If Videogames and Apps Are Addictive, Should Designers Worry about Liability? - <AUTHOR> https://www.socialgameslaw.com/2018/07/videogames-apps-legal-liability.html <comment><USER3> All things that feel good and releases dopamine ≠ equally addictive.

Video games have reached levels of immersion higher than other forms of entertainment, add real $ loot boxes to that and it's clear publishers should worry about this, smart ones already are - Valve tracks Anti_Addiction_Rating for users to notify/suggest they play within healthy limits: [https://www.pcgamesn.com/dota-2/dota-2-anti- addiction](https://www.pcgamesn.com/dota-2/dota-2-anti-addiction).

<comment><USER4> I think the strange thing that's happened with video games is that it used to be that you felt good because you were having fun. In this new era of micro transactions the games aren't even fun anymore. There is only frustration, and then you pay to alivieate that frustration. You sometimes find yourself sitting there say, "why am I even doing this?"

I genuinely miss gaming. When I try to get back into mainstream titles these days I evtually hit some roadblock mechanic designed to extract dollars and I'm just like, "This shit again?" and bail on the game.

Some developers do it right. Most don't. There are so many games or experiences that I just don't think will ever exist again. I don't know that there will ever be another Ultima Online or EverQuest, or another tactical shooter like Rainbow Six or America's Army that isn't pay to win. Or that we'll ever see another decent RTS ever. It sucks.

<comment><USER5> > In this new era of micro transactions the games aren't even fun anymore. > There is only frustration, and then you pay to alivieate that frustration. > You sometimes find yourself sitting there say, "why am I even doing this?"

This is one reason I've stopped playing most games that have any kind of online or multiplayer element. Ones that either have a really strong single player mode or don't engage in these kinds of tactics (see civilization games) have been the ones that I end up enjoying long term.

I've found that I end up preferring indie titles not for any philosophical reason, but because many of them don't have the teams needed to create these kinds of mechanisms (successfully anyway). Mobile platforms make it significantly easier to you see it there a lot more too.

<comment><USER6> >"This is one reason I've stopped playing most games that have any kind of online or multiplayer element. Ones that either have a really strong single player mode or don't engage in these kinds of tactics (see civilization games) have been the ones that I end up enjoying long term."

I've found that Darkest Dungeon is the game I just keep coming back to. No multiplayer, no micro transactions, just you against the game. And I also really like the dark fantasy setting and art style.

Plus it runs great on my X220i, which is nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anything that gives you positive feedback can be addictive.

People get addicted to exercising to the point it can harm them. Yet Nike shouldn't be liable if someone runs themselves into the ground.

<comment><USER8> If nike knowingly sold products they engineered to drive running addiction then yes they would be liable.

<comment><USER9> Imagine if an organization recruited children to running-centric lifestyles to the point that it consumed their afternoons and weekends, dominated their social lives, threatened their academic performance, and routinely imparted injuries requiring long-term care by an associated cottage medical industry. I bet they'd be sued into the ground.

Oh wait. That's every high school athletics program.

<comment><USER10> Imagine if a majority of children actually participated in these athletic programs. Committed to physical fitness, had social lives with teammates and didn't have health problems because they were over weight.

Oh wait. Basically every first world country has an obesity epidemic.

<comment><USER11> Anecdote, but a lot of the kids that did sports all through my high school stopped playing when they went to college and gained weight from what I guess was based on their passed eating habits with high activity. However, the ones who didn't do sports all through high school mostly lost weight.

I'm not sure what the overall implications are of school athletic programs but I definitely don't think it is as black and white as you make it out to be.

<comment><USER12> In my opinion school gym/sport classes can be very good at completely sucking the living joy out of exercise.

Athleticism and sports should not be forced on kids. Let them run freely.

Eg. Just look at all the "free" street sports such skateboarding, rollerblading, bmx, parkour and so on. It doesn't have to be dull, boring and super formalized.

<comment><USER13> Most kids don't do them. Most kids don't do them regularly even if they have a chance and do them freely.

There are classes and trainers for parkour and bmx. Free parkour is quite often done by people who did gymnastics or similar sport as kids.

Looking around me, there are many kids who enjoy formalized sport clubs they go to. It is not for everyone, but the idea that most find them dull is wrong.

<comment><USER12> Sure, I didn't mean that anything is intrinsically dull.

In my experience, clubs outside schools are much better because the kids actually want to be there.

However they often push some competitive agenda to the kids, especially when they become teenagers.

Many quit at that point because they don't have the time or motivation for it, and there very few clubs that only do "fun amateur league" at that age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So I have an honest naive question. Simply put, why are people playing Pay to Win games to begin with?

I genuinely don't understand where the dopamine release is? That's what keeps people coming back, right? And is the dopamine release for some reason stronger than non-Pay to Win? Because if it's not stronger, why do they play that rather than a flat cost game? Sunk costs? Trying to keep up with friends?

I game a ton, but have never given such a game more than a couple hours, and far more rarely money because I simply wasn't having fun...

I'm not being judgmental, I'm trying to understand because I don't. I'm assuredly the weird one.

<comment><USER13> Cause they are fun, at least initially, and cheap (free). You don't care about pay to win thing unless you are far in ladder and most people know they wont be among top anyway. I suspect that most people mind pay to win aspect much much less then noise about it would suggest.

Flat cost games have to be paid before trying which means that you cant just pick them up out of curiosity.

Unless you have a lot of friends to show you, it is hard to find flat cost game for you. Here I am projecting, I used to like games and they either ceased to make them for me or I was not able to find them for some reason. I was able to find pay to win I like and suit my lifestyle, after I finally actually tried them without bias (I was initially strongly biased toward the "mobile games must be shit" and "it is all pay to win crap" so I resisted long).

<comment><USER15> > You don't care about pay to win thing unless you are far in ladder

IME, P2W generally substantially effects gameplay and UX everywhere, because a P2W game is invariably designed to stress you into paying. Now, there's a big variability in the degree of impact this has, but it's pretty consistent with the degree to which a game is P2W, not orthogonal to it.

> Flat cost games have to be paid before trying

Limited scope playable demo/intro (including multiplayer) with pay-for-full- scope upgrade (or pay per feature which isn't P2W) have been around longer than P2W model, and F2P with pay-for-cosmetics is also a model which lots of games have succeeded with. The alternative to P2W isn't just flat cost games.

<comment><USER13> I never found them stressful. I don't even know which aspect is supposed to be stressful. The ones I played a lot were literally catered to people who cant or wont commit hours long stretches of time. I know about one stressful mobile game, but that was not pay to win and was not successful.

Limited scope playable demo/intro were pretty much non-existent for years. Creators argued that demo lowers sales. Which is possible, but I stopped playing games entirely, because too many turned out not what I expected and very disappointing after I bought.

I never understood paying for cosmetics, honestly. I would pay to support creator, but it is not something I ever cared about and perceive as waste of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Today, no.

Once health insurance companies start paying for video game addiction treatment, yes.

<comment><USER17> Porn addiction is a thing but I haven't heard of smut producers being successfully sued for enabling it.

<comment><USER18> There might be a difference that's worth noting. There are game designs that are clearly engineered to create either outright addiction, or at the very least, cravings. Porn, at least superficially, doesn't seem to attempt to engineer addiction in a similar way, maybe because they don't need to?

While the end result might be the same, there seems to be a much clearer intent to create addiction in some parts of the game industry, especially where gaming and gambling meet.

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure that distinction is as clear as you're describing it. Pretty much anything that creates positive feedback has the potential to create addictive behaviors, and (most) porn certainly isn't going for a realistic depiction of a healthy sex life. The design of porn sites, like most content websites, are oriented around continued usage. Trying to get people to use your product more doesn't seem technically distinguishable to me from "engineering to create addiction", and it's not clear to me what you think makes the two examples you describe distinct from each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand what makes people disdain freedom so much that they'll deem this sort of state overreach as reasonable.

