Tailscale raises $100M • Hacker News Board

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#401

Post by stanmancan » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:15 AM UTC

criddell wrote: post #334

stanmancan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can access your home network and any machines on it without exposing anything to the public internet. It's much safer to connect to my home network over a VPN than to expose all of the services to the public internet and hope they're all secure.

Doesn’t putting Tailscale in the middle mean you are now hoping they are secure? I supposed that’s probably better than connecting to the VPN on your home gateway router that your ISP has access to.

I have a model and my own router; I don't use (or even have) one provided by my ISP. I'm not entirely sure how Tailscale works TBH, so yes I'm betting on them being secure.

Tailscale comes with a few other benefits that don't come on other VPN's. I have my home server setup as an 'exit node' which allows me to route my traffic through it when I'm travelling. Super handy sometimes like when I'm travelling and my bank decides not to let me log in.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#402

Post by bibabaloo » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:24 AM UTC

klazutin wrote: post #292

I've tried Tailscale recently after reading all the raving reviews here on HN. The service is very easy to install and the apps are nice to use, everything is just very well done. However, I just don't see much difference from my vanilla Wireguard setup. Granted, my use case is very simple, just connect a few devices at home and in the cloud into a single network and use one of them as an exit node, but I'm still not…

NAT and firewall traversal are two other things that Tailscale gives you that you don't easily get with Wireguard alone, FWIW.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#403

Post by gobins » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:27 AM UTC

Would love to work for Tailscale but the openings are limited to US and Canada.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#404

Post by klabb3 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:28 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #296

margalabargala wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a strange example to pick given that (1) it's a war, and (2) a significant percentage (majority?) of Namecheap's employees and offices are in Ukraine. If we (the US) decided to invade Canada tomorrow, you can be certain that the maple syrup would stop flowing. Edit: According to their website[1], the overwhelming majority of their employees are in Ukraine. Two of the three cities they have offices in are on t…

I don't think parent is saying it's unexpected, but rather that having a third-party identity provider (especially a corporation) is an unwarrented and/or unwanted political dependency. I deeply empathize with this sentiment but also recognize why many companies choose to rely on them (identity is very difficult).

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#405

Post by danenania » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:39 AM UTC

girvo wrote: post #398

danenania wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron actually offers some of the best dependency-isolation capabilities of any language/platform given that you can set a content-security policy and leverage Chrome's extremely robust sandboxing to prevent front-end dependencies from accessing the file system, making network calls to untrusted domains, making system calls, calling 'eval', etc. A fully native app will offer you no such protection. If a dependency…

> Any project that uses dependencies (in any language) has the same issue. While that's absolutely true, the Node ecosystem (which I use, love, and make my money in) definitely takes the sheer dependencies of dependencies of dependencies problem to a rather fascinating extreme, compared to nearly any other language I use.

It would be interesting to see some data. Node definitely has that reputation, but every other language I’ve worked in—ruby, python, golang, clojure, hell even objective c—all have rich library ecosystems and most libraries include other libraries. They also all have plenty of small, single-purpose libraries. Perhaps node is a bit worse, but it’s not like it’s in a different category. Most popular languages/ecosystems are like this.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#406

Post by ignoramous » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:42 AM UTC

anderspitman wrote: post #371

xena wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailscale employee here. Tailscale has a fallback that does connections to a relay server called DERP. DERP works over HTTPS, so if you can't access the outside world via HTTPS then you have much bigger problems than Tailscale not working.

Is DERP raw HTTP or based on WebSockets?

derp seems to be its own protocol.

tailscale seems to prefer websocket transport for derp frames: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/blob/505f844/derp/der...

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#407

Post by conductr » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:47 AM UTC

boesboes wrote: post #12

For anyone else who wonders wtf tailscale is: > Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you own accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly. It enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the open source WireGuard protocol, which means only devices on your private network can communicate with each other. It seems to take care of key distribution, nat-traversal, authen…

Maybe a apt place to ask the question, all of my devices are silos. I’m still wondering if this is for people besides me, or if I’m just missing the potential use cases for myself. I have never needed to connect my device to each other. In the house I have a few laptops, a couple phones, Xbox, Apple TV’s, fire sticks, and every device is just connected to the google mesh Wi-Fi. Every device communicates out for what it needs (and yeah probably more) but I never in years have needed to use a device as a server unless I was developing on it and using it as localhost. Do I still have a use for tailscale?

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#408

Post by stavrianos » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:48 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #81

boesboes wrote: post #12

For anyone else who wonders wtf tailscale is: > Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you own accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly. It enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the open source WireGuard protocol, which means only devices on your private network can communicate with each other. It seems to take care of key distribution, nat-traversal, authen…

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.

What precisely are the consequences of the third-party auth? Is it, they get an IP ping each time a device connects or does anything? Or, does that only happen once, but they can revoke access at any time? *Surely* they aren't granted access to the content? That would be mindboggling.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#409

Post by pid-1 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 1:49 AM UTC

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.

IMO it's still the best pw manager by a fair margin.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#410

Post by discardedrefuse » Thu, May 05, 2022, 2:05 AM UTC

api wrote: post #340

discardedrefuse wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it too complex for a lay person . On a regular computer or server its not too bad. I can send someone a config file with the certs and keys already built in. That's easy enough. But on mobile it requires a back and forth exchange of keys over a different medium. Compare that to ZeroTier where I can just tell someone, "install this app and punch in this Network ID". Also, ZT lets me control the entire network…

> Their self-hosted option is a joke. There is no webui. There's a community developed one: https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui

I had looked at this. It doesn't seem like they've implemented anything to handle firewall rules. They may not even be able to, seeing as how that part of ZT is closed source. Also, this doesn't solve the problem with mobile apps, so the whole thing was a moot point for me.