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Tailscale raises $100M

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141–150 of 468 posts

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#141

Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work. The biggest risk that this company has is that…

I’m pretty ignorant on this topic, but what are the benefits of having a personal VPN?

I use it so I can connect to my work machine (dynamic IP on office wifi) from my laptop (dynamic IP, home Wifi).

It's also great to be able to just ssh into your laptop at home when you're at work and you forgot to push whatever you were working on last night.

It's not necessary, but Tailscale makes a lot of things just easier.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#142
i wanted to to use tailscale really bad, but since you cannot login without the given choices they provide, i am not sure any security minded person would mind using it.

i rolled my own with a simple vps, a haproxy and ansible.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about services like NordVPN, Mullvad, etc. They do not funnel your Internet connection through their servers.

Ah, fair enough. Those are not general purpose VPNs though. In fact, they are not even VPNs in the first place. They merely use the same technology to provide a private tunnel to the public Internet (and use the name in marketing material because by now people are familiar with it). What they are not is general purpose private networks.

They are absolutely VPNs. If you don't like my term "general purpose" that's fine, but they 100% fit the definition of VPN.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#144
post #14

I read almost all of TFA (started to jump paragraphs near the end) and still couldn't figure out what it was or did, even after being told, repeatedly, that they "make easy things easy". Apparently, it's a VPN.

I got bored long before then. It's a terrible piece of self-backslapping drivel

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#145

Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work. The biggest risk that this company has is that…

I’m pretty ignorant on this topic, but what are the benefits of having a personal VPN?

I have a server at home with file syncing, personal media, and home automation. I want to be able to access it remotely, but I’d rather some of those things not be publicly accessible for security. I could always do HTTP auth with an nginx reverse proxy, but it’s not a very smooth workflow and it relies on me being able to configure my server/services correctly.

Instead I can bind my services to Tailscales network interface and access it anywhere that I’m connected to my Tailscale network. It’s like authentication for free.

As a side note I know this is an anti pattern since one intruder can access all of my services, but that’s not a vector I’m really concerned about since I’m not exactly a high value target.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#146

Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work. The biggest risk that this company has is that…

> a direct ring of trust with friends

The vision you outlined is great, except it doesn't work. The trust assumptions are too high, and even a great product like Tailscale seems to rely completely on centralized identity providers (you have to choose Google, Microsoft, or Github on sign-in).

Ultimately, if you want to maintain full control of your online identity and network, you'll probably need some of the decentralized (but economically aware) resources you seem to have issues with — or at the very least a means of transitioning authentication to private key methods with DIDs.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#147
post #81

For anyone else who wonders wtf tailscale is: > Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you own accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly. It enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the open source WireGuard protocol, which means only devices on your private network can communicate with each other. It seems to take care of key distribution, nat-traversal, authen…

I thought that Tailscale was pretty interesting. Avery Pennarun, its CTO, is somebody whose judgment I am used to trusting. Then I learned that to use it, I would be dependent on authenticating using a login on one of the unaccountable internet behemoths who could take away my account for any random reason or no expressed reason at all. No, thank you.

Oh, that is a shame. I can see why they do it like this for businesses, but for personal accounts I refuse to use SSO. Been bitten by that a few times too many.

I _could_ use my github account, but I don't trust them at all anymore. And I'm not going to setup an account with some other service just to use this. So that is a hard pass for personal use.

For a company it makes sense to have to use whatever sso provider you are already using i guess

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#148

Am I the only one that has an issue with a VPN that I can't self host? Presumably if Tailscale get's PWN'd or subpoenaed then your network is breached no?

Just install wireguard yourself. With Bullseye on the RPi, it is easier than ever. There is a learning curve, but it is worth it.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard some people complaining a bit for a moment when they made the transition, but that happens anytime anyone changes anything and doubly so when that change is Electron. But that faded quickly.

I...don't think it's faded. I could totally be wrong here, but I don't think they'd actually made a transition yet; the complaining you're talking about was over the 1Password 8 beta . That actually just went GA this week, and people were still upset. I get why they're doing it (or, at least, think I do), and I'm not angry enough to go get angry on Twitter, but I am going to avoid the upgrade for as long as I can. Th…

Honestly I haven't noticed and I use 1Password on all of my devices every day. I heard some grumblings about 1Password changing to electron months ago and just assumed that they already made the transition. In whatever case, I haven't heard a peep until this thread. I don't like electron in theory and the industry should collectively come up with a solution that incentivizes app developers away from electron rather than hoping they swim against the current of incentive.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a kind of WIP control server implementation, it's not production ready in my opinion but it's definitely usable. https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

Super cool, and a lot of contributors! Can this work the rest of the wireguard ecosystem (agents, UIs, ...) for a full VPN soln without involving the VC-tied company?

Yes, it's usable with every tailscale client (except for iOS). You provide an argument to make headscale your controller, and then it works much the same as the hosted Tailscale service, with some only minor differences in configuration.
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