Explained: NAT

Your laptop is sitting on a home network. It has an IP address — something like 192.168.1.42 . But that address means nothing to the rest of the internet. It's a private address, invisible beyond your router. And yet, you can open a browser, load a webpage hosted on a server in another country, and the response comes back to exactly the right device, on exactly the right tab. How? The answer is NAT — Network Address Translation. It's on… Read More

Explained: DERP Protocol

Imagine two friends trying to pass notes in a room full of locked doors. They can't reach each other directly, so they slip their notes — already sealed in envelopes — to a trusted courier standing in the middle of the room. The courier doesn't open the envelopes. They just read the name on the outside and pass them along. That, in essence, is DERP. DERP stands for Designated Encrypted Relay for Packets . It's a protocol designed to … Read More