Tailscale is a company that provides a VPN (“Virtual Private Network”) service. If you don’t find yourself thinking “man, I really wish this one computer over here could share the same network with that computer over there, despite not being on the same WiFi access point or physical Ethernet network”, then their service (and the news regarding it) aren’t for you.
Why would someone want a VPN? There are a bunch, but here are some examples:
1) You want to connect to one of your machines at home while you’re at a coffee shop, or on vacation. Maybe so you can check security cameras, I dunno.
2) You’re on vacation outside of your home country, and you would like to watch a video stream that is blocked in the country you’re vacationing in. I experienced this in the Bahamas — If I recall, I was wanting to watch a UFC fight, but the UFC app refused to stream to the Bahamas (it was this and/or other Disney/Hulu whatever services refusing to play in the Bahamas). By routing traffic through your ISP back home: problem solved. (This what “exit node” is referring to — a computer through which internet traffic flows on your behalf)
3) You want to play a game with a friend that only supports multiplayer play on the same network, but your friend isn’t physically there with you in the same house. So just put the two of you on the same virtual network and now you can play together.
I bet they run a useful service. But their post doesn’t really speak well to people who don’t already use the service, because it doesn’t define the used names (e.g. it’s only implied that the service is a VPN, why not just say it up front). That’s why I think it’s not a great press release.
Their homepage literally says it is a “Zero-config Business VPN”. Not “implied” — directly stated.
> That’s why I think it’s not a great press release.
Press release? This a blog. It should be self evident that this is for customers and other already interested parties.
When you visit friends and family, do you regularly reintroduce yourself? I’m going to guess you probably don’t. If someone did that, it would both be weird and wasteful of everyone’s time.
Blogs work similarly. The majority of traffic is expected to be people already following you, in which case reiterating who you are, what you do, etc, would all be a waste of everyone’s time — with the minor exception of the occasional person that stumbles upon your blog for the first time. Even then, such individuals usually end up on an unfamiliar blog because they are explicitly searching for something topically relevant, and thus are already familiar with what is being described.
It’s kind of bizarre, IMO, to arbitrarily follow links from a link aggregator (Hacker News, in this case), with no prior knowledge of the related topic, skim through a blog on said unfamiliar topic, and then complain that the author didn’t spell out what 99% of their readership already knows. Like… why? If you like exploring things you don’t know, why not check out their homepage? You already clicked one link without knowing what you were getting into, what’s one more click to go to the very page that describes what they do? Or if you don’t like discovering new things, what compelled you to click a link, when the link text was completely foreign to you?
Car maintenance books don’t describe the usefulness of cars.
Calculus books don’t assume you have zero familiarity with numbers and counting.
Recipe books don’t remind you that, as a human being, you need food to survive.
The Netflix tech blog doesn’t tell you what Netflix is, describe “streaming” in the abstract, nor explain what movies are and why people watch them.
How little familiarity would you recommend that Tailscale expect from the reader of their blogs? Should plumbers be able to understand what’s being talked about? If they should tell you that they are a VPN service, should they also describe what a computer network is, what you can do with a network, and why they’re useful? Do they need to describe what a computer is?
but why is this better than running a vpn client on your pc? For example,when I want to watch streams restricted in my country, I fire up the ExpressVPN client on my laptop, connect to Switzerland, and then my restrictions disappear. Why should get another piece of hardware, wires and complexity (what happens when this box doesnt connect to the internet but it has no keyboard,, display or mouse to guide troubleshooting?)
Because Tailscale is a [1] direct connection. No middleman service with access to your traffic.
[1] In some cases this is not possible and there are relays setup to help route traffic.
What's in the traffic is opaque to these nodes. You can also choose to use your own nodes.
If you are interested here is a great post on how this works: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/
Most streaming services block commercial VPNs and even data center IP ranges at this point.
Some VPN vendors bypass that by reselling access to residential IPs (witting or unwitting on the side of the person paying for the ISP service), but even that is hit and miss.
> Why should get another piece of hardware
Many people already have an Apple TV or Android TV streaming box.
The GL.iNet routers have a mobile and desktop config site and buttons to configure/reset the device as well as a two-position hardware switch, the function of which is configurable also. This is not to mention they can run OpenWRT/LEDE and there are vendor created “clean” firmware images to do so. They’re one of the best devices for this use case and price point. I don’t think the situation you’re worried about is a reasonable concern for someone already expected to be competent to manage the router generally to begin with, and if they also want to do the things Tailcale does, they can and should be able to troubleshoot the problem space. The stock firmware is a modified OpenWRT with a web GUI and some optional extras, but it’s the most functional consumer router I’ve used.
thank you for your replies but I think my density is getting the better of me.When ii want to pretend I am in Switzerland, my vpn client connects to an exit node there through an encrypted tunnel between my machine and the vpn service's exit node. If I have an Apple TV in my home running tail scale, how can I make it talk to the internet through an exit node in Switzerland ? My understanding is that I cannot. If I run tail scale on my Apple TV and then travel to Switzerland , can I connect to my Apple TV and watch shows in Switzerland from it? But how can I get through my home firewall / NATted router to my Apple TV? is there a tail scale client that I run on my laptop that finds my Apple TV running tail scale?
Tailscale recently announced an integration with Mullvad [1] that is probably what you're looking for: Mullvad's VPN servers act as Tailscale exit nodes, and they have servers in countries around the world. This lets any of your existing Tailscale nodes route traffic through Mullvad.
