WARP is here

https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-warp-plus/

by BCM43 • 7 years ago

657 330 7 years ago

blog.cloudflare.com

I'd perhaps consider Warp+ on a computer or the router, but on the phone it seems a bit overkill.

(Though I haven't tried it. So far I haven't received the 10gb Argo credits described, despite being on the waiting list for yonks)

croon• 7 years ago

Same here regarding the 10GB, and have been on the wait list since April 1st.

Pfhreak4• 7 years ago

Yep. Same here. I assume they are working through the waitlist. I'm going to give them a couple days to get it sorted before asking customer support about it.

Edit: My 10GB came through. Looks like release day latency.

throwaway9d0291• 7 years ago

I'd really like to use this on my computer. The article says it uses the WireGuard protocol, can I just take the private key from my device, put it in a configuration file and use it?

fnordsensei5• 7 years ago

They've said elsewhere[1] that they're are working on desktop apps. No time frame yet.

If you can extract the endpoints, private and public keys, it might work. It would be considered unsupported and might be considered a violation of the terms of use. Check the license agreement.

1: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/warp-desktop/79072

judge20205• 7 years ago

Note that while community MVPs (FD: I'm one of them) are generally good for answers, they don't represent Cloudflare or speak for them.

That answer is correct, but official word is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071258

eastdakota4• 7 years ago

We plan to provide desktop versions. That’s, frankly, a piece of cake compared to mobile, so the wait shouldn’t be too long.

trollied2• 7 years ago

How to use it on macOS: https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1176893448445558784?s=21

(Not my Twitter account, just saw it on my timeline)

Pigo• 7 years ago

It sounds like an interesting product, but I'm wary of anything put out by the arbiters of the internet.

AznHisoka3• 7 years ago

Personally, I'd feel safer using this vs any other random VPN service. At least these guys have a reputation at stake, if people discovered they were selling your data.

fnordsensei5• 7 years ago

If you're dealing with adversarial middle-men, it could be OK. I lived in a country where everything inside the country right up to the border could be considered adversarial.

If it brings competition to the shady VPN-peddlers, and is easy to download and get going, I'll consider it a net positive, all-in-all, regardless whether I'll use it personally or not.

Pfhreak4• 7 years ago

Really? The arbiters of the internet? You don't think that's maybe a little melodramatic?

Cloudflare has, time and time again demonstrated openness, transparency, and insight into their technical and ethical frameworks. I trust them a whole lot more than my isp or any random vpn provider.

falcolas• 7 years ago

The arbiters of the internet? You don't think that's maybe a little melodramatic?

As someone who has browsed sites "powered by cloudflare" over Tor and been tossed into an infinite "are you human" loop, it certainly doesn't feel melodramatic.

They've also exercised power over websites based on moral outrage. Perhaps 99.999% of people agree with the morals behind this decision, and maybe it's even the right decision, but it's still an arbitrary decision made by Cloudflare.

They are also bound by US law, and other entities bound by US law have been forced to enable the exact same forms of record keeping that Cloudflare says they will keep turned off.

Cloudflare is not a neutral party. They don't even advertise themselves as a neutral party.

pingec• 7 years ago

Since Cloudflare have their own network, would this be useful to use in countries where they have a reliable home internet but poor (bad latency/speed) links outside of the country?

For example would remote desktop from Thailand or Philippines to Europe work more reliably?

jgrahamc• 7 years ago

Probably. That's the sort of thing that WARP Plus can help with.

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

WARP, instead, is built for the average consumer. It’s built to ensure that your data is secured while it’s in transit. So the networks between you and the applications you’re using can’t spy on you. It will help protect you from people sniffing your data while you’re at a local coffee shop. It will also help ensure that your ISP isn’t hoovering up data on your browsing patterns to sell to advertisers.

Most of those consumers aren't aware of any of that, so if you want them to use it, you'll have to pay for marketing to bring it to their attention. Is that the plan?

lm28469• 7 years ago

They also states:

Before today, there were approximately two million people on the waitlist to try WARP. That demand blew us away. It also embarrassed us. The common refrain is consumers don’t care about their security and privacy, but the attention WARP got proved to us how wrong that assumption actually is.

asdkhadsj2• 7 years ago

I feel like that misses the point though. I'd be shocked (and happily wrong) if a large portion of those 2M users are none technical average people.

If anything, all I would take from that number is that the tech crowd is perhaps larger than people give it credit for. But I highly doubt that waitlist expands highly beyond the tech crowd.

