alt Hacker News>If anything, NAT has saved millions of wildly insecure devices running unpatched old Windows versions from getting pwned the second they connect to the open internet.
This might not be a good thing. Perhaps if there had been no protection for those odious operating systems, they'd have died the horrible deaths they earned decades ago. We should only want to protect things we intend to keep, after all, and none of us wanted to keep that garbage.
All of the current OS choices are insecure by design. The all operate programs with the ambient authority of the user. While this was fine for the corporate world of AT&T in the 1970s, and the classroom in the 1980s, it's insane to use it in the era of ubiquitous persistent megabit Internet connectivity, and mobile code.
I know of zero systems that can survive exposure to the raw Internet, unpatched and without administrative oversight, with uptimes of years.