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The New Internet

tailscale.com

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Re: The New Internet

#81

Post by password4321 »

jmprspret wrote: post #61
figassis wrote: post #9

I love Tailscale, but this post gives me the creeps. The internet succeeded because it was built on standards and was completely free. With Tailscale, I get wireguard is open source and we have things like Headscale. But the whole everyone gets an IP, doesn’t it depend on Tailscale owning a massive ip address space? We can all wait until full ipv6 rollout, or we can depend on centralized ipv4, and servers and proprie…

You can self-host a Tailscale control sever with Headscale[1]. It's not quite at feature parity with Tailscale, but it supports most if not all the current feature set and its improving every day. One of the lead devs is even paid by Tailscale to work on it, IIRC. I run it for my personal self-hosted infra, and it works really well. Setting a custom control server URL is relatively easy (at least on Windows and Andro…

The question is: how long will Headscale be supported in the official clients - how long will the incentives of Tailscale's VC's align with the freeloaders?

The official clients (most valuable: the polished mobile apps easily installed from the default app stores) are one auto-update away from cutting ties when push comes to shove, the same as all commercial VPNs with a free tier.

Re: The New Internet

#82

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

metadat wrote: post #63
throw0101d wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can anyone elighten me regarding what is different or special about 100.64.0.0/10 vs say, 192.168.0.0 or 10.0.0.0. A bit of context: if an ISP cannot get enough IPv4 addresses for the WAN-side of people's home routers, some problems exist: * something in 192.168/16 is generally used for the LAN-side of people's home routers, so that cannot be used on the WAN side * 10/8 is used for business/enterprise corporate net…

Interesting, I thought docker uses 172.*.

It does; 172.16.0.0/12 is just another RFC1918 internal subnet.

Edit: I should say, a subnet that docker carves smaller subnets out of for its networks.

Re: The New Internet

#83

Post by iovoid »

I think the author misdiagnoses the problem, and the proposed solution simply hides the centralization instead of removing it.

The reason AWS is expensive is not because of IPv4, or the datacenters. It's mostly in their software/managed offerings, and the ability to quickly add more servers. If you are a "serious company" and you don't want to pay AWS or a similar company, renting a rack and colocating your own servers (either within your premises or in a datacenter) is doable and done by lots of companies.

I disagree that certificates have caused centralization, and they're not something separating the haves and have-nots and are in no way comparable to having or not a mainframe. HTTPS becoming pseudo-mandatory didn't push people into having their own (sub)domains, which is nowadays the only requirement to obtain a certificate. It already happened out of convenience.

The other point of centralization mentioned is DNS, which tailscale doesn't avoid at all. MagicDNS still relies on the ICANN root, as does the tailscale control plane. And if all you wanted was a free subdomain, there are plenty of people offering that.

If you are behind CGNAT, tailnets aren't particularly less centralized, as traffic has to flow through the DERP servers. I doubt tailscale can keep providing these free of charge when the volume is in the tbps instead of the gbps.

I agree that tailscale (and similar solutions) help in the last remaining case, which is accessing your computer that is behind a NAT. I even think they could reach the dozens of millions of users. This is, in my opinion, not enough to claim the title of "the new internet".

Re: The New Internet

#84

Post by genpfault »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #75
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...you can rent seek on proprietary peer to peer systems as well..." I still use a non-proprietary one that predates Tailscale and that is not OpenVPN. It is small and simple enough even I, a non-programmer, can make modifications. It's possible one ends up using client-server in order to achieve peer-to-peer because not everyone has an internet-reachable, non-firewalled IP address. Using some hosting company's serv…

What is the non-proprietary option you are referring to?

Tinc[1]?

[1]: https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc

Re: The New Internet

#85

Post by genewitch »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #75
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...you can rent seek on proprietary peer to peer systems as well..." I still use a non-proprietary one that predates Tailscale and that is not OpenVPN. It is small and simple enough even I, a non-programmer, can make modifications. It's possible one ends up using client-server in order to achieve peer-to-peer because not everyone has an internet-reachable, non-firewalled IP address. Using some hosting company's serv…

What is the non-proprietary option you are referring to?

