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The New Internet

(tailscale.com)
517 points ingve | 3 comments | 26 Jul 24 18:29 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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teddyh ◴[27 Jul 24 03:19 UTC] 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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hnarn ◴[27 Jul 24 10:56 UTC] No.41085716[source]▶
This sounds like a reasonable point, but the more I think about it, the more it sounds like digital flagellation.

IPv6 was released in 1998. It had been 21 (!) years since the release of IPv6 and still what you're describing had not been implemented when Tailscale was released in 2019. Who was stopping anyone from doing it then, and who is stopping anyone from doing it now?

It's easy to paint companies as bad actors, especially since they often are, but Google, Cloudflare and Tailscale all became what they are for a reason: they solved a real problem, so people gave them money, or whatever is money-equivalent, like personal data.

If your argument is inverted, it's a kind of inverse accelerationism (decelerationism?) whereby only in making the Internet worse for everyone, the really good solutions can see the light. I don't buy it.

Tailscale is not the reason we're not seeing what you're describing, the immense work involved in creating it is why, and it's only when that immense amount of work becomes slightly less immense that any solution at all emerges. Tailscale for example would probably not exist if they had to invent Wireguard, and the fact that Tailscale now exists has led to Headscale existing, creating yet another springboard in a line of springboards to create "something" like what you describe -- for those willing to put in the time.

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throw0101d ◴[27 Jul 24 11:25 UTC] No.41085838[source]▶
> Who was stopping anyone from doing it then, and who is stopping anyone from doing it now?

The folks who either (a) got in early on the IPv4 address land rush (especially the Western developed countries), or (b) with buckets of money who buy addresses.

If you're India, there probably weren't enough IPv4 address in the first place to handle your population, so you're doing IPv6:

* https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

Or even if you're in the West, if you're poor (a community Native American ISP):

> We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from ROKU devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale(POS) equipment. So we cut ROKU some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices.

* https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s...

* Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624

IPv4 'wasn't a problem' because the megacorps who generally run things where I'm guessing you're from (the West) were able to solve it in other means… until they can't. T-Mobile US has 120M and a few years ago it turns out that money couldn't solve IPv4-only anymore so they went to IPv6:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGbxCKAqNUE

IPv6 is not taking off because IPv4 (and NAT/STUN/TURN) is 'better', but rather because (a) inertial, and (b) it 'works' (with enough kludges thrown at it).

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api ◴[27 Jul 24 13:32 UTC] No.41086487[source]▶
There is another reason: the addresses are long and impossible to remember and hard to type.

I always bring this up and it’s always dismissed because tech people continue to dismiss usability concerns.

Even “small” usability differences can have a huge effect on adoption.

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1. gorgoiler ◴[28 Jul 24 10:10 UTC] No.41092279{3}[source]▶
In practice I haven’t ever had a problem memorising IPv6 addresses. The significant proportions of any address you might type manually are 48 bits long at one end and a few bits at the other.

An example IPv4 address is 8 to 12 digits:

  10.30.115.5
A memorable IPv6 address at a /56 site — the prefix and then one or two digits — isn’t much longer:

  2001:db8:404:14::42
If you’re with a reasonably clued in ISP you probably get a /48 for your site by default:

  2001:db8:404::42
If you’re enumerating your own /64 prefixes then it’s not much more complicated than:

  site 2001:db8:404::
  net              :14::
  host                ::42
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2. RulerOf ◴[29 Jul 24 02:56 UTC] No.41097625[source]▶
>the prefix and then one or two digits — isn’t much longer

I'd argue it's just enough to make the difference though.

The problem is that people got used to being able to rely on memorizing IP addresses. IPv6 does its best at making IP addresses both harder to memorize, and completely dynamic, going so far as to change the IP on a fairly regular basis. It's antithetical to some very core qualities that an IP address is supposed to have in the minds of many.

3. tempcommenttt ◴[29 Jul 24 04:52 UTC] No.41097978[source]▶
This is the first time I read about someone actually trying to remember IP6 addresses, maybe I should try that, because it’s really easy to remember IP4. For me, the problem is that there’s hex numbers, which are harder to remember and missing zeros, so you need remember the colons. If IP6 would just be 6 decimal numbers and this would be the default way of writing them, this would not be a problem. But it feels to me that the cryptic way IP6 is written is to make it hard for humans to remember it.