Holding Tobacco producers liable is paternalist & wrong, this is almost totalitarian.

<comment><USER21> I haven't heard a good defense of tobacco producers. For decades they suppressed evidence that their product caused lung cancer, which seems a rather bad thing to do. Even ultra-libertarians seem to agree that dangerous products should be labeled as to how dangerous they are, so that consumers can make an informed decision.

Can you summarize or link to an argument that tobacco producers did nothing wrong?

<comment><USER6> I don't think the solution is to ban tobacco/sugar/alcohol/weed/opioids/new- drug-of-the-day, and I honestly think they should all be legal.

The plain packaging law instituted in Australia and other places is a good way to do it. Plainly state what product is inside the pack and the dangers it presents. No "hip" and enticing designs to lure the impressionable, but let people make an informed choice for themselves.

<comment><USER22> What would the average pay-to-win game look like without the hip packaging? Basically just a collection of buttons to click with cooldowns before you can click the button again and a way to pay to click it sooner?

<comment><USER6> Something like that, yeah. (I know you're being sarcastic)

I'm not sure I buy the idea that pay-to-win games are anywhere near as addictive as tobacco or alcohol or opioids or similar substances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't see much discussion of the actual contents of the article on this thread, but in case anyone else read it, this passage stuck out to me:

> Gambling is a highly regulated industry. For example, in Indiana, regulatory > agencies have set up voluntary exclusion programs whereby "any person may > make a request to have his or her name placed on a voluntary exclusion > list," and casinos "must have procedures by which excluded individuals are > not allowed to gamble." Courts in Indiana and other states agree where such > exclusionary programs are in place, casinos are only obliged to exclude > compulsive gamblers who self-identify through the programs. Casinos are not > obliged to "refuse service to pathological gamblers who [do] not self- > identify."

I generally fall pretty heavily on the "let people make their own choices" side of the spectrum[1], but I'm always open to the argument that the individual isn't the most effective lever with which to minimize harm. The above is the kind of regulatory step that seems like it could do a lot of good while avoiding a lot of the pitfalls of the approaches on both extremes.

There are some important finicky details though: how is removal from the list handled, if allowed at all? Who bears the liability if the exclusion list is violated, the provider or the user (in the form of criminal penalties, as with voluntary gambling exclusion in some states)? If the latter, is this likely to be run into the same pitfalls as criminalizing drug addiction? In the case of videogames, is it a reasonable burden to make the user provide ID (privacy implications and all), and if not, how do you prevent them from setting up a new email address to circumvent their voluntary exclusion?

This is just one of the potential solutions, which IMO illustrates that there's a lot more nuance to the discussion than many here are approaching it with, and a lot more potential for out-of-the-box solutions, instead of simply having to resort to pitting the values of personal responsibility and paternalism directly against each other.

[1] For example, responsible use of certain illegal or formerly-illegal drugs is as much (or more) an enriching part of my life as the regular consumption of the legal drug known as alcohol is for most people. Thank god I live somewhere that's civilized enough to avoid a heavily-enforced punitive approach to drug use and generally fosters a treatment-oriented approach to addictions.

<comment><USER23> I think the best case for not having another law/regulation is the future.

If we regulate this today, what will this country look like in 200 years?

Will we have regulations on water consumption, posture, etc...

With every regulation you need regulators to enforce it and people to write the laws.

Now you created cronyism to pay for it... When there is profit, profit feeds itself.

<comment><USER24> Isn't that pretty much a textbook case of the slippery slope fallacy? Just because we want to regulate something harmful, does not mean we will regulate EVERYTHING harmful

Your logic seems flawed

<comment><USER23> Look at how roman politics evolved.

The use of violence to kill one political opponent spiraled into private militaries taking over the city.

I think you either misunderstood slippery slope or my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was an alcoholic for over a decade before I found my recovery.

But I couldn't turn around and tell a distilleryman that he has to brew his liquor a certain way.

Maybe the world would be a better place without booze. I would've had an easier childhood, maybe. I don't think addiction is necessarily the fault of production.

There are certain exceptions and scenarios, like cigarette marketing to minors, marketing in lower income neighborhoods on purpose, stuff like that.

Regulation is and always will be a very slippery slope. Even a small step down the slope can eventually compose into cataclysmic effects. It also makes it easier for regulatory bodies to make their case fallaciously once the first steps are taken. "You trust us with your credit card number, why not give us your location info now?"

I'm rambling, but the video game industry could be irrevocably injured by trying to regulate addictive content. Maybe that's not a bad thing, but we should aim for fairness when possible, I think.

Maybe awareness for individuals that are already more vulnerable to addictive behaviors? Like a surgeon general warning or something.

<comment><USER26> Alcohol poisons the body, so there are natural limits to how much one can drink. How much one can game is limited by how well one's meeting their own needs, eg. food, water, sleep, connection, etc.

Point being alcohol probably can't be designed to be more addictive, while games can.

As a recovering information addict & software developer who has studied dark designs, I can confirm people are intentionally making things with the intention of creating addicted customers. Information and gaming of various types is also freely available at most libraries, not to mention on all smartphones.

Information & games are way more ubiquitously available than alcohol. They're not comparable & recovery for behavior addictions that don't contribute to social skills the way substance addictions often do can be a bit more complex. Substance addicts usually learn to navigate society well; behavioral addicts typically don't. Social connection is really important for recovery & requires skills the addict may need to develop. I know I had to do LOADS of work on connecting, as well as developing my emotional intelligence, since I started addictively avoiding my emotions around age 9.

People designing things to be addictive are absolutely liable to some degree.

<comment><USER25> So I've heard of dark patterns before, but wouldn't it be a logistic nightmare to try and describe, and therefore regulate, design patterns that dont actively injure users? I'm using injure to mean induction of the addictive behaviors. Design is something I'd consider very subtle, and with lots of moving parts.

Here's an example. What if Google decided that when you pull down for notifications on android, items originating from DoubleClick should be prioritized to the top, regardless of user settings? A lot of people who have apps that generate advert-ifications wouldn't immediately notice the difference but the effect would begin to work in their brains as that consumption impulse is triggered more and more often.

Or what if they decided that same thing for the lock screen notifications? Eventually you're fending off consumption impulses everytime you touch your phone.

These are patterns I trust independent users, like bloggers and columnists, enthusiasts, those sorts, to keep me informed about. I remember hearing about the search engine nuking years ago when it actually was committed. That sort of media is in my eyes, a decent way to inform people that they need to mentally condition themselves to subvert the patterns.

But many never become aware of these things, and of course those are the people usually more vulnerable to the effects of psychological conditioning in the first place.

I'd love to hear some moonshots about how to safely and fairly try and regulate something like design.

<comment><USER27> Pulling down for notifications is a form of addictive behavior in itself, much like pulling the arm on a slot machine. You might get nothing, you often get something boring, you rarely get something great. Perversely, they can taper off how often it pays off which makes it more addictive (deep instincts tell us to keep trying when we know the odds are bad), which is a pattern that's easily observed in a lot of games.

Sorting ads to the top is, as far as I know, not a mechanism for increasing addiction so much as a way to try to monetize it. It's more likely to run into anti-trust regulations than public health concerns in my opinion.

But as to regulation, it's likely to run behind the technology but it's not hard to document dark patterns and write laws against them, just like bait- and-switch and various con jobs that were well known before the Internet age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Of course.

People can get addicted to anything. But when a company makes a product that they know is not only addictive but harmful. When they go out of their way to make the product more addictive without any regard for the harm being done. When they go out of their way to specifically target those who are the most addicted. Well, then you run into some very clear-cut ethics problems.

And that's the state we are in right now with a sizeable number of games. Certainly far from all, but those who are right now being the most exploitative are probably going to face a lot of scrutiny in the next several years.

