P2P Sockets: convenient firewall circumvention
by Kevin Dangoor
Standard Internet routing techniques allow any machine on the network to talk to any other. It’s a basic part of how the net works. Then, people started setting up firewalls to protect their less-secure (or more private) hosts. Now, some folks have reimplemented java.net.Socket to allow you to run any service over JXTA, essentially doing nothing of value other than circumventing your firewall. I guess there is a little value in that a lot of people are not behind firewalls, but are behind NAT devices because of their limited IP space. Anyway, this still feels a bit crazy to me.
Hi, this is Brad Neuberg, one of the developers on P2P Sockets (http://p2psockets.jxta.org). We didn’t design it for firewall circumvention. It is more about allowing the 90% of home computer users, who are blocked by NATs and cable modem providers blocking ports, to be full-fledged nodes on the Internet. JXTA already allowed this, but is hard to use; P2P Sockets is meant to allow existing Java socket and J2EE programmers to be able to use the powerful stuff in JXTA without it’s complexity. Check out Paper Airplane at http://www.paperairplane.us for a view of the kinds of applications meant to work on top of P2P Sockets.