If you have the August 13, 2024—KB5041580 update. You’re good.
Not the person you were replying too, but I was there when we had modems and raw-dogged the internet.
The average person clicks “Yes” on everything without reading it, has no idea what a firewall is, and they never update anything unless it does it without asking.
Having things accessible from outside your network is great if you’re a network nerd and that’s what you want, but most people are going to be in a world of unprotected shit. Especially in a world of pointlessly online devices. I don’t trust any of those fuckers to have their shit in order.
I would assume/hope the default setting for a consumer router would still be to drop incoming connections. That should suffice for the average person as long as ISPs don’t make it easy to disable that without actually understanding what the consequences are.
I would also assume that to be the default, but unfortunately the first Google search for “why doesn’t my smart fridge work from my phone when I leave the house” will be a set of instructions for turning that feature off.
NATs and port forwarding is annoying, but it’s also very manual, and only lets you fuck up one device at a time.
Then the instructions are bad. They should be how to open the firewall port for that device, which is almost the same as setting a NAT port forward, with the same limitation of only exposing one device.
