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Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

tailscale.com

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Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#181

Post by snailmailman »

nickburns wrote: post #47
Lammy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does Tailscale make money? They spy on your network behavior by default, so free users are still paying with their behavioral data. See https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging “Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at log.tailscale.com). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your networ…

Pretty much this. DNS, SNI, and otherwise plaintext traffic sniffing. That together with user/device 'fingerprinting' (a much more amorphous concept), and that's why such-and-such thing you were just talking about with so-and-so pops up on your screen/feed/whatever, sometimes only minutes later. I highly doubt any of this can actually be opted-out of. How else would they stay in business?

They specifically avoid sending traffic through tailscale servers whenever possible. That’s how the free tier stays free. Most connections are direct, P2P.

The traffic that does go through their servers is encrypted, and bandwidth limited on the free plan. Any snooping on client behavior would have to be done client side, and the clients are all open source. To some extent the coordination server might be able to deduce some metadata about connections; but definitely not snoop all plaintext traffic.

I think they do have some “service detection” which can basically port-scan your devices to make services visible in the web UI. But that is easy to disable. And premium/enterprise tiers can intentionally log traffic statistics.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#182

Post by ghthor »

solarisos wrote: post #114

The shift from managed DERP to decentralized Peer Relays is a massive win for self-hosters with difficult NAT situations. I’m curious if this significantly reduces Tailscale's own egress costs or if the primary goal was just improving latency for users who can't establish a direct WireGuard tunnel. Either way, removing the 'hassle' of setting up a custom DERP server is a great UX improvement.

We’ve had issues with the centralized DERPs just blackholing traffic when we startup ephemeral nodes in CI. This is despite us ensuring that all important peers can establish direct connections to each other. But there is some bootstrapping that is happening before both peers negotiate.

Having said this, it’s been almost a year since the last incident of this. It’s been rock solid the last months. Ok sure using these new peer nodes will greatly reduce this from even a chance of happening anymore. :hacks away:

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#183

Post by api »

pmarreck wrote: post #125
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #75

If you're sold on Tailscale due to them "being open" (as they semi-officially support the development of Headscale), keep in mind, that at the same time some of their clients are closed source and proprietary, and thus totally controlled by them and the official distribution channels, like Apple. Some of the arguments given for this stance are just ridiculous: > If users are comfortable running non-open operating sys…

I don't understand this attitude. Some humans have to eat and put a roof over their heads sometimes, and extracting consulting fees from open-source work (i.e. the Redhat model) is not always a paying business model. A hybrid model is often the best way to compromise. Disclaimer: I'm pursuing a similar solution on an app I'm working on. The CLI will be free and open-source (and will have feature parity with the GUI),…

The bigger problem is that making software easy to use is stupidly expensive and hard and is usually the kind of work devs hate. So it’s usually not possible for free software to do it, hence free software usually makes no impact outside very technical circles.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#184

Post by mintflow »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #75

If you're sold on Tailscale due to them "being open" (as they semi-officially support the development of Headscale), keep in mind, that at the same time some of their clients are closed source and proprietary, and thus totally controlled by them and the official distribution channels, like Apple. Some of the arguments given for this stance are just ridiculous: > If users are comfortable running non-open operating sys…

As a developer who have been built some tailscale-based clients, I think this maybe acceptable because they running a business with money from the VCs.

And I am also very grateful that tailscale implement some workaround for systems such as apple-based OS with core APIs built into the open source code, thus if you really need you can just look the open source code and doing accordingly, though it really need some research work.

For the long term if they really do not want to open source the core client code (which I do not believe at the moment), I think support a fully open source coordinator and open source client based on the fork will still be doable.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#185

Post by segmondy »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #75

If you're sold on Tailscale due to them "being open" (as they semi-officially support the development of Headscale), keep in mind, that at the same time some of their clients are closed source and proprietary, and thus totally controlled by them and the official distribution channels, like Apple. Some of the arguments given for this stance are just ridiculous: > If users are comfortable running non-open operating sys…

where were the alternatives before tailscale? we could only read bout BeyondCore with envy before tailscale. i'm going to keep supporting them unless they do something naughty.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#186

Post by pastel8739 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #159
baq wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out people see value in imperfect experiences.

There’s a difference between tolerating something and seeing its value. I tolerate lines at restaurants, I don’t see value in them for me. You’re also operating under the assumption that people always have a choice.

But you clearly see value in the restaurant experience, even with the shortcoming of a line. Or else you wouldn’t go.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#187

Post by Gigachad »

dawnerd wrote: post #169
riknos314 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Tl;Dr here is that the cost to them of operating the free tier is lower than what they estimate their Customer Acquisition Cost would be without a free tier, so the free tier generates better leads/conversions to their paid products at a lower cost than traditional sales and marketing. As long as these economics continue to hold they'd be stupid to discontinue the free tier.

Makes sense. Get tech people to adopt it, then push for it at work. It's brilliant and it will work. It's working for Cloudflare too.

Also the fact it means companies can run a demo themselves without having to contact sales, after they see it works on their system they pay to add all the users they will need.

Products that have no free tier where everything is behind a scheduled sales demo present a huge barrier to entry.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#188

Post by alexktz »

drannex wrote: post #82
adithyassekhar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was it, ok now I feel stupid.

Oh man, I even read all the comments and still couldn't find it when I finally clicked on the image link. Terrible UX. cc: @apenwarr (tailscale founder), might want to have someone fix this and move the close button to the top right of the modal, not the bottom right.

(Alex from Tailscale here) I've sent this to the web team, we'll take a look first thing in the morning. Sorry y'all had to look at my ugly mug a bit longer than is ideal just now.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#189

Post by Forgeties79 »

pastel8739 wrote: post #186
Forgeties79 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference between tolerating something and seeing its value. I tolerate lines at restaurants, I don’t see value in them for me. You’re also operating under the assumption that people always have a choice.

But you clearly see value in the restaurant experience, even with the shortcoming of a line. Or else you wouldn’t go.

You’re missing the point. The restaurant experience would be better without a line. I tolerate lines if the restaurant experience is good enough.

If it is not, I go somewhere else. “Going somewhere else” is not always an option when it comes to computers/software.

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