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The New Internet

(tailscale.com)
517 points ingve | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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teddyh ◴[] No.41084227[source]
The eternal problem with companies like Tailscale (and Cloudflare, Google, etc. etc.) is that, by solving a problem with the modern internet which the internet should have been designed to solve by itself, like simple end-to-end secure connectivity, Tailscale becomes incentivized to keep the problem. What the internet would need is something like IPv6 with automatic encryption via IPsec, with PKI provided by DNSSEC. But Tailscale has every incentive to prevent such things to be widely and compatibly implemented, because it would destroy their business. Their whole business depends on the problem persisting.

(Repost of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38570370>)

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ZhongXina ◴[] No.41086195[source]
No, we definitely don't want "automatic IPSec" (especially IPSec!), or really any enforced encryption at the network level, even if it's something sane at this moment like WireGuard. Look at old VPN protocols or authentication schemes like RADIUS which have glaring security holes and are impossible to fix because of compatibility issues, and they're running at much smaller scales than the whole internet. Hell, the way the industry is solving TCP ossification problems is by throwing TCP away and reimplementing it on top of UDP, that should tell us something.
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teddyh ◴[] No.41086520[source]
Your argument seems to be to never implement anything, because eventually it will become old and it will be hard to move away from it? This seems to be an argument against anything new, and it is therefore hard to take seriously.
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1. zbentley ◴[] No.41090041[source]
Not GP, but I interpreted it as an argument to innovate/proliferate implementations early and often, but to standardize minimally and as late as possible.