Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tailscale raises $100M

tailscale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 468 posts

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#161

Post by ThePhysicist »

nickysielicki wrote: post #133
mnkmnk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare already has a competing product https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/lp/ppc/cloudflare-for-teams...

It’s not really a competing product until they relaunch it with a heavy consumer focus and with some of the properties that Tailscale has, ie: avoiding going through the cloudflare CDN. But more to my point, cloudflare is definitely in a position to outcompete Tailscale, it’s just a couple tweaks and a marketing shift.

I don't think Tailscale will focus on the consumer market, I'd be very surprised at least if they did. I think they built a developer-friendly product to get mindshare and early adoptors, but eventually the real market for such such products is in the B2B space, i.e. implementing the "BeyondCorp" model of zero-trust networking. There's also a market for building cloud mesh services but I'm not sure if Tailscale is well positioned for that as there are good open-source solutions available for that already.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#162

Post by karlshea »

gzer0 wrote: post #137
siavosh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am able to route traffic on my mobile device through my home network via the use of their "exit node" option. It allows one of my home devices to act as an exit node for my entire personal tailscale network. This serves multiple benefits: the main one being that I receive pi-hole filtered ad-free traffic on my mobile device via a Wireguard VPN with my home IP 24/7/365

I can do that without Tailscale though by just using the WireGuard app. What is Tailscale adding to this?

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#163

Post by Pr0ject217 »

arsome wrote: post #124

I was going to try TailScale but then it seemed the only option to do so as an individual was to login with a 3rd party cloud provider, which I in no way want tied into my networks. I gave up and just setup wireguard directly instead, I don't trust Tailscale either if that's their attitude towards privacy, it's permanently marred my vision of their product.

Interesting. That's a non-starter for me as well.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#164

Post by nickysielicki »

karlshea wrote: post #162
gzer0 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am able to route traffic on my mobile device through my home network via the use of their "exit node" option. It allows one of my home devices to act as an exit node for my entire personal tailscale network. This serves multiple benefits: the main one being that I receive pi-hole filtered ad-free traffic on my mobile device via a Wireguard VPN with my home IP 24/7/365

I can do that without Tailscale though by just using the WireGuard app. What is Tailscale adding to this?

NAT breaking, I can have a wireguard network with Tailscale where every device only has an RFC1918 address and a default route.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#165

Post by oicU00 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #152
oicU00 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a basic web UX over a built in Linux kernel feature There are Docker containerized apps that manage Wireguard too Maybe contribute to one and fret less about behavior of VC funded business and wondering if they’re actually respecting your privacy to accomplish finance goals

It handles a lot more than that, right? It does all of the key distribution and rotation which is a pain.

If they can do it it’s not impossible (they’re just people after all).

With an open source implementation out there, anyone can do it merely pulling a Docker container, and without paying Tailscale.

Regardless I manage a dozen users with no issue using Embarks container; once they’re setup I touch nothing.

Paying people is not working with people; it’s working with a specific group. Open source is working with people.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#166

Post by nickysielicki »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #161
nickysielicki wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really a competing product until they relaunch it with a heavy consumer focus and with some of the properties that Tailscale has, ie: avoiding going through the cloudflare CDN. But more to my point, cloudflare is definitely in a position to outcompete Tailscale, it’s just a couple tweaks and a marketing shift.

I don't think Tailscale will focus on the consumer market, I'd be very surprised at least if they did. I think they built a developer-friendly product to get mindshare and early adoptors, but eventually the real market for such such products is in the B2B space, i.e. implementing the "BeyondCorp" model of zero-trust networking. There's also a market for building cloud mesh services but I'm not sure if Tailscale is we…

It costs them so little to provide their free consumer service (iirc: they fall-back to providing transit, but it’s very rare and only occurs when UDP is completely blocked) that it benefits them to keep their focus on consumers because if everyone is using Tailscale, the business customers are inevitable.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#167

Post by rhuber »

JeremyNT wrote: post #135
arsome wrote: post #124

I was going to try TailScale but then it seemed the only option to do so as an individual was to login with a 3rd party cloud provider, which I in no way want tied into my networks. I gave up and just setup wireguard directly instead, I don't trust Tailscale either if that's their attitude towards privacy, it's permanently marred my vision of their product.

Indeed, this is why I won't use it either. I settled on Slack's Nebula [0] instead of wireguard because it handles direct p2p communication between nodes automatically. There also exists an open source implementation of the tailscale control server [1] that you could self host. [0] https://github.com/slackhq/nebula [1] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

(Nebula coauthor here)

People sometimes ask me to describe the differences between Nebula and Tailscale. One of the most important relates to performance and scale. Nebula can handle the amount of internal network traffic and scalability of nodes (100k+ nodes, constant churn) required on a large network like Slack's, but Tailscale cannot. Tailscale's performance is fine for many situations, but not suitable for infrastructure. It is just a fundamentally different set of goals.

Nebula was created and open sourced before Tailscale was offering their product, but their architecture is similar to older offerings in the market, and is something we purposely avoided when creating Nebula.

Fwiw, I even recommend Tailscale to friends who want to do things like connect to their Plex server or Synology or [other thing] at home remotely. It simplifies this kind of thing greatly and doesn't require you to set up any infrastructure you control directly, which can be a headache for folks who just want to reach a handful of computers/devices.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#168

Post by margalabargala »

__float wrote: post #97
ncmncm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use an identity provider like Okta or OneLogin, then you're not tied to any "contentful" services like GitHub or a Google account that "historically" seem to have more problems of this type. As far as threat models go, I can't really say I understand this one too much.

As an example: shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Namecheap cancelled all accounts of all of its customers who were located in Russia. This was done regardless of what content if any was hosted by the account, whether or not the person in question supported the war, or whether the person in question was actively fleeing Russia and may have been relying on technical infrastructure they had previously set up to help them do so.

Just because a service you sign up for is not contentful, does not mean that they won't choose to boot you off for some reason completely unrelated to anything you control or anything you chose to do.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#169

Post by sleepybrett »

alberth wrote: post #49
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, 1Password is practically a utility at this point, as far as I'm concerned. I really like the direction they're heading and they're solving some pretty tricky problems without compromising on security, predominantly in the enterprise domain. The experience is the same regardless of whether you're an enterprise user or a personal or family user. It's polished enough that my grandma can use it.

> I really like the direction [1Password] is heading I thought customers were complainingly loudly against their new direction of making 1Password an Electron app. Is that not the case? Note: I'm not a 1Password customer.

Removing the ability to use it in a non-saas (local vaults, vaults shared by other syncing solutions) capacity is what drove the final nail into the 1password coffin for me. I can't trust that they don't hold master keys to all the vaults on their saas offerings.

The swap from native to electron on macos was hugely disappointing but something I could have probably lived with if they hadn't gone full saas no alternative.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#170

Post by nsm »

arsome wrote: post #124

I was going to try TailScale but then it seemed the only option to do so as an individual was to login with a 3rd party cloud provider, which I in no way want tied into my networks. I gave up and just setup wireguard directly instead, I don't trust Tailscale either if that's their attitude towards privacy, it's permanently marred my vision of their product.

I’m curious. Why not create a new google account that is not used for anything but Tailscale and use that?
Post reply on HN