What's this about?
Tailscale's own blog post about Tailcat — netcat over Tailscale's data plane — covered here as a GitHub release a week ago. The title is the joke.
Why would Tailscale ship a tool that removes Tailscale?
Because the data plane is the product, and the coordination server is the part people worry about depending on. Tailcat uses the peer-to-peer networking — NAT traversal, encrypted direct connections — without the persistent mesh, for the case where you just want to move data between two machines once. Shipping it is a bet that demonstrating the underlying tech builds more trust than protecting the bundle does.
Why is it worth noticing?
HN 70 points, 4 comments
- The original GitHub release drew 493 points a week ago; the company's own writeup drew 70, which is a nice illustration of what this audience prefers.
- Four comments on 70 points means people read it and had nothing to argue about.
- The title is doing most of the work and it is a good title.