If you have the August 13, 2024—KB5041580 update. You’re good.
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.
Yeah, but that’s going to involve knowing what the device is called on the router, or knowing what the address is.
I’m afraid the great age of computer literacy has come and gone.
If anything it makes me want routers to not even allow a blanket whitelist for all devices…