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Tailscale raises $100M

tailscale.com

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Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#51

Post by gowld »

bambax wrote: post #14

I read almost all of TFA (started to jump paragraphs near the end) and still couldn't figure out what it was or did, even after being told, repeatedly, that they "make easy things easy". Apparently, it's a VPN.

The blog post is poor. It has TailScale's "house style" of folksy reminiscence and Avery's stream-of-consciousness writing stylewrapped around an announcement. It only says two things, one at the top, and one at the bottom: "We raised a $100m for our war chest; we don't have any plans for how to use it besides extending runway for our current operations". The middle is left trying to justify why that is a good thing, despite not having a reason beyond "we know a lot of rich people who know we are wicked smart and talented, so they want a piece of equity in us".

The home page is a pretty clear exposition of what TailScale is: https://tailscale.com/

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#52

Post by aaronax »

I have heard of but never really looked in to Tailscale until today. I'm not impressed.

"Fixing the Internet" is not done by layering more private network garbage on top of it.

Their claim[0] that after you install Tailscale on all your devices: "This final configuration is called 'zero trust networking',” is pretty interesting. It seems this would be more like having a trusted internal network (sure it is overlaid on an untrusted network). A true zero-trust network would mean all of your clients and servers are secure in a manner that they can operate on the public Internet...like O365, Salesforce, etc. To say that you run a zero-trust network because you implement a fancy VPN is C-suite dreaming at its finest.

"get around a misbehaving corporate firewall" like newhouseb sings praises for is exactly the sort of thing that should be happening less, and the opposite of "fixing the Internet". Follow the policies of the network you are being allowed to use, or lobby for them the be fixed. Don't like ISPs messing with DNS traffic? Get rules/laws implemented that prohibit that, instead of garbage like hiding your DNS in DNS over HTTPS. (DNS over TLS seems more acceptable to me.)

[0] https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#53

Post by user3939382 »

Every time I've looked at setting up distributed VPN I've wanted layer 2, I haven't used WireGuard yet but apparently it's layer 3. I would love to be able to connect remotely and have my newly connected machine act like just another machine on the LAN. That in turn makes all kinds of other network-related operations simpler and homogeneous, in that the remote property of the connected machine(s) is abstracted away.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#54

Post by jollybean »

" What if we all just had a static IP address, and a DNS name? …and the address migrated around the world with you? …and you could connect to any of your devices no matter where they were? …and it was always encrypted? …and there was always a correctly configured firewall? …and you never had to worry about certificates? …and every device in your organization was tied to a user identity and SSO and MFA? …and all this just happened automatically? "

So why do people care about that?

Those all seem like positive things but they are in and of themselves, not value creating.

From this article and even their landing page ... I think they might need an explanation that makes more sense than IT/Networking Admin.

Even as a developer, I don't quite see the obvious benefit.

Instead of taking about 'what if you could have this tech that does ABC' - instead, talk about it in terms of problems 'what if you didn't have this problem or that one'. etc..

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#55

Post by gowld »

cassianoleal wrote: post #50
hu3 wrote: post #30

They are open source too: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale edit: Only the client is open source. See clarification below.

The clients are. The control server, which is the bit that Tailscale host, is not. There is an open source alternative called headscale [0]. The main downside is that you'll need to run it. The closed source centralised control server has other potential issues though, and it ends up being up to the user to decide what's the right balance of security vs convenience. [0] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

To be clear, headscale is an alternative to the control server, compatible with Tailscale clients.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#56

Post by jonfw »

lajamerr wrote: post #36

I remember reading a previous HN post about Tailscale and a certain commenter said that Tailscale is ideologically driven, small-scale operation and they prefer an alternative like NetMaker which has more backing. $100M seems more than a small-scale operation or is $100M in tech actually small scale?

Tailscale has been much larger than Netmaker for as long as Netmaker has existed

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#57

Post by legalcorrection »

yrro wrote: post #39
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…

Tailscale is one of the ways you can restore the end-to-end connectivity principle that IP introduced and that NAT destroyed.

This is kind of overstated. Even if everyone went IPv6 and gave every device a public IP address, pretty much every network would have a firewall that behaved just like NAT.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#58

Post by moloch »

throwaway92394 wrote: post #26

Am I the only one that has an issue with a VPN that I can't self host? Presumably if Tailscale get's PWN'd or subpoenaed then your network is breached no?

No, they don't have access to the Wireguard keys and everything is point-to-point. They'd have to push a backdoored software update to gain access (and this is a threat with any vendor product).

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#59

Post by chrisweekly »

newhouseb wrote: post #7

Tailscale is my favorite (product) discovery of 2022. I initially set it up to use as a VPN to get around a misbehaving corporate firewall and accidentally realized it solved a whole bunch of other problems I didn't realize I had. Usually a new product doesn't even live up to the intended use case and so TS is really anomalous IMHO in how good it is. - SSH'ing into a raspberry pi I have at home that does random IoT s…

Similar experience. It's profoundly good UX atop a fundamentally strong stack.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#60

Post by bfm »

throwaway92394 wrote: post #26

Am I the only one that has an issue with a VPN that I can't self host? Presumably if Tailscale get's PWN'd or subpoenaed then your network is breached no?

A self hosted alternative we've been using for our infrastructure is innernet, which was discussed on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628285 last year
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