Happy to be wrong, though :)

e12e2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure why I'd trust cloudflare (a company who's business it is to know all about traffic flows and usage patterns) more than a traditional back bone provider?

eis2• 7 years ago

The article mentions that WARP is exposing the end user's IP to websites they visit. I'd be interested in how they do that, especially with HTTPS websites where they can't MITM and inject headers.

WARP is not designed to allow you to access geo-restricted content when you’re traveling. It will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit.

aasdasdasdasd2• 7 years ago

The requests come from a CloudFlare address range -- my original IP isn't visible to the server. Not sure what they mean either.

xuki• 7 years ago

It passes on your IP address if the website you're visiting is using CF. See for yourself:

https://icanhazip.com - on CF network https://ifconfig.me - not on CF network

zackbloom8• 7 years ago

Great eye! We haven't figured out how to expose them yet for sites not using Cloudflare. We do have some experience solving this problem for Spectrum [1] we're hoping to lean on. The most important thing to us is users don't expect us to keep their IP private, as that is not the intent of WARP.

1- https://blog.cloudflare.com/mmproxy-creative-way-of-preservi...

fnordsensei5• 7 years ago

Are you going out of your way to forward the original IP to the end recipient? What's the point of that?

Is it to support IP authenticated logins or similar?

commoner10• 7 years ago

Although Warp doesn't mask IP addresses, it should be useful for these two use cases:

1) Communicating with insecure websites (HTTP instead of HTTPS)

2) Using unsecured wireless networks (e.g. Wi-Fi at a coffee shop)

Beyond these two cases, is there any advantage to using Warp? Does Warp provide any benefits for email (secure IMAP/SMTP), file sharing (BitTorrent), or other protocols?

eis2• 7 years ago

Thank you for your reply. I see that it's rather easy to do that for websites running behind CF as you terminate the traffic and can just set the corresponding header.

But for websites outside your network I don't see any obvious way how to do that. Wouldn't this being possible imply that it's possible to spoof traffic? That would open a whole can of worms for the web and even the internet at large.

But I also get your point that you don't want people to see WARP as a regular VPN to protect a users IP address from being exposed to the other side. Since it's not easy for a user to see which sites run behind CF and which ones don't while browsing they must keep this in mind. Or they can just firewall all CF IPs minus the ones used by WARP (assuming none are shared with other CF products and a list can be obtained).

lancepioch• 7 years ago

Can you have an option to do that? I imagine in some cases it might be better for people (in certain regions or roles) where their IP being hidden is a core component of "Privacy First".

pedrocx4863• 7 years ago

The most important thing to us is users don't expect us to keep their IP private

I would dare to say you're wrong. It's one big reason I wouldn't/won't use Warp.

Iwillgetby• 7 years ago

This split tunneling article may be useful. https://www.macobserver.com/news/tmo-scoop/cloudflare-warp-s...

mobilio• 7 years ago

I can confirm.

Last night i was testing it and geo-location was visible...

bithavoc2• 7 years ago

Warp doesn't provide anonymity, however, for some reason Netflix in my phone can stream US TV shows with Warp on while my non warped devices can not even list the show. Weird.

xeroaura2• 7 years ago

It seems to not be hiding IP, but it does inadvertently(?) do so for some site's detection methods I think. When I did an IP lookup, some sites reported correct while others reported one I didn't recognize (assumed its the one from WARP).

PentiumBug• 7 years ago

Because Netflix is not a Cloudflare client, so CF can't pass the source (client) IP. The same should happen with Google, Facebook (or anyone not behind CF infrastructure).

At least, that's the way I'm currently understanding it.

steveklabnik7• 7 years ago

There's also a technical version of this post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-technical-challenges/

I'm hyped to see Rust code running on so many phones.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

I wonder if any popular applications for a mobile platform ship with Rust code already.

steveklabnik7• 7 years ago

There have been some instances of this before; at least one game was implemented in Rust. But, given the length of the Warp waitlist, I'm pretty sure this is the most popular application so far. There could be things I don't know about though, at this point Rust is big enough that not everyone who uses it talks about it publicly.

mwcampbell11• 7 years ago

I think that for Rust to really take off in that space, we'll need comprehensive, auto-generated bindings for the platform APIs. Are there any serious efforts in that area yet?

mr_puzzled3• 7 years ago

Just remembered, you now work at cloudflare! I remember reading your blog post about joining cloudflare, so how's it going so far?

steveklabnik7• 7 years ago

I've been enjoying it. My team is great, we're building cool stuff. Being a PM is different, but I like it a lot. Thanks for asking :)

hckrzulu2• 7 years ago

How would this work together with nextdns.io?

ac29• 7 years ago

On Android it doesn't appear to override private DNS settings, so its working just fine for me with Adguard DNS. I think nextdns works the same way.

