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The New Internet

tailscale.com

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Re: The New Internet

#121

Post by thinkski »

Fnoord wrote: post #22
zokier wrote: post #5

Of course these ideas are not that new. IPv6 was supposed to give end-to-end connectivity to all, and originally IPsec was supposed to be mandatory part of IPv6, giving each internet host cryptographic identity. And so on.

I was curious why the article didn't mention IPv6 at all, since Tailscale does support it. IPv6 -together with WireGuard- gives privacy, security, and performance. The downside is the complexity to set it up. Tailscale builds on the shoulder of giants. IPv4, WireGuard, Samy Kamkar NAT punching, OpenSSH, and probably many more. One of the upsides is the combination of these, and that the management interface in genera…

I think there’s a common misunderstanding that with IPv6 anyone can connect to anyone else. That’s not true.

My laptop has an IPv6 address, as does the router that routes its traffic. There’s no NAT, that’s true, but there’s still a firewall — only inbound packets from a destination host and port that have been sent to are allowed in. And in enterprise environments, from what I’ve seen, there’s a symmetric NAT on IPv6 anyway — packet comes from a different IPv6 address and randomized port than the one client sent it from, making peer connectivity impossible, as the source port varies by destination host and port.

Re: The New Internet

#122

Post by rubi1945 »

> I read a post recently where someone bragged about using Kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep.

lmao

Re: The New Internet

#123

Post by p_l »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #77
ssss11 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. The tailscale CEO is preaching “tomorrow you’ll have or not have Tailscale. And if you don’t, you won’t be able to run apps that only work in a post-Tailscale world.”?? That won’t go down well in 10 years if they don’t become Microsoft-scale juggernauts.

Yeah it's a weird flex. I'd use Tailscale today if it was open all the way up and down. If not, why bother? TLS and http don't charge licensing fees...

You can use tailscale without using tailscale hosted components, using purely open source parts.

I have switched where possible, both my own networks and clients, to use headscale which is folly open source coordination server compatible with tailscale.

Re: The New Internet

#124

Post by hnarn »

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.…

This sounds like a reasonable point, but the more I think about it, the more it sounds like digital flagellation.

IPv6 was released in 1998. It had been 21 (!) years since the release of IPv6 and still what you're describing had not been implemented when Tailscale was released in 2019. Who was stopping anyone from doing it then, and who is stopping anyone from doing it now?

It's easy to paint companies as bad actors, especially since they often are, but Google, Cloudflare and Tailscale all became what they are for a reason: they solved a real problem, so people gave them money, or whatever is money-equivalent, like personal data.

If your argument is inverted, it's a kind of inverse accelerationism (decelerationism?) whereby only in making the Internet worse for everyone, the really good solutions can see the light. I don't buy it.

Tailscale is not the reason we're not seeing what you're describing, the immense work involved in creating it is why, and it's only when that immense amount of work becomes slightly less immense that any solution at all emerges. Tailscale for example would probably not exist if they had to invent Wireguard, and the fact that Tailscale now exists has led to Headscale existing, creating yet another springboard in a line of springboards to create "something" like what you describe -- for those willing to put in the time.

Re: The New Internet

#125

Post by throwaway290 »

smolder wrote: post #108
sulandor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a poor statement. the cost is not in dispute, but the bearer of it. historically car owners need to pay for repairs.

Look at how the early 90s Ford Tempo resale value compared to Toyotas of the era. Trash cars don't keep their value. Toyota could then charge a premium because they were known for quality.

is resale value what the manufacturer wants? I mean they want to sell new cars after all...

Re: The New Internet

#126

Post by pdimitar »

imiric wrote: post #73
eddythompson80 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its major problems aren't technical but social, and no new technology will solve those. Really? Isn't the major problem of the current internet is inherent centralization of services because the initial promise of 100% decentralized network is simply too complex to realistically manage? I view that problem as deeply technical. Unless if by "social" you simply mean everyone should become an experienced sysadmin. (or…

> Isn't the major problem of the current internet is inherent centralization of services because the initial promise of 100% decentralized network is simply too complex to realistically manage? Not quite. The internet _is_ decentralized. What made the web so centralized from the start could partially be the result of lacking tools that made publishing as easy as consuming content. I.e. had we had a publishing equival…

> As you say, we've had the fediverse for over a decade now. How is that going?

Convenience trumps everything. All the parts of the iPhone existed for a few years before it -- especially PDAs with touch pens -- but what made the iPhone succeed was putting everything into convenient and easier package.

The amount of time worked on thing X has almost zero correlation with its adoption, as I think all of us the techies know.

> Even if we could get everyone to use decentralized services today, the internet infrastructure is not ready for it. Most ISPs still offer asymmetrical connections, and residential networks simply aren't built for serving data.

While that is true, let's not forget half-solutions like TeamViewer's relay servers, Tailscale / ZeroTier coordinators, and many others. They are not a 100% solution but then again nothing is nowadays; we have to start somewhere. I agree that many ISPs would be very unhappy with a truly decentralized architecture but the market will make them fall in line. I have no sympathy for some local businessmen who figured they will run with tens of millions with $50K investment. Nope, they'll have to invest more or be left out.

So there would be a market reshuffling and I'm very OK with it.

---

But how do we start off the entire process? I'd beet on automated negotiation between nodes + making sure those nodes are installed on much more machines. I envision a Linux kernel module that transparently keeps connections to a small but important subset of this future decentralized network and the rest becomes just API calls that would be almost as simple as the current ones (barring some more retry logic because f.ex. "we couldn't find the peer in one full minute"). I believe many devs would be able to handle it.

Re: The New Internet

#127

Post by pdimitar »

intelVISA wrote: post #52
imiric wrote: post #8

I like Tailscale, but this reads as too self-aggrandizing. You have a mesh VPN product with some value-added services on top of it. That's great, but this idea isn't novel or unique. Why should your solution be the "new internet" instead of any of the alternatives? I wouldn't want to rely on a single company for all my internet infrastructure, anyway. So I'll stick with the traditional internet with all its complexit…

What's Tailscale's value prop? It's just a kludge together of various FOSS heavyweights..?

Oh, you mean like most IT businesses nowadays?

Re: The New Internet

#128

Post by aquariusDue »

k_bx wrote: post #88

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 t…

Would you mind going into more detail about the 4-core Linux Laptop as a production server via Tailscale, please? I too use Tailscale and love it for self-hosting internal stuff but I never thought about using it for public facing production stuff. Now I'm really curious to hear more about your setup (if you're willing to share of course).

Re: The New Internet

#129

Post by [deleted] »

hnarn wrote: post #124
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.…

This sounds like a reasonable point, but the more I think about it, the more it sounds like digital flagellation. IPv6 was released in 1998. It had been 21 (!) years since the release of IPv6 and still what you're describing had not been implemented when Tailscale was released in 2019. Who was stopping anyone from doing it then, and who is stopping anyone from doing it now? It's easy to paint companies as bad actors,…

[deleted]

Re: The New Internet

#130

Post by jasonjayr »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #110
genewitch wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Wireguard is L3 not L2. re: GP comment. It really does not matter which non-properietary solution one chooses. It is personal preference. I know what I like but others might not like it. There are many options to choose from. And (I hope) there will continue to be more.

True, but you can make a L2 mesh network with a bunch of WG endpoints with tools built into the linux networking stack easily:

https://gitlab.com/NickCao/RAIT

https://github.com/m13253/VxWireguard-Generator

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