<comment><USER29> I agree. This entire industry needs to take a good, long look in the mirror and ask ourselves whether the ends justify the means.

Now, I'm not saying it's a clear-cut issue. There's a lot of murky grey area in the land of "what is entertainment?" versus "what is addiction?" And I think culpability on a moral level - though perhaps by necessity not a legal level - will ultimately end up being determined by the product's _intent_.

If you ever want to bum yourself out, go down the road of asking yourself why you _really_ find the things you do for entertainment entertaining. I don't know if it would be for everyone, but it was certainly sobering for me. As a species, we like to think that we have many of the answers about how our brain works and what certain things that _feel_ intuitive mean - things like "entertainment." But I think we're actually a long way off from truly understanding these concepts.

<comment><USER30> There's a big difference between producing something that's addictive by accident vs. engineering the addiction.

Even in the former situation, it's reasonable to ask researchers to detect and flag accidentally addictive mechanics.

<comment><USER29> Yes, exactly - I totally agree. That's why we both need to have an introspective moment in our industry - where we think about what the things we're making are _really_ doing - and why intent is so important when talking about this issue. I genuinely do believe that a lot of companies have - <USER2> lack of a better term - stumbled into addiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's too bad our society has moved away from the person who chose to do something bad being liable, towards blaming people around them:

1\. bartenders are at fault for the drunken actions performed by people who bought the booze

2\. Seattle just passed an ordinance where gun owners are liable for gun crimes committed by people who steal those guns

3\. Employers are liable for crimes committed by employees

4\. Homeowners are liable if people do stupid things and hurt themselves on the homeowner's property

5\. Drug makers are liable for drug users' actions

etc.

<comment><USER32> Some amount of liability, though not completely liability makes sense for all these things though.

1\. Its reasonable for the public and police to expect you to regulate and secure your establishment and keep it from having a negative impact on the community.

2\. Weapons are very dangerous and not everyone is licensed to distribute them. Its fair of society to expect you to take reasonable measures to keep them secure.

3\. They are liable if its found that leadership haven't taken reasonable measures to make sure employees don't do bad things. You cant benefit from a company's output just to turn a blind eye to what might be illegal activity.

4\. If your property isn't reasonably safe, you shouldn't be inviting people onto it, its not fair on those people might be injured, who don't know what to look out for.

5\. Your saying Big Pharma has nothing to answer for the opium crisis in in the US right now? A requirement for responsible marketing and prescription of harmful and addictive substances makes complete sense.

<comment><USER31> Your post pretty much exemplifies what I was talking about. It's the notion that if an adult decides to pull the trigger on the gun he stole, it is someone else's fault.

Consider 1. This an overreaching and hopelessly vague statement. It could be interpreted to mean pretty much anything.

Consider 2. I bet your home is full of dangerous things. Have you taken steps to secure them all?

Consider 3. This is why ex-cons cannot get jobs. It's because there have been successful lawsuits against companies who hired ex-cons, and then some of them committed crimes. The idea is that the employer "should have known" the employee was an ex-con and shouldn't have hired him.

Consider 4. I know of cases where a painter set his ladder incorrectly, fell off, and successfully sued the homeowner.

Consider 5. Recently there was an HN discussion where doctors have been pressured to simply stop prescribing opioids, thus sending their chronic pain patients to hell.

<comment><USER32> I guess we're talking at different levels.

Yeah some of these examples are extreme. But I think we can probably agree that there is a balance between accepting gross negligence, and having overzealous legislation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Should we start holding food chemists accountable for weight gain and obesity?

Rhetorical question aside, there's a lot of stimuli competing for our attention in any given day. Since we've created this brave new world, I think it makes sense to educate people growing in this society to combat that. If you're into that sort of thing. I'd liken measures against this to soda taxes and cancer photos on cigarettes.

I think education is fine, but anything that impedes on personal agency is annoying. I understand addiction ruins lives. But imposing blanket measures, like soda taxes or whatever, seems like punishing others because of someone else.

</comment><comment><USER34> There are two newer, disheartening trends in game development that feed on people's enjoyment of games: pay-to-win and forever-early-access. Both are marketed as a way to support the game's development, and in some cases that may be true. If it's just cosmetics that are on sale (no loot boxes) or the developer is genuinely taking community feedback then both are bearable evils, but so often players are taken for a ride with the cost being their money, time and mental well-being. Companies should absolutely be held accountable for these practises, particularly because it's often children and adolescents who are the victims.

<comment><USER23> I dont quite understand how this problem started.

Do people not know about Steam sales?

Pay to win is such an awful concept, I wont touch it. Especially since there are literally 30 years of games and emulators to play.

For 'forever early access', you really need to be sucked into the marketing to waste time and money on an unfinished game.

I dont want to imply I'm some sort of stone wall when it comes to marketing, but I dont understand why people would do either of these. I've put 15 hours into Mount and Blade since the Steam Summer Sale and I dont think I paid more than 5 or 7 dollars.

Is this an issue of uninformed consumers that dont know whats available?

<comment><USER13> You cant buy mobile phone game on steam. You cant download steam sale game whenever you want to and try for free.

<comment><USER23> I cant imagine playing mobile phone games.

Shitty controls and I'd rather use emulator and play full games on my phone.

<comment><USER13> Nevertheless, that is what most people play and enjoy.

15 hours for 5 or 7 dollars (plus PC and same for xbox etc) is pretty expensive per mobile standards.

Through that is not the only reason I guess, steam has nothing form and had nothing for me for years. Or at least I could not find it there, which amounts to same thing. See, I knew about steam and spent a lot of time trying to find game I would like, only to be frustrated. I ultimately succeeded on mobile.

Different people like different things. And yes, it is possible that many don't know about steam or did not found there anything at the first look. Mobile playstore is right there on device everyone owns. Steam is something you have to know about, search and download on device not everyone has. Plus, you still cant try games for free, so you are list in catalogue of expensive games you have low chance to like. So if parents dont support gaming habit, kids are out of luck to even try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Good timing!

I would not say that apps are addictive. Some of them are be but not all.

Yesterday I was running a thought exercises around what makes Facebook, Instagram and Twitter so popular and why people keep flocking there despite their negatives - I certainly don't understand it. I reached to several conclusion but the most important one was that just like cigarettes there must be an addictive element that makes it into a rewarding experience for many people. Think of the likes count, sharing count, comments and even scrolling the news feed - you get a small doze of dopamine by just doing things and I would imagine, eventually it gets so addictive that you loose perception of time and you just get stuck in.

I would not say that the Web is addictive in general. There are some places which could turn into an addiction but I highly doubt anyone would get addicted to checking the forecast or searching with Google. These are very popular utility services. The same applies with many apps and games which provide utility: spotify, iTunes, notes recording, etc. But some apps are specifically exploiting our addictive nature. Social networks which rank the top lists are good example. Even this forum can be addictive in a sense that although it provides a function it also has the concept of ratings through the karma scores. It is gamified and that is what makes it addictive.

The sad fact is that many people in this forum are in fact in the business of making people addicted. We measure success in terms of how well and for how long we capture the customer's attention and if that has something to do with emotional responses I would say it is nothing but machine for making people addicted. Why would anyone spend 2-3 hours a day on Facebook or Instagram? What function these platforms provide that is useful in day-to-day life? Yes they are useful to connect with friends but this is not what they are used for mostly. You will put effort into making great posts and shares and the reward is the likes which I am sure is as addictive experience as it gets.

So worrying about getting customers addicted to your app or game is counter to the goal of making the same app or game very popular and I will say that it is also business prohibitive. You could however concentrate on ideas that are utilities (all of SaaS) but you should also be aware that you will probably have much tougher time ahead to make your idea into a successful venture.

<comment><USER23> To be fair, for something to be addictive, it needs to get better before people get bored of it.