I'm surprised, but pleased that you can use WARP without 1.1.1.1 DNS. Hopefully thats not a bug.

hckrzulu2• 7 years ago

On iOS it doesn't seem to work. It's either WARP or nextdns. A quick google search taught me all "custom" dns setups on iOS require some sort of VPN-like solution (very much like the nextdns.io iOS app does).

Back to nextdns then, has more value to me.

mwcampbell11• 7 years ago

I was openly critical of Cloudflare when they announced Warp the first time. My accusations were over-reaching, and I ultimately retracted them. But I'm still skeptical, and I still won't use Warp.

Here's what still bothers me: Cloudflare is a single company with points of presence all over the world, handling traffic for websites all over the world (including some big ones), and now trying to attract consumers worldwide to proxy their traffic through its network. That's a lot of power, and we all know the saying about power and corruption. It doesn't matter how conscientious the leadership are. I'd prefer that the temptation to abuse that power was just not there at all.

My idea of a better Internet is a return to the way the Internet was -- a large number of small providers, communicating with each other over open standard protocols. So, yes, I should switch to something other than Comcast here in my apartment. So far, I've been afraid that doing that would leave me with a truly abysmal quality of service. (I'm in Bellevue, Washington.) But at least I can avoid adding Cloudflare, with its terrifying power, to the mix.

Granted, I mostly use the Internet on a stationary computer with a cable connection at home. About the only thing I do on my phone away from a WiFi connection is request an Uber ride. And I do need that to work reliably. But it is working just fine without Warp. So, maybe Warp is just not for me. Still, for the people that would benefit, I'm afraid of how much more power they're going to be giving Cloudflare when they tap that "on" button.

aasdasdasdasd2• 7 years ago

When I look at friends and family, they use their phones for everything because Computer UX failed. And they will switch to whatever public WiFi is available because their expensive yet small mobile data plan.

I can see how some people would benefit from this kind of VPN.

mwcampbell11• 7 years ago

Another commenter on this thread said that there are already VPN services with Wireguard support and easy-to-use apps. Why not recommend those to friends and family?

tmikaeld4• 7 years ago

Can't the same be said about any of the huge hosting companies such as OVH, Hetzner, 1&1, AWS, etc.

And any VPN provider that hosts their servers and routes their traffic through unknown datacenters?

I'd rather trust Cloudflare that has a great track-record (+Public Canary and are on US Privacy Shield), than any random VPN provider.

mwcampbell11• 7 years ago

Maybe I'll feel better if some other company releases a product that directly competes with Warp.

zzzcpan3• 7 years ago

Trust with what? Warp is specifically designed to reveal your IP address. This is as anti-privacy VPN as a VPN can be. Which is absolutely not surprising coming from a US corporation.

eastdakota4• 7 years ago

Early on in Cloudflare’s history when we were asked who our competition was we said Facebook. The concern was that the challenges of being online would get so hard that individual websites would give up and just move to run Facebook pages. We saw our role as providing the security and performance needed to compete without making you give in to use an all-consuming platform.

We haven’t said that in a long time, but I was reminded of it while we were on our IPO Road Show. One investor we met with said:

“Here’s how I think of you: Cloudflare is to Facebook as Shopify is to Amazon.”

That resonated to me and reminded me of our earliest days and why we started the company.

So I appreciate the concern but hope there will always be more independent web because we exist than there would be if we didn’t.

rogerkirkness• 7 years ago

Totally agree with that analogy having worked @ Shopify. We shall see which is more durable long term.

trenning• 7 years ago

Basically we should trust you because you're not facebook. Haven't you personally shut down websites because you don't like their content?

mwcampbell11• 7 years ago

Thank you for taking time to share your perspective. However, I remain skeptical.

It's true that a website using Cloudflare is more independent than a Facebook page, in that in the former case, the company can take their domain to another provider. But my idea of an independent Web is a large number of websites depending on a large number of high-quality hosting providers. The latter number will inevitably be smaller, but shouldn't be single-digit. That would lead to too much potential for abuse of power.

