The New Internet

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>)

I never thought of this. Forces me to rethink every negative post people made against DNSSEC which shaped my opinion. I still think that IPv6 and DNSSEC do more harm in practice than what they solve. Maybe the SCW podcast can do a deepdive on this together with somebody who is militantly-pro DNSSEC. <3 ...

edit: maybe even invite 2 or 3 DNSSEC advocates @tptacek :)

I may be in favour of DNSSEC, but I admit that it's time for a v2 of the RFC that removes the stupid "encryption can't be done at the endpoint" restriction. In practice you can just turn on validation on many computers and gain its benefits, especially if used in the manner as described here where you can just block connections to unprotected hostnames to work around the most glaring issue, but the whole spec is written for a world we've moved beyond.

IPv6 doesn't have that problem, though.