Apparently facebook is collapsing as people are using it less. Even with every data on a human, they couldnt keep me around.

I actually really enjoy instagram. I have learned a lot on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'd be worried if I thought video games were substantively more addictive than TV is, for example, I dont think it is.

<comment><USER37> Well, there is old TV and new TV.... old TV you watched what you were given, and I don't think that is very addictive compared to how addictive games can be

Modern TV where you can 'binge' series, can be addictive (I've certainly ended up staying way later than intended because of an exciting series ). It seems like this is a bit more addictive than old TV.

Then there's games, which I think for many have around about the same addictiveness as Modern TV. But some seem to get incredibly addicted, with extreme cases like [http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/04/01/korea.parent...](http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/04/01/korea.parents.starved.baby/index.html)

<comment><USER36> No more addictive than not being able to put down a good book.

<comment><USER37> thing is, books end. For a long time, most games end. But now there are lots of games that are reptitive play games. They don't end. Books also don't tend to have the same andrenilin rush, there are no time contraints, no other people. I think books are very different and don't seem to lead to the same level of problems as gaming does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Everything is addictive, they should look into junk food / sugar for once.

<comment><USER39> Really just comes down to a argument what side of the fence you're on. Are you the addict? (then its bad), if you're the dealer (then its good).

Mostly comes down to switching the burden of responsibility.

<comment><USER26> I'd say it comes down to sharing the burden of responsibility. The addict & designer are both liable for the addict's addiction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think a similar system to what the article mentioned in Indiana where you can opt out, or more ideally set a time limit will become the norm sometime in the 20s

</comment><comment><USER41> I mean, if they did, think about how much greater the risk would be for people like PornHub.

</comment><comment><USER42> That depends on how much the industry can spend on lobbying.

<comment><USER23> This is basically what I thought.

Regardless what happens I feel like the consumer will lose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> There are way too many video games out there that are essentially casinos. In fact, I'd say some of those games are even worse than casinos. At least in casinos you have the chance to actually win some money. Some mobile games I've played were literal spending competitions between players, and we got essentially nothing for it. After a while it's not even fun anymore but it's pretty hard to quit because my friends and me invested so much time and money into it.

The mechanics were well disguised and hidden behind several levels of indirection. There's a game component which gives you resources and generally improves your standing in the game's community. You can't just play the actual game though; you need "stamina" to play, which is just a fancy way to describe a timer. If you run out of stamina, you can't play again until it regenerates. One of the reasons this timer exists is to rate limit the game. Your progression in the game can only happen at the fixed rate dictated by the timer. The timer resets every 8 hours or so and this acts as negative reinforcement, creating a log-in habit: people feel like they're losing progress and falling behind if they don't log in 3 times a day. The timer should always be running to ensure maximum gains; every second it sits at 0 is a second wasted. Lots of people wake up at 2 AM just to do some game tasks that became available because the timer reset. It's insane.

What makes it a spending competition is the fact you can pay to reset the timer. This means non-paying customers are stuck with a fixed progress rate while the whales pay to amass ridiculous amounts of resources quickly. The casual players who don't pay money only have a chance in the beginning. They simply can't compete over the long term so they quit the game. This leads to a constantly decreasing player base.

The game operators usually create hundreds of different servers. They stabilize over the long term, with small groups of powerful players dominating it. Eventually, they merge stable servers in order to make players compete with each other for dominance once more. The more merges a server's been subjected to, the harder it is to compete with the other top players and the more money you must spend just to keep up. You might have been a top player in the original server, but you fall by hundreds of positions after a merge, and you're pretty much forgotten after two merges. Unless you start spending increasingly ridiculous amounts of money, of course.

If they just merged old servers, eventually there'd be only one remaining. That's why they create at least two new servers at the same time. It forms a beautiful cycle. It would be perfect if every server started off with the same amount of players every time, but games lose popularity over time. Eventually, it will die.

I once thought the traditional PC/console video games industry would never design money traps like these. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is slowly becoming the norm in online games. They're not as extreme as the mobile game I described above, but these ideas do seem to be slowly creeping into modern online games. If this is what the future of video games looks like, I won't shed any tears when governments regulate it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER45> Anyone who does anything sufficiently valuable to society should worry about liability. Addictive or not, tons of value = tons of $$ = tons of envy = tons of political points to be had by taking you down a peg.</comment>


Domino's will start delivering pizzas via an autonomous robot this fall - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/17/dominos-will-start-delivering-pizzas-via-an-autonomous-robot-this-fall/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a great idea and the prefect stepping stone into fully autonomous cars for people.

$7 for grocery delivery also sounds like a steal. Fairly odd that the 'car' only goes 25 mph.

<comment><USER3> When I used a major gorcer's delivery service 20 years ago, I was paying $7 per delivery. Even then, I thought it was too cheap, and I still think it's why they had to scrap the service. Today, it's definitely a steal.

On a side note, they always had the best fruits, veggies, and meats. I found out it was because they had trained pickers that would pick the best at the distribution centers, before the rest was shipped to the stores. Of course, it wasn't same-day delivery, but it was awesome.

<comment><USER4> In my experience, grocery store delivery services are often shockingly cheap because traditionally their target market were the elderly and infirm. People that _can 't_ leave their homes easily, and don't have a lot of money either.

<comment> toper-centage Running a warehouse is also much cheaper than running a neat and pristine supermarket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I cant wait for a robot to deliver pizza into my mouth, while I watch porn on my oculus rift, then pop a few melatonin pills and fall asleep on my couch.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't wait to see the first time someone hijacks the pizza bot Fast and the Furious style...</comment>


Planetary 'autopsies' indicate worlds like Earth common in the cosmos - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-planets/planetary-autopsies-indicate-worlds-like-earth-common-in-the-cosmos-idUSKBN1WW2M7 <comment><USER2> A possible explanation of why we haven't found anything is because intelligent live once developed will quickly overload the ecosystem and start causing things like climate change and quickly make the planet inhabitable, this could all happen in less than 2 million years which is nothing on the cosmological scale.

There was running water on Mars and it's within the goldilocks zone. Probably Venus too, both those planets had stable conditions for the emergence of life for billions of years.

Once a species like humans starts spreading like a virus and taking over the ecosystem, it can easily go downhill very fast (cosmologically speaking).

<comment><USER3> I suspect it's the other way around, really: it might be really hard to develop out of the early stages without hitting a reset button. Yes, we're destroying the planet at the moment and it remains to be seen if we learn quickly enough. However, the first cyanobacteria repeatedly caused global mass extinction events by poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen _for over 800 million years_ until something evolved that could breathe that poisonous molecule[0]. That is almost one fifth of the entire age of Earth.

What if the odds that most planets are trapped in early development of life for the entire time that it can support life are just really really big?

[0] [https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2009/02/bands-...](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2009/02/bands- of-iron/)

<comment><USER2> I think this is also a likely cause, the odds that life even develops beyond the microscopic level, plus the fact that civilizations probably don't last that long combined with the scale of the cosmos and the light speed limitation means that it's unlikely that two civilizations even become aware of each other.

Still, I think it's a bit surprising that no signs of former life have been found so far in both Mars and Venus especially, and even elsewhere in our solar system like on certain moons.

<comment><USER4> There are definitely lots of hints that there is live in Mars, but not a smoking gun yet. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars#Possible_biosigna...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars#Possible_biosignatures)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The probability of no other intelligent life other than ours is near zero. The reason most question it is because we are relatively unintelligent, given we can't even exit our solar system, and also see anything clearly in the next closest system.

<comment><USER6> No, they question it because there's no evidence that there's intelligent life elsewhere. Not only do we only have one known example of sapience in the universe, but only one example of sapience on a planet with over a million species of animals. _As much as I admire crows, dolphins, and greater apes for their intelligence, they don 't even come close to the intellectual capability of humans._

The fact that there are habitable planets out there gives us hope that we will find extraterrestrial life, perhaps intelligent, but to assert that there must be life out there is speculation. To say that those who question whether there's extraterrestrial intelligence is pure arrogance.