Also, the more sites are using a single provider with its black-box algorithms and heuristics, the more potential there is for bad consequences for innocent users when those things misfire. That's what worries me about the bot-fighting feature you launched on Monday.

To respond specifically to part of what you said:

The concern was that the challenges of being online would get so hard that individual websites would give up and just move to run Facebook pages.

I don't think I understand how Cloudflare actually helps here. I think the average bar, karaoke DJ (I love karaoke), spa, or other small business that might just use a Facebook page would be served just as well by the kind of hosting provider that gives your website a single IP address pointing to a single machine. Are DDoS attacks and bots really that big of a problem? If so, I haven't run into them in the 16 years that I was the programmer and sysadmin for a small company (admittedly, online services are that company's business). Maybe we just didn't make the right enemies? Now, maybe small web hosting providers could make it even easier to set up a new website, but Cloudflare doesn't do anything about that problem anyway. If the concern is performance, maybe we need better alternatives to WordPress and Drupal, and more local hosting providers, so the website for small businesses can be closer to their mostly-local customers without using a CDN.

ttul• 7 years ago

Would you now consider that AWS is Cloudflare’s greatest threat?

hinkley2• 7 years ago

I don't have a horse in this race, but observing this back and forth is reminding me of Nietzsche:

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

danShumway2• 7 years ago

but hope there will always be more independent web because we exist than there would be if we didn’t.

I'm wary about joining in on Cloudflare bashing. I like Cloudflare. But...

The mark of a responsible company is that it has plans to mitigate potential harm once it stops being responsible. At one point growing up, I would have made the same arguments you make here about Google. They're not perfect, but they're better than the alternative.

The problem is that this promise essentially boils down to, "we'll try very hard not to be bad." You can't make that promise, even if you're a good person. At some point you're going to either retire or die, and your company will be handed off to other people. Your comment doesn't make me feel any better, because it reads to me like your plan is, "things won't go wrong", and you don't know that.

I'm glad Cloudflare exists, and I do think you're doing a heck of a lot more good than harm. Cloudflare is about as close as anyone can get to an ethical company. But if this is the attitude, then Cloudflare is not a responsible company, because it's not making plans for what will happen after its owners turn evil. Cloudflare is an ally for the Open Web right now. It doesn't have a backup strategy I can see for when that changes.

The Shopify analogy is actually really fitting to me. Shopify is better than Amazon, but Shopify is definitely not where I want the future of commerce to be. Many of the problems and risks inherent in Amazon's design are also inherent in Shopify -- Shopify just happens to be a more ethical company that tries harder not to exploit those flaws.

At some point in the future, once we've all centralized everything onto Shopify, that will change and Shopify will become the new Amazon. And at some point in the future, maybe even decades from now, Cloudflare will become evil. All powerful companies eventually become evil, it's inevitable.

irq-1• 7 years ago

Could you add Privacy restrictions? I'd like to see a maximum 18 month data retention, and some restriction on changing the terms: promise to never change them, or only change with 6 month public notice... idk

aftbit• 7 years ago

How do you protect yourselves from becoming part of the USA's internet surveillance network? You're exposed to National Security Letters and you lost the case with the Ninth.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/ninth-circuit-rules-on-nsl-gag-o...

tiffanyh• 7 years ago

I have always thought it’d be super interesting if Cloudflare owned Twilio (or vis versa)

Sir_Cmpwn• 7 years ago

The fact that this names four companies and remains an effective analogy is deeply troubling. There should be so many actors in all of these spaces that listing them would be a challenge.

cj3• 7 years ago

I agree using Cloudflare proxy (or really any VPN) gives the company a lot of power.

But the idea of Cloudflare intercepting all of my traffic doesn't bother me since the alternative is simply another company (Spectrum, or my random friend's wifi, or Starbucks) intercepting all of my traffic by virtue of being my ISP. It's up to you which is the lesser of two evils.

I suppose Cloudflare may have more insight into the data being proxied if they're also managing the SSL certificates at the other end, however.

mwcampbell11• 7 years ago

I can believe that Cloudflare's current leadership are currently more conscientious than, say, Comcast's. But, especially post-IPO, what is that actually worth? I think that, worldwide, it's likely that Cloudflare is already bigger than Comcast. So, unless I'm given evidence to the contrary, I think Comcast is the lesser evil.

bassman9000• 7 years ago

Is your legal relationship with Cloudfare the same as with your ISP