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The New Internet

tailscale.com

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Re: The New Internet

#161

Post by api »

throw0101d wrote: post #131
hnarn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Who was stopping anyone from doing it then, and who is stopping anyone from doing it now? The folks who either (a) got in early on the IPv4 address land rush (especially the Western developed countries), or (b) with buckets of money who buy addresses. If you're India, there probably weren't enough IPv4 address in the first place to handle your population, so you're doing IPv6: * https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/…

There is another reason: the addresses are long and impossible to remember and hard to type.

I always bring this up and it’s always dismissed because tech people continue to dismiss usability concerns.

Even “small” usability differences can have a huge effect on adoption.

Re: The New Internet

#162

Post by teddyh »

ZhongXina wrote: post #150
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.…

No, we definitely don't want "automatic IPSec" (especially IPSec!), or really any enforced encryption at the network level, even if it's something sane at this moment like WireGuard. Look at old VPN protocols or authentication schemes like RADIUS which have glaring security holes and are impossible to fix because of compatibility issues, and they're running at much smaller scales than the whole internet. Hell, the wa…

Your argument seems to be to never implement anything, because eventually it will become old and it will be hard to move away from it? This seems to be an argument against anything new, and it is therefore hard to take seriously.

Re: The New Internet

#163

Post by teddyh »

api wrote: post #161
throw0101d wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who was stopping anyone from doing it then, and who is stopping anyone from doing it now? The folks who either (a) got in early on the IPv4 address land rush (especially the Western developed countries), or (b) with buckets of money who buy addresses. If you're India, there probably weren't enough IPv4 address in the first place to handle your population, so you're doing IPv6: * https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/…

There is another reason: the addresses are long and impossible to remember and hard to type. I always bring this up and it’s always dismissed because tech people continue to dismiss usability concerns. Even “small” usability differences can have a huge effect on adoption.

Yes, like Ethernet addresses. Those are impossible to remember, too, so obviously Ethernet is no good. /s

The solution for IPv6 addresses is the same for Ethernet addresses; don’t use them directly. Leave it to the name resolution system, and use host names.

Re: The New Internet

#164

Post by [deleted] »

teddyh wrote: post #163
api wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another reason: the addresses are long and impossible to remember and hard to type. I always bring this up and it’s always dismissed because tech people continue to dismiss usability concerns. Even “small” usability differences can have a huge effect on adoption.

Yes, like Ethernet addresses. Those are impossible to remember, too, so obviously Ethernet is no good. /s The solution for IPv6 addresses is the same for Ethernet addresses; don’t use them directly . Leave it to the name resolution system, and use host names.

[deleted]

Re: The New Internet

#165

Post by throw0101d »

api wrote: post #161
throw0101d wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who was stopping anyone from doing it then, and who is stopping anyone from doing it now? The folks who either (a) got in early on the IPv4 address land rush (especially the Western developed countries), or (b) with buckets of money who buy addresses. If you're India, there probably weren't enough IPv4 address in the first place to handle your population, so you're doing IPv6: * https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/…

There is another reason: the addresses are long and impossible to remember and hard to type. I always bring this up and it’s always dismissed because tech people continue to dismiss usability concerns. Even “small” usability differences can have a huge effect on adoption.

> There is another reason: the addresses are long and impossible to remember and hard to type.

If only there was some mechanism in which we could use a human-friendly label and have that translated to a computer-usable address…

> I always bring this up and it’s always dismissed because tech people continue to dismiss usability concerns.

I don't bother remembering IPv4 addresses, so I'm not sure why I would bother to remember IPv6 addresses. Heck, phone numbers are generally short as well, and who remembers them nowadays? ("0118 999 881 999 119 725… 3")

Maybe it's dismissed because people see it as a non-issue. I regularly work at OSI Layer 2 (and even 1, pulling fibres in a DC), and Layer 3, and am not sure what the concerns are about.

Re: The New Internet

#166

Post by p_l »

ssl-3 wrote: post #36
OJFord wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zerotier is I think the obvious answer? I haven't used it though; it's more proprietary, not less.

AFAIK, Zerotier is about equally proprietary, more-free (as in beer), and has been doing the node-to-node mesh thing instead of spoke-and-hub longer than Tailscale has been in existence. And if I remember correctly, ZT was initially created to provide something like this "New Internet" concept that Tailscale has apparently recently discovered, except they called it "Earth" and abandoned it in 2023. (Some things don't…

Tailscale does p2p, not hub-spoke, with additional DERP system which combines various NAT bypasses with worst case hair pinning over HTTPS - you can host all components yourself.

Re: The New Internet

#167

Post by api »

teddyh wrote: post #162
ZhongXina wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we definitely don't want "automatic IPSec" (especially IPSec!), or really any enforced encryption at the network level, even if it's something sane at this moment like WireGuard. Look at old VPN protocols or authentication schemes like RADIUS which have glaring security holes and are impossible to fix because of compatibility issues, and they're running at much smaller scales than the whole internet. Hell, the wa…

Your argument seems to be to never implement anything, because eventually it will become old and it will be hard to move away from it? This seems to be an argument against anything new, and it is therefore hard to take seriously.

It’s an argument against complexity. IP had amazing longevity because of its simplicity and openness.

Even if something is open, complexity is almost like closed as we can see with crazy complicated web standards for which there are few implementations.

Re: The New Internet

#168

Post by p_l »

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..?

Tailscale value proposition is that it just works, all the parts you normally have to assemble yourself already built and connected, with value add in terms of ACL support publicly and things like funnel (exposing services over HTTPS on nodes that don't have a public IP) and taildrop (easy file sharing).

Also various integrations, like tailscale k8s operator.

Re: The New Internet

#169

Post by spacecadet »

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.…

Companies like you list solve people problems. Their business is about using abstraction to create customer experiences that match the market demand. I want to say that "institutions" solve computer science problems, but it's much more complicated than that.

Re: The New Internet

#170

Post by pphysch »

Animats wrote: post #102
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.…

And, worse, incentivized to require users to use a "coordination server" which helps with the NAT and firewall traversal problem by being something you can reach from outbound-only clients. There's a lot of verbiage there, but the general idea seems to be that Tailscale sits at the middle of this as the means by which machines find each other. There are other ways to do that. There are dynamic DNS schemes, so you can…

How is trusting a dynamic DNS provider different than trusting Tailscale's coordination nodes?
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