<comment><USER5> I just looking at the billion billion galaxies out there, what are the chances there is no life or even slightly intelligent given the physics and chemistry laws are the same in every planet.

<comment><USER7> Some scenarios:

1\. ET life formed and vanished so quickly that they didn't even get to the stage where they generate electromagnetic signals.

2\. ET life formed and got to generate EM waves, but:

\- they're either too far from us that we haven't detected those waves yet;

\- they only recently got to this stage and the signals they produce have not reached us yet;

\- or both.

3\. ET life formed way sooner than we did; figured out how to generate EM waves, and then vanished entirely. So, any signals of their civilization they must have sent out there have already reached earth, but before we began listening for such signals.

4\. Then again, since there are practically infinite number of planets with habitable conditions for ET life, statistically speaking, we must have already received a signal from at least one of them.

Which leads me to this:

5\. ET life doesn't exist, because the universe as we know it is most probably a simulation inside a computer and the computational resources can only render so many different objects at a time. (This is serious stuff, researchers have already proposed methods for verifying this: [https://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in- a-c...](https://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-c...)).

<comment><USER8> (5) is not serious. It's nonsense, and I wish people would stop bringing it up.

<comment><USER7> Can you say why it's nonsense? It's a speculation and can either be proved or discarded. I wouldn't do neither without proof.

<comment><USER9> It's essentially solipsism and there are strong philosophical arguments against it.

<comment><USER8> That's it in a nutshell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even if there are Earth like planets everywhere, we don't know the probability that life appears spontaneously. Right?

How does this change our outlook if one assumes The Great Filter hypothesis? Does this lower or increase that such a filter would be behind us or before us?

<comment><USER11> The last years have given us two estimates of previously unknown factors in the Drake equation, that's why everybody is excited.

Yes, life could be very improbable to appear, but there is a counterargument to this hypothesis: on our planet, life appeared almost immediately once the crust solidified and oceans appeared.

If there had been a 3 billion years period, there may have been an argument that maybe we got very lucky it appeared at all, but we have fossils that are just 100 mil years younger than the apparition of oceans. And we keep finding older ones.

If life was a really rare occurrence that would mean we would have been lucky twice: that it appeared at all and that it appeared that early.

> Does this lower or increase that such a filter would be behind us or before > us?

When so many things are unknown, it makes little sense to talk about probabilities. It removes a possibility for a filter behind us.

I still have doubts that evolution necessary leads to intelligent life. When I started getting interested into evolution, my main surprise was that there is no "optimal" unicellular life-form. Why isn't the earth covered by a green pellicule of photosynthesis-able cells that would be a Kardashev I organism without ever reaching intelligence?

I still don't understand why it did not happen. Evolution favored competition to optimality and the reasons are unclear. I would not be surprised that evolution in other ecosystems would result in one organism "winning" over all the others.

My personal opinion is that we will find a lot of life on other planets, but many will be unicellular and many will show an evolutionary process that is stuck in a dead-end.

I expect intelligent life to be rare, and that the "great filter" is that we will find things much more worthy of our time and energy than colonizing the universe or doing mega-engineering projects. Maybe we'll colonize a few star, build a Dyson star or two, but then we will discover that everyone prefers to spend time in another dimension, or in infinite pocket-universes. Maybe the real party is inside the black holes or the neutron stars and all the advanced civilizations are waiting for us to figure it out.

The idea that an intelligent species would colonize the universe assumes that it does not manage to handle its demography or views its growth as a good thing. I doubt that this is a rational conclusion once you reached the state of full automation.

<comment><USER12> Green unicellular life-form is perfect food and energy source same way as energy of sun is. Evolution does not stop if there are easy energy sources available everywhere.

Nature does not care if energy of sun is used optimally or not. It just cares if offsprings live or not.

<comment><USER11> I think it is very easy to imagine a local minima in which evolution would be stuck. Making a membrane far too hard to pierce could starve a predator into extinction instead of making it evolve.

If you reach a point where one organism developed enough mechanisms to resist simple predators and that their advanced predators die out, I think it would be impossible for evolution to get out of that dead end. I am not sure that getting unstuck is a universal feature of life.

Emergence of sexual reproduction, of multi-cellular organisms, are all very weird phenomenon that I think are risky to take for granted.

I mean, it feels like playing Conway's game of life: Often, when you start a random one, it all dies out. It often gets stuck in a position where just a few things vibrates. Some last longer. Others go on forever but are rarer.

My intuition (which can be dismissed without argument) is that life is similar: if the conditions are right, it may lead to emergent evolutionary behaviors that eventually can lead to intelligent life, but that's not the most common outcome.

<comment><USER13> > If you reach a point where one organism developed enough mechanisms to > resist simple predators and that their advanced predators die out, I think > it would be impossible for evolution to get out of that dead end.

If all the predators died out, then those defense mechanisms would become wasteful, and organisms that didn't have those defense mechanisms would be more efficient. That would open the door to the development of new predators. The situation you're describing is not a true equilibrium, in other words.

<comment><USER11> True, but in such case, defense mechanisms don't just disappear from the gene pool, they just get deactivated. The second time they are going to be much faster to re-evolve, making the disappearance of the second appearance of predators even faster.

<comment><USER13> The predators will never disappear in the first place.

The fewer predators there are, the more wasteful defense mechanisms are, and therefore the more disfavored they are by natural selection. The more predators there are, the more defense mechanisms are favored. The equilibrium is neither zero defenses nor 100% effective defenses against predation. It's somewhere in-between.

The predators get to evolve too, by the way. There's no 100% effective defense against all forms of predation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My physics isn't great, but why does it matter that these are white dwarfs?

The article says "researchers studied six white dwarfs whose _strong gravitational pull_ had sucked in shredded remnants of planets" and "if they stray near its _immense gravitation field_, they "will be shredded into dust, and that dust will begin to fall onto the star and sink out of sight."

Isn't it the case that the gravitation field will be as strong as it was before the star died, or even weaker from blowing off its outer layers?

<comment><USER15> White dwarfs are interesting because they make up almost all of the current or future outcomes of most stars in the milkyway. -> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf)

The Roche-limit (the radius at which a satellite would be ripped apart) for the Sun-Earth system is at ~ 550000km. That's inside the current size of the Sun. So if the sun shrank a lot (white dwarfs are basically small, 'dead' stars which shrank to that size after the nuclear fusion stopped which had counteracted the attraction of the star's mass), Earth could actually be in such a low orbit and therefore fall apart due to the Sun remnant's attraction.

-> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit)

<comment><USER16> Why would a decrease in the sun's radius cause a change in Earth's orbit? From those to articles it sounds like the mass of the sun will remain about the same, so the orbit should remain about the same. And less mass will cause the orbit to migrate outwards.

<comment><USER17> Shrinking of the star simply makes it _possible_ to come within the roche limit without being inside the star. The inspiral would happen due to separate processes e.g. friction as the star sheds its envelope or due to interactions between multiple planets.

<comment><USER18> When the Sun enters the red giant phase, will the radius have expanded enough to consume the earth? I'm trying to remember if that was something my physics professor said years ago or if I heard it from someone less reliable and am merely attributing it to him...

<comment><USER15> Wikipedia says the sun is expected to expand out to roughly the orbit of Venus (consuming it and Mercury) and turning Earth into a blob of molten rock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am not an astronomer, but in terms of empirical evidence, for the longest time the only prior we had was our own solar system. Thus the natural best guess should have been that (at least for stars similar to our own) earth-like rocky planets near our size should be the most frequent occurrence.

</comment><comment><USER20> Assuming there are intelligent species living in nearby systems(with not such advanced tech), it's unlikely that they can notice us unless we can control the light intensity of our Sun. Because that's the only object they're probably looking at.