Not sure if parent means wireguard, but my GitHub page has a way to get around cgnat using wireguard for use with a Nintendo switch (or any wifi/etc device that doesn't run an editable OS)

Re: The New Internet

#86

Post by figassis »

password4321 wrote: post #81
jmprspret wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can self-host a Tailscale control sever with Headscale[1]. It's not quite at feature parity with Tailscale, but it supports most if not all the current feature set and its improving every day. One of the lead devs is even paid by Tailscale to work on it, IIRC. I run it for my personal self-hosted infra, and it works really well. Setting a custom control server URL is relatively easy (at least on Windows and Andro…

The question is: how long will Headscale be supported in the official clients - how long will the incentives of Tailscale's VC's align with the freeloaders? The official clients (most valuable: the polished mobile apps easily installed from the default app stores) are one auto-update away from cutting ties when push comes to shove, the same as all commercial VPNs with a free tier.

I think clients are the least to worry about. They can be built by someone else if the need arises.

Re: The New Internet

#87

Post by skybrian »

metadat wrote: post #6

I really enjoy and appreciate the tailscale service, but this article didn't click for me. I love an inspiring CEO rally speech as much as the next early adopter, and agree that there is a ridiculous amount of developer friction and complexity in computing, but tailscale still has its own friction and isn't on track to solve the big picture issues _at all_. As a concrete example, a few weeks ago, I invited my dad to…

I don’t know if it’s the same issue, but the problem I ran into is that I misunderstood how it works for families who just use gmail addresses. It’s quite counter-intuitive. The organization stuff isn’t for you - instead each person creates their own tailnet and you connect them. See:

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/10731

Re: The New Internet

#88

Post by k_bx »

I'm one of the people who actually use Tailscale for production systems where there are servers physically close to me, or at some other controlled locations, and then there are hundreds of users hundreds kilometers away, all working via Tailscale.

I should say two things. Tailscale is amazing and I love it. The system could not exist without it, or I'd have to have at least ten more people in my team to manage all this 24/7. It's working, and it's good enough.

That being said, you do need to lower your expectations: it's not as good as "the internet". The latency spikes periodically, the connection drops sometimes, the MagicDNS just magically stops working or interferes with the system. Since we have many users, we've encountered every possible problem one can encounter, and then there's still something new you'll see tomorrow.

In any case, we believe in Tailscale and its vision, it's a categorically new approach that simultaneously gives you the control on hardware, reduces the cost, and improves the security. Our first big production server was a 4-core Linux Laptop!

We love Tailscale and we wish the product prosperous life and development. Thank you TEAM TAILSCALE!

Re: The New Internet

#89

Post by whoistraitor »

teddyh wrote: post #57

The eternal problem with companies like Tailscale (and Cloudflare, Google, etc. etc.) is that, by solving a problem with the modern internet which the internet should have been designed to solve by itself, like simple end-to-end secure connectivity, Tailscale becomes incentivized to keep the problem . What the internet would need is something like IPv6 with automatic encryption via IPsec, with PKI provided by DNSSEC.…

Ie. A form of perverse incentive or the cobra effect. Endemic to capitalism, especially in infrastructure.

Re: The New Internet

#90

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

teddyh wrote: post #57

The eternal problem with companies like Tailscale (and Cloudflare, Google, etc. etc.) is that, by solving a problem with the modern internet which the internet should have been designed to solve by itself, like simple end-to-end secure connectivity, Tailscale becomes incentivized to keep the problem . What the internet would need is something like IPv6 with automatic encryption via IPsec, with PKI provided by DNSSEC.…

I never thought of this. Forces me to rethink every negative post people made against DNSSEC which shaped my opinion. I still think that IPv6 and DNSSEC do more harm in practice than what they solve. Maybe the SCW podcast can do a deepdive on this together with somebody who is militantly-pro DNSSEC. edit: maybe even invite 2 or 3 DNSSEC advocates @tptacek :)
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