router has NAT. That’s the problem. CGNAT is another problem. My C&C: Generals issues did not have CGNAT.

. . . nobody at home actually runs VOIP . . .

Plenty of people used Skype and Vonage. Both were subverted because they have to assume NAT is there.

. . . quick game servers don’t need static . . .

But they do work better without NAT. That’s somewhat separate from static addresses.

My old roommate and I had tons of problems back in the day when we tried to host an Internet game of C&C: Generals behind the same NAT. I couldn’t connect to him. He couldn’t connect to me. We could connect to each other but nobody outside could. It’s a real problem that’s only been “solved” because a lot of games have moved to publisher-hosted servers. Which has its own issues with longevity.

You can get IPv6 addresses. What you can’t get, in many cases, is a static IPv6 prefix assignment.

CGNAT is not fine. Its problems are simply hidden from most people. ISPs have to have more equipment that’s less reliable, increases latency, and is potentially a bandwidth bottleneck.

The reason they have no use for a static address is because applications haven’t evolved to work that way. Roll back the clock 30 years, do IPv6 seriously so that everyone has static assignments by the time the Y2k problem has come and gone, and you have a very different Internet.

In fact, many applications, like VoIP and game hosting, have to go through all sorts of hoops to work around NAT.

“Hashed emails”. Besides the fact that they can match up a hash from one source to a hash from another source to link them to the same person (they never said they’d salt them), emails often have enough predictability to break the hash. Assuming they all end in “@gmail.com”, “@outlook.com”, or “@yahoo.com” will get you the vast majority of emails out there. Unlike a good password scheme, people don’t shove a lot of random data into their email addresses.

Actually, I only want to add one file, tea.yml, to your repository. Because I have a job that requires uploading the file and I also don’t know what it is used for.

So you want me to merge a file you use on your job and you don’t know what it does?

I see no issue. Merged!