> Some applications (looking at you, BitTorrent client) do not play well behind a NAT.
I've seen a number of such warnings, but never personally encountered the issue. Is that because I've been always sitting behind a router? Or that's just an ISP thing that I got lucky with? Like, my IP isn't "grey" enough? (always had dynamic IP)
The reason that peer-to-peer tools tend not to work well behind NAT is because peers can't initiate inbound connections to you.
So your router gets 1.2.3.4 as an external IP. And it assigns you 192.168.1.10 as an internal IP, and handles NAT for your outbound connections. You start your torrent client and it advertises "hey, I have all these Linux ISOs, and I'm at 1.2.3.4:50000, come connect to me". Peers try to connect to 1.2.3.4:50000, and your router says "who the hell is this".
This is what UPNP and related tools attempt to solve. UPNP works by allowing your computer to say to your router "hey, I'm going to want inbound connections on port 50000, so if you get any, send them to me".
Other methods like STUN/TURN/etc use different techniques to get around the issue.
This makes perfect sense on paper, but I disabled UPNP in router settings at some point just to see what happens and the torrents still work to this day. No issues with no apps whatsoever. That got me confused and I assumed that NAT masquerading is responsible for such "port forwarding" (having the address translation table and all that).
I'm currently using Mikrotik router with the latest RouterOS and Transmission/qBitTorrent for the clients if that helps. Any idea why is this the case?
And if (just in case) Mikrotik's implementation of NAT does in fact do "UPNP", why add separate UPNP settings? By the looks of things, I would assume that, when disabled, UPNP still works, but with some default rule set, and when enabled, you get to fine tune the interfaces. But that's just a wild guess. No mentions of such behaviour in the official wiki.
Sorry, Mikrotik does some arcane things so learning network concepts on RouterOS often leaves one with more answers than questions :')
There must be a connection to how doctors advice to talk to (even unconscious) patients who survived a stroke: the brain of the patient is still actively receiving information and constantly rewires itself while trying to process the data over and over again. In case with a complex programming problem, the person itself is responsible for the 'feedback loop'. Like how you can't stop thinking about the problem under different angles. Thus no need for external stimulus. I'm guessing the best time for that kind of processing is when one is asleep because there is simply not much else for brain to do in that state. Plus, when asleep, some long-term memory mechanisms kick in which make the already processed data more accessible and easier to work with. If there are some studies explaining the why's, I bet the medical ones focusing on brain damage and long-term memory would be the most related.
> most scraping tasks require either desktop or mobile useragents and not both together
Why? Do some sites serve completely different content? Or it's simply markup differences? Have never done much scraping and I'd expect the viewport size to be the decisive factor these days, not the user agent. But, again, I don't know much about that.
> and only very recently have things looked somewhat brighter for them
Haven't been following recently. What have made the things to look brighter? It's really hard to see these things as a non-player these days because of all the negativity surrounding the company. Can't say I don't see why it is that way, though.
The alternative to fully cloud-based solutions would be a local, open source kdbx client (Keepass, KepassXC, etc) with the password database situated on a cloud storage (Dropbox/Google Drive/etc). This way, one gets the best of both worlds.
This can be a nice compromise, but it's not without downsides. Personally, 99% of the authenticated software I use is in my browser, and the usability of an extension that has a little badge to tell me I have an account on this site and autofill capabilities is really tough to pass up. Further, because it's an extension, it can know what site I'm on, which all but eliminates my risk of falling prey to phishing attempts.
I've seen a number of such warnings, but never personally encountered the issue. Is that because I've been always sitting behind a router? Or that's just an ISP thing that I got lucky with? Like, my IP isn't "grey" enough? (always had dynamic IP)