</comment><comment><USER21> So, to be clear, are they doing spectroscopy on the spectra of these white dwarfs? Do they have to be looking at it at the exact moment the planet gets shredded or do the chemicals they're looking for remain in the star's atmosphere?

<comment><USER22> From their paper (link in my other message):

"(White dwarfs) WDs are the remnant cores left behind when a star ejects its hydrogen-rich outer layers after the red giant phase. These remnant cores are ~0.5 M (solar masses) and about the same radius as Earth, are no longer powered by fusion, and slowly cool over time. Because of their high densities, and thus strong gravitational fields, elements heavier than helium rapidly sink below their surfaces, becoming unobservable. Nonetheless, spectroscopic studies show that the atmospheres of up to half of WDs with effective temperatures <25,000 K are "polluted" by elements heavier than He (3–5). The source of these heavy elements is exogenous, coming from accretion of debris from rocky bodies that previously orbited the WDs (6–9). We exploit this pollution to measure the elemental constituents of extrasolar rocky bodies."

So the answer is "the later."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The paper:

[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/356](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/356)

</comment><comment><USER23> The science here and although it's different, makes me think of the "I'm Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars" article posted here a few days ago. If they are able to draw these conclusions with such limited data, I doubt they've missed anything obvious on the surface of Mars.</comment>


Tailscale has reached general availability - <AUTHOR> https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-launch/ <comment><USER3> I've said this before - I really love the concept but I can't get past the pricing. I don't think I'm cheap, but I work in a startup and have to justify what I spend, and USD$10/user/month is very steep for the hard-to-explain benefit of doing away with jump servers. I already use Wireguard, I have a script to add users, update configs and bounce the servers.. it's not as cool and automatic and "zero trust" but it also doesn't cost hundreds of dollars per month to access my own servers I'm already paying for!

GSuite is easy to justify for me. Github is. JIRA is. Tailscale is more expensive than all of them and it's hard for me to make the case, even to myself, that it's worth it.

I'd like to ask Tailscale to think about alternative pricing models of maybe $20/month per admin account, which comes with 10 bundled "member" accounts or similar. That would get me to $40 or $60 a month, which I can stomach. But I won't pay $300+/month to save myself a little bit of inconvenience every few weeks so my devs can securely log into our servers.

<comment><USER4> (Tailscale co-founder here). I certainly appreciate the feedback and suggestions. We've had pricing inquiries from individuals all the way to enterprise. Finding the right set of features at the right price is something we're going to spend a lot of time exploring (for instance, some larger companies don't care too much about ACLs, but some smaller ones really, really do). Right now, all I can say for certain is that our pricing page will change and that we're open to discussion.

I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on where you think we can add value and what it might be worth to you. If you're up for it, please email me at firstname.lastname@example.com Regardless, thanks again for the input.

<comment><USER5> Yes, at $10/mo as the GP says, it's more than Slack or G-Suite or Microsoft 365(?).

It sounds like a great product, but it would definitely have less value to us than the above products.

That seems to set a price ceiling, but of course, you're free to find the price elasticity curve by exploration...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if it's really ready without what they're calling "magic DNS": [https://tailscale.com/kb/1054/dns](https://tailscale.com/kb/1054/dns)

Something that bugs me about ZeroTier is also present here, which is that there's no name management whatsoever, so I have to either keep a hosts file around with all the names of the network or find a script on GitHub that does it for me (or put a DNS server on the Tailscale network, and make sure all the hosts have records on there manually since there isn't a way to automatically integrate it with the hostnames that Tailscale already logs). Or, of course, use public records and pray you don't have more than a couple services because who wants to log in to the domain host every time you bring up a new container?

Half the magic of BeyondCorp (which I'm a big believer in) is that it's invisible from an end user perspective. I open a browser, go to git.corp.planeteaston.com, and it works, not "let's go to gitlab... it didn't resolve. what was the IP address again? 192.168.10-oh, wait, I'm offsite, the address is different, let's go see what it is in the Tailscale console", and a tech person could figure that out, maybe, never mind a computer-illiterate person in another department that was just told "go home, coronavirus, take your laptop".

This isn't a knock, since the main competitor, ZeroTier, doesn't have a great solution for DNS either besides run a DNS server, but whoever cracks it will probably win this race. And it's almost worse for ZeroTier, which by default (at least when I started using it 2-ish years ago), wanted you to use IPv6 addresses by default that there was no chance of you memorizing. I'll be a customer when this works!

<comment><USER7> (Tailscale co-founder) Everyone at tailscale agrees 100% with all your comments here. We're eager to someday have a chance to stop optimizing NAT traversal so that we can make magic DNS work. But we also know we have to get the core routing near-perfect before we start adding more features. I'm guessing ZeroTier feels the same.

<comment><USER8> > _But we also know we have to get the core routing near-perfect_

As someone who's been following tailscale's development, I'm curious to what you mean by _core routing_? Isn't routing P2P? Or, do you mean routing via DERP tunnels or TURN relays when P2P is a no-go? If so, what really are some key challenges here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Been using it for the last few months and it's great. I use it for SSH, NAS etc...

Also, being able to ping my iOS phone that's on 4G from my computer feels like magic.

<comment><USER10> > Also, being able to ping my iOS phone that's on 4G from my computer feels > like magic.

So, like every other VPN?

<comment><USER9> TailScale is to other VPNs what Docker was to LXC. Well, except Hamachi.

<comment><USER11> "Well, except Hamachi."

As well as the one from the author of ntop.

A few characteristics most projects consistently fail to meet are (a) keeping the source code available, small, relatively simple and easy to compile, (b) allowing peers the _option_ to connect directly after discovery without routing traffic through a third party and (c) recognising that not all peers want to form massive infinitely scalable networks, most will prefer small ones.

Most P2P projects choose a design that forces the majority of users compromise in order to accomodate a few unpredictable/hypothetical edge cases. "Perfect" gets in the way of progress. History shows there is no "perfect" when it comes to P2P.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems like it requires a Google or Microsoft account (or corporate SAML). No thanks!

<comment><USER7> (I'm a Tailscale co-founder) The idea is to avoid building yet another commercial service that holds onto your username and password. People have enough identities already. More details here: [https://tailscale.com/blog/how- tailscale-works/](https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/)

We know we keep getting feedback that people want a different way to authorize their accounts (especially for personal use), so we're looking at other options. We just really want to stay out of the username+password business; it's simply bad security practice.

<comment><USER13> I'd actually rather you have my username and password, since I use a password manager and every password is long and unique. I don't want to tie my Google/Apple/<X-Mega-Corp> account to my Tailscale account. This way I can also more easily keep track of which accounts I have since my password manager stores them all. So I will wait for email signup (which currently just subscribes me to a mailing list...)!

<comment><USER7> It's easy to make a basic password login system, and very technical people use password managers, long passwords, etc. But there's a long "tail" (ha ha) of people who don't use long passwords, who will reuse their password on multiple web sites, who will forget their password and need to recover it using their mother's maiden name, etc. This opens up unlimited opportunity for phishing attacks.

And you don't get any key rotation unless you force people to change their passwords occasionally, which is itself now deprecated as a bad practice because people then start writing their passwords down on paper or storing them in a spreadsheet, which is even worse than no rotation. (Tailscale rotates your VPN keys automatically, but it's all for naught if the root key is just a password.)

We know that something better is needed for personal accounts, but please, not username+password. Your private network security is important. The world needs something much closer to foolproof.

<comment><USER14> > few very technical people use password managers, long passwords, etc

I'd be very surprised if this was true. Most all technical (competent) people I know use a pw manager of some sort

<comment><USER7> It originally said "a few", not "few", which was intended to have a slightly different meaning, but I've edited it to remove that because you're right and it's not important :)

Unfortunately non-technical people mostly don't use a password manager and we can't assume they do. Tailscale is about making the Internet secure by default, and passwords will never be secure by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sorry for off-topic, but does anyone know which css library Tailscale used for their blog?

