On Jun 25, 2014, at 10:43 AM, Niels Dettenbach <nd@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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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