Tailcat

I enjoy that they supply a nix install/environment, similar to the main tailscale/tailscale repo. Is nix widespread or the standard dev environment at tailscale, or is it like a 10% option and most people just use Docker or whatever?

So this is somewhat similar to Iroh?

https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh

This is smart. It's Magic Wormhole but for generalized connectivity, not just file transfer.

It looks like a direct competitor for the recently launched bitbang-cli

https://github.com/richlegrand/bitbang-cli

Wush was already doing something similar (using tailscale under the hood)

https://github.com/coder/wush

Looks like a Wireguard stunnel replacement, which is very useful!

Interesting. I thought about doing this immediately after reading their old blog[1] post on punching through NAT some time ago. Just a combo of never getting around to it and friends talking me out of it b/c of existing alternatives such as wormhole[2].

[1] https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works [2] https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

What's the risk of malware using this for C&C or otherwise? Hackers love communication channels that are difficult to take down individually.

I did the homemade version of this for years just with SSH forwarding and nginx reverse proxy

A bit off topic: it’s just insane how I used to watch this guy’s http2 in Go yt video 10 years ago, and he’s still very relevant to this day! Cheers Brad!

i like that it removes tailscale proprietary.

if that is goal then why not go 100% open source to eliminate the ts derp control as well and get full sovereignty?

like netbird, openziti, zerotier, etc.

>"like netcat, but over Tailscale's data plane"

Half of the Software offering nowadays seems to be selling vendor lock-in at no added value and then making a profit.

Sure there's always some negligible added value, and then they reinvent a whole stack for their ecosystem. In the case of tailscale the added value seems to be avoiding going into your router and activating port forwarding? It looks like negative added value to me. Someone that tells you "don't do NAT traversal, just open a port" would be highly valuable, but saying no doesn't seem to be trendy, and is certainly not an easy sell.