Looks very nice and clean.

<comment><USER16> (Designer behind the Tailscale blog here)

Glad you like it! The text styles are custom, and the layout is built using an in-house CSS framework not unlike Tailwind [1].

But if you'd like to build something similar, you could get pretty close by using something like Tailwind and building with Rasmus Andersson's lovely (and open-source!) Inter type family [2], which we use throughout the site.

[1] [https://tailwindcss.com/](https://tailwindcss.com/) [2] [https://rsms.me/inter/](https://rsms.me/inter/)

<comment><USER15> Hi,

thanks for your reply and great work:). The site looks just amazing and very clean (especially typography). I noticed it uses utility classes like tailwindcss so thought maybe there is a similar library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very nice! Congratulations on launching, and looking forward to seeing your success in the coming years!

</comment><comment><USER18> If a site within a tail scale net is compromised, does that make all of the other sites instantly compromised on that net?

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks really interesting! For my use case I'd really want that Android app, but other than that this looks solid.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone comment on the tradeoffs between Tailscale and ZeroTier?

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice service, was just testing it out. I had one question/issue. Will the pings heal automatically if a device changes internet connections or wifi providers? I noticed I had to disable and re-enable the active toggle on an ipad after changing wifi networks (local wifi to phone/LTE). I didn't have to if simply disconnecting/reconnecting to the same wifi network.

</comment><comment><USER22> According to the blog[1], Tailscale currently have a relay network for relaying traffic when NAT traversal does not work.

I wish one day Tailscale allows private relay server, for privacy and speed / latency reasons.

[1]: [https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale- works/](https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/)

<comment><USER23> It's planned. Although note that DERP only relays the encrypted wireguard packets. All we see is "please send this ciphertext blob to pubkey X", i.e. exactly what any router on the internet sees.

Still, for latency and compliance reasons, it makes sense to allow companies to operate their own DERP relays, if they want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why my team should pay Tailscale 10 dollars/user/month? We can get the same features with Wireguard/OpenVPN.

<comment><USER25> If you can, do so. This reminds me of claiming to be able to build Dropbox in a weekend with existing tools. You can, but it most likely won't work as well, won't be as integrated and well, you'll have to build it yourself which won't be as easy as you think it is, then add monitoring and paging and, depending on your requirements, high availability.

I'd certainly be interested in a blog post about this, if it's as easy. But considering that Tailscale took this long to launch, I have doubts that this is as easy to build.

<comment><USER4> (Co-founder of Tailscale here) To that end, we started publishing a "blueprint" for people who want to DIY. There's more to explain (and questions encouraged). Please check it out: [https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale- works/](https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/)

<comment><USER26> Thanks for this. From the link:

 _My teammate Dave Anderson is writing a post about all the insanity that is NAT traversal. That alone will probably be as long as this entire article. Stay tuned!_

I've watched countless p2p projects fail due to NAT difficulties, and spent months/years banging my head against it only to fail too. I've heard that NAT is tragically still a thing with IPv6 as well.

Please, if you all make it big, start a cross-platform open source, drop-in library that completely solves the NAT problem. The unit test for it would be that an app using it can accept inbound connections with zero configuration. That might require a central server though. I think the crux of the problem is how to share IP addresses with each other through that central server securely for STUN/ICE so that nobody can eavesdrop. Would you consider making your DERP servers free and open for that purpose? Apologies if I'm glossing over this or missed something, this is just something that has vexed me for almost 20 years. Thanks!

<comment><USER7> (Tailscale co-founder) I'm with you on this! The NAT problem drives me nuts. That's one of the core concepts behind tailscale. Unfortunately I don't think the "open source NAT traversal as a library" idea will work; it's been tried before, but NAT is just _so fiddly_ that the library invariably "doesn't quite work" in some weird condition and the app developer is left trying to debug NATs, which they don't know how to do.

With Tailscale we want to take full responsibility for connectivity, so that app developers can work on apps that just assume the connectivity+security is there, and users can complain to us instead of them when their computers won't connect. At least, that's the dream. How best to package that up, I'm not quite sure.

Regarding DERP, the server code is open source: [https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/tree/master/cmd/derpe...](https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/tree/master/cmd/derper) and if you look closely, you can see that DERP servers are fully anonymous (pseudonymous?) and will route traffic between any two DERP connections based on their public keys. We rate limit traffic to keep costs under control, and we'll let paying customers boost their speeds, but we intend to always let our DERP network be usable at "reasonable throughput" for free. And since the code is open source, you can write your own tools that do it.

Lots of things to work on. Hope this helps!

<comment><USER27> Does tailscale work in China? Does DERP penetrate the great firewall? How does tailscale protect / work against nation state actors? Are you incorporated in the US? How does Tailscale help against wide-reaching legislation like EARN IT?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Congratulations on launch! The solo tier looks very nice and useful (except for missing Android client for now). Low the sign-up flow, very easy.

This looks very similar to ZeroTier - apart from building on wireguard - <USER2> do the solutions differ? Is tailscale also a true mesh (ie packets go direct between two tailscale nodes on a lan)?

</comment><comment><USER29> In "The asymmetry of internet identity" you're describing a problem and currently Tailscale doesn't solve it -- it relies on google/ms/etc for identity.

I'm curious if it'd be possible to avoid using brands by just authorizing device ids like Syncthing does, without any login at all.

</comment><comment><USER30> How about we add another pricing plan. It's for people who like me are happy with the free plan, but still want to somehow give you money without upgrading to the $10/user plan.

Bonus points if you call the plan, the wireguard plan; and 90% of the payments go to Jason Donenfeld.

</comment><comment><USER31> Can you use tailscale with friends or does it only work with the same email address?

<comment><USER23> (Tailscale employee here) For personal use, we're planning a "sharing" feature, so that you can share machines (or individual services) with friends, and they just show up on their network (after mutual approval, of course). It's a feature I very much want for my personal use of tailscale, so it's going to happen :)

<comment><USER31> That sounds awesome. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In the dashboard, there is no link to support. There should also be a way to create a support ticket or even better live chat.

I am getting intermittent errors in the dashboard as well.

<comment><USER33> I've filed an issue for me to add a support email link. Will do another dashboard release in a couple days, thanks.

As for alternatives, we tried chat but no-one used it, and it added a ton of heavy awful javascript to our website. You can file issues on [https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale](https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale), though for the dashboard I'll move them elsewhere. Also we have been looking at various pieces of "forum" software too but haven't settled on anything we really like.

Could you elaborate on the errors you saw? If you want to send support@ an email with your account email address and rough time, I can look in the server error logs and try to hunt it down. Thanks.

(I work on Tailscale.)

<comment><USER32> Thanks so much for the reply. I am sending an e-mail to @support now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> From the website

> We're announcing our public launch today, with a $3M seed round →

Seed rounds are now 3M, wow!

I wonder how they seemlessly authenticate with Okta, Google, Active Directory e.t.c ?

</comment><comment><USER35> Do you plan to release a Terraform provider for configuring Tailscale?

<comment><USER23> (Tailscale employee here) Automatic provisioning is definitely on the list. It's an enabler for immutable infra deployment, getting connectivity into containers, and building things like automatic enrollment based on external sources of trust (e.g. "automatically enroll any VM that can prove via its vTPM that it's in this GCP account").

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there a pfsense integration?

</comment><comment><USER36> Is talescale really that popular? Who are upvoting these articles?

