Tailscale raises $100M

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, authentication etc etc

Neat! No sure how that is 'fixing internet' exactly, but really cool anyway

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.

If you use an identity provider like Okta or OneLogin, then you're not tied to any "contentful" services like GitHub or a Google account that "historically" seem to have more problems of this type.

As far as threat models go, I can't really say I understand this one too much.

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 them do so.

Just because a service you sign up for is not contentful, does not mean that they won't choose to boot you off for some reason completely unrelated to anything you control or anything you chose to do.