"Overtone writes "Steve Bellovin of AT&T Labs Research has published a paper showing how to remotely count the number of machines hiding behind a NAT box (in IMW 2002, the Second Internet Measurement Workshop). Your friendly DSL or cable broadband provider could implement this technique to enforce their single-machine license clause. Bellovin explains how to change the NAT software to defeat the measurement scheme, but the fix is complicated and unlikely to appear in commercial home gateways anytime soon." " writes Slashdot.org, here.
The implications of this are, of course, rather worrying for home broadband users. There's nothing to stop your ISP from introducing a new clause to prevent you from operating Internet Connection Sharing on your own home LAN.
Their justifications will range from "better download speeds for normal, ungreedy users" to citing the increasing costs of technical support, however as always I am sure that its greed that motivates such things. "Want to connect a second home PC to the Internet? Why its so easy with the SECOND CABLE MODEM WE WILL RENT YOU!"
Its about time, I think, that broadband ISPs fully realise that we pay the extortionate amounts of monies involved to get cable, ADSL, etc, so that we can run NAT, P2P, etc and not have to worry about it! Get with the program, people. Stop conning us or we will find ISPs that treat us fairly.
More here.