<comment><USER37> I can only speak for myself:

I was interested in WireGuard for a while, but setting it up properly seemed rather a daunting task to me. With Tailscale, this was literally a matter of minutes. I'm not sure I would pay $10/month for this, but the free solo plan is sufficient for my purposes and works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I will get banned for this in a matter of minutes but I will say the truth to whoever think HN is fair. For the past 3 months, every, again EVERY post that was linked to Tailscale (not just the company domain but also the blog posts of the founders' websites), has gotten to the frontpage within minutes, with a full 100% hit rate. This cannot happen for any company, any project or anything else to be honest since there is a thread that gets posted every minute on average, and almost every thread, no matter how great it is, goes forgotten forever without a single upvote. This doesn't happen to even trillion dollar companies that are known by almost everybody so certainly this can't happen for a company of 5 people that was started only last year and hardly known by anybody. Nothing can get to HN's frontpage at a hit rate of 100% especially when you know this has been happening on almost a weekly basis since last December not to mention the daily promotion in comments on literally everything that has anything to do with WireGuard or even VPNs.

HN simply favors some founders who have good network over the rest of us. I know that organized upovting and astroturfing isn't uncommon here, but there has never been anything anywhere near that's being done by this company and its founders here. This is simply free advertising worth of hundreds of thousands of dollars for free simply because the founders "know people".

EDIT: Thank you HN for proving me right! This comment has 42 points as of now and it's buried in the bottom below almost every other comment. Still not a response from the founders who very coincidentally happen to exist literally during every time a post about their company gets submitted!

<comment><USER39> > Thank you HN for proving me right

You've been proven nothing of the sort. I buried your post _and_ the submission itself while investigating this claim, even though you've been trolling HN threads with these rants for weeks now, using multiple accounts to do it, ignoring our requests to stop breaking the site guidelines, and barraging us with ranty emails to boot.

I've looked closely at the data and found no evidence for any of this. Every sentence in your comment is either demonstrably false or completely unsupported.

I know that sometimes a bee gets into one's bonnet, but as I've explained to you a dozen times or so, all we can do is look at the data, and if reality conflicts with what you're saying, we have to go with reality. Actually, I appreciate your underlying concern for the integrity of this site. (Not so much the smears and accusations of corruption.)

Your real sin, though, is wasting our time. That sucks precious resources away from doing what we ought to be doing to make HN better. I haven't had a chance to attend to the front page for the last several hours because I've been busy looking into this, writing about it, and dealing with your posts and emails. Meanwhile other emails pointing out quality concerns in other threads have been piling up in the inbox.

Even though it's tedious, I've assembled a sample of what you've been posting so that readers can evaluate your claims for themselves, and also see how much damage a single disgruntled user can do to this place. In the future, we can refer concerns back here and hopefully not lose so much time.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465402)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22645796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22645796)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587268)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22646808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22646808)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223423)

This was a pleasant one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22652042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22652042)

In the past, you've had similar campaigns against other sites and topics, including Go, Kubernetes, IndieHackers, Keybase, DuckDuckGo, Mailchimp, and (yes) the Qataris:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361860)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22329624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22329624)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190633)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211243)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109987](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109987)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048852)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22112625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22112625)

<comment><USER39> I want to add something for fair-minded users who may still be wondering, after all that, whether the interest in the OP really is organic or whether there might be shenanigans. It's natural to worry about this, especially because other users tend to make loud and grand claims about abuse, whether they have knowledge or not.

You can check a lot of this for yourself using publicly available information.

Look at a sample of users who've been expressing interest about Tailscale, in threads about that topic and/or Wireguard or other topics. Check out the histories of these users—you can do that by clicking on a username to go to their profile, and then clicking on 'comments' or 'submissions'. You'll see that most are longstanding, serious community members. If your random samples look anything like the ones I've examined, you'll find many excellent HN contributors among them, with a lot of technical expertise. This is evidence that the interest in this topic is both organic and serious. I'd supply links, but it wouldn't feel right to haul in specific usernames that way. It's easy enough to check.

To that public information, I can add some non-public facts. First, the profiles of users upvoting these threads look much the same as the commenters. Of course in many cases they _are_ the same, since it's natural to both upvote and comment on something that you find interesting. In addition, the voting patterns on these threads look like what we see on popular topics of organic interest, and nothing like what we tend to see with voting rings and organized promotion.

Conclusion: although we can never say for sure, because we aren't inside users' heads while they upvote, the evidence points to organic interest. I'll go further: I'm the person who has spent by far the most time on this problem in the history of HN and I find it hard to imagine the evidence being any clearer. Also, no one at HN (and no one at YC that I know of) has any connection with any of the people involved in this project. I've spent so much time writing about this because (a) I don't like to see people smeared, (b) we take concerns about abuse of HN extremely seriously, and (c) I want a record to link back to in the future so I don't have to spend any more sad hours on this.</comment></comment></comment>


John C. Dvorak: Windows8 should drop the tiles or will fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393269,00.asp

<comment><USER2> Err, the tiles support icons too. A lot of tiles on Windows Phone apps are just icons. Eg see some at <http://www.wp7applist.com/>

Tiles are better because you can get to see updates on things like weather etc. without having to open the app. Example, you can have a Fedex tracker app that updates when the item status changes, but without bothering you with a full fledged notification.</comment>


Compleat: Programmable bash completion for human beings - <AUTHOR> http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2009/10/30/compleat.html

<comment><USER2> This is the kind of project I really like; it's the way things should be. Very awesome. This _should_ become universal. A barrier to adoption is that the installation process seems a bit scary/involved - if it was straightforward, this would fly off the shelves like hotcakes (...er), and become part of the standard bash distribution.

I wrote something similar recently (in terms of tech, not in terms of application): a parser for a language with which the user can specify another language (which is used to parse something else). With a lot of experience in it (including a compiler subject at uni), and having written similar things before, professionally and in research, and including reusing some aspects from previous code, it took me 2 weeks - in Java.

How long did it take you? I'm thinking it might have been much faster for you, even without those benefits I had, because you wrote in Haskell...

Does anyone know if there is a Haskell that targets the JVM? That could be a cool solution for me...

I want to note that while 2 weeks seems like a long time, it's fairly straightforward once you know how; the hard work is in what comes before it: coming up with the concept, the design of the language etc.

BTW: "GitHub is Temporarily Offline." <http://github.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Argh! Here's a hastily-setup mirror. Yay for distributed version control!

<http://limpet.net/mbrubeck/projects/compleat/>

The first commit was on October 6, so this release took about three weeks of programming (mostly on the bus and when I should have been in bed sleeping). And you're totally right - a lot of the work was done in my head long before I typed "git init."

The very next thing on my to-do list is learning the right way to package this with Cabal so that a single command will install and configure it, and so I can provide pre-built Debian and Ubuntu packages.

<comment><USER2> Pre-built packages sounds perfect! Though I think you deserve a rest while you bask in adulation. :-) Your idea is worthy of the original unix hackers... and, in keeping with their spirit, made real.

BTW: I actually took a little over 2 weeks (2-3 days extra), and I was working full-time (though that amounts to only about 2-3 hours of 100% concentrated hacking); you also did extra stuff with integrating it with bash, and I'm sure fiddling with it a bit to make it a practically usable tool. So I think the implementation time is within a factor of 2, for Java vs. Haskell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good idea for a tool, great writeup of the implementation. This struck home for me:

 _I realized recently that some things I do are so specialized that my parents and non-programmer friends will probably never get them. For example, Compleat is a program to generate programs to help you… run programs? Sigh. Well, maybe someone out there will appreciate it._

Just about all of my research falls into that category.

</comment><comment><USER4> You all may be interested in these two ruby-based bash completion libraries: <http://github.com/drnic/tabtab#readme> and <http://github.com/cldwalker/lightning#readme>. The former is similar to compleat in wanting to make command completion easy to define but it does it through a ruby dsl instead of usage statements. The latter autocompletes paths given a yaml file of paths.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! I hadn't seen these before. I was actually surprised not to find more similar work when I searched for it, so it's nice to know other people are dealing with the same problems.</comment></comment>