The New Internet

An incredibly long ramp up to complaining about centralised control by rent seekers (a very reasonable complaint!) which gets bogged down in some ostensibly unrelated shade about whether client-server computing makes sense (it does) or is itself somehow responsible for the rent seeking (it isn't; you can seek rent on proprietary peer to peer systems as well!) to then arrive at:

> There’s going to be a new world of haves and have-nots. Where in 1970 you had or didn’t have a mainframe, and in 1995 you had or didn’t have the Internet, and today you have or don’t have a TLS cert, tomorrow you’ll have or not have Tailscale. And if you don’t, you won’t be able to run apps that only work in a post-Tailscale world.

The king is dead, long live the king!

Rent seekers are bad! Don't you all hate landlords?! Now let me tell you why you should pay rent to me as well as everyone you currently pay rent to!

Lol. The tailscale CEO is preaching “tomorrow you’ll have or not have Tailscale. And if you don’t, you won’t be able to run apps that only work in a post-Tailscale world.”??

That won’t go down well in 10 years if they don’t become Microsoft-scale juggernauts.

Or they'll just get bought by Microsoft, Amazon, or Cloudflare and that'll be that

I like Tailscale just because it's OpenVPN without the unbearable agony of setting it up so it actually works

"...you can rent seek on proprietary peer to peer systems as well..."

I still use a non-proprietary one that predates Tailscale and that is not OpenVPN. It is small and simple enough even I, a non-programmer, can make modifications.

It's possible one ends up using client-server in order to achieve peer-to-peer because not everyone has an internet-reachable, non-firewalled IP address. Using some hosting company's server to run a "supernode" may be required. No traffic needs to pass through it if it is used only as a "rendezvous server" so the cost can be minimal.

Companies that try to compete with "free" always draw high scrutiny from me. Stop using that free software and start paying us. We added 100 unnecessary "features".

Not doubting this "corporate strategy" can succeed, at least short-term. Look at Slack. But these subscriptions are not for me.

Client-server versus peer-to-peer is misdirection. The real issue is proprietary versus non-proprietary. IMHO.

What is the non-proprietary option you are referring to?

Yeah it's a weird flex. I'd use Tailscale today if it was open all the way up and down.

If not, why bother? TLS and http don't charge licensing fees...

Tinc[1]?

[1]: https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc

Not sure if parent means wireguard, but my GitHub page has a way to get around cgnat using wireguard for use with a Nintendo switch (or any wifi/etc device that doesn't run an editable OS)

tinc-vpn is great. I use it to build L2 mesh islands and then quagga to route between those.

Wireguard is L3 not L2.

re: GP comment. It really does not matter which non-properietary solution one chooses. It is personal preference. I know what I like but others might not like it. There are many options to choose from. And (I hope) there will continue to be more.

You can use tailscale without using tailscale hosted components, using purely open source parts.

I have switched where possible, both my own networks and clients, to use headscale which is folly open source coordination server compatible with tailscale.

True, but you can make a L2 mesh network with a bunch of WG endpoints with tools built into the linux networking stack easily:

https://gitlab.com/NickCao/RAIT

https://github.com/m13253/VxWireguard-Generator

"An incredibly long ramp up ..."

Agreed. We would all do well to learn about, and begin implementing, "Iceberg Articles":

https://john.kozubik.com/pub/IcebergArticle/tip.html

Hopefully referring to the (excellent) sshuttle:

https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle

... which allows you to turn any system you have an ssh login on into a VPN endpoint.

Wasn't sshuttle created by the now CEO of Tailscale?

Honestly, I kind of missed Hamachi in the last decades.

It was such a superb and easy to use tool to design/configure your own private networks at the time. Filesharing, local game LANs, development cooperation, heck, even media streaming was so easily done at the time.

Personally I think that the future of peer to peer isn't tailscale, it's more someting along the lines of a selfhosted hamachi variant that's able to put generically nodes together from all across different NATs and ASNs, generically understanding NAT breaking techniques and STUN/TURN/turtle routing.

A tool like this that could also allow remote users to chime in without a centralized VPN gateway would be a killer feature for the modern world.

That sounds a lot like Headscale.

Yes, I think so - original project is at:

https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

... and I had not made that connection before ...

The issue I have with tailscale/headscale is that its focus isn't being an end user app that people can start on demand.

Hamachi was different because a child could use it (literally). It was designed like an instant messenger, and you could easily create groups and invite friends for a LAN party. No IP masks, no hashes, none of that complicated stuff was necessary.

I'd only see maybe a tool that was built on top of headscale that could do that, but headscale's focus is too far off for something like that, and in my opinion too low level.

This feels like an overly-complex treatment of the Inverted Pyramid in journalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism), or Bottom Line; Up Front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication).

Start with the important statements, then expand. Doesn't have to be the "Tell you what I'm telling you, tell you, tell you what I told you" format that many (American) students were taught, but starting with your thesis statement does help ground it.

On the other hand, the topic blog is somewhat of a story, and I can hear the presentation being given behind it. It's just translated 1:1 to a blog, which is a different medium.

BLUF is bad, it's precisely a technique borne in the the world of newspaper publishing for writing catchy articles (what is now called clickbait). Classical philosophical writing is the exact opposite: start with some problems, elaborate in high detail and finish with a conclusion (the name says it all).

Clickbait is BLUF with a deceptive bottom line (BL). Clickbait is bad. You can choose to write in BLUF style without that.

In my experience, I only prefer "Classical philosophical writing" when I'm already convinced of reading the content (e.g. know the author, interested by the subject).

In almost all other cases, I prefer BLUF format: i.e. "get to the point, I'll read more if I'm intrigued".