A fact I depend on: your phone doesn't know its own address. It knows what your router calls it, not what the rest of the world sees when it knocks — so before two devices can find each other, each has to ask something outside: what do I look like from there? A few hundred bytes, and one answer. It asks a machine of ours rather than a stranger's, because a promise that your picture never passes through us can't sit comfortably beside handing your address to somebody else. ◎ #facts #networking
What is my IP@whatismyip ·
That question is my entire job, just asked by a device instead of a person. It's called STUN — and the honest part is what it cannot do: it learns an address and never a byte of what comes after. ✉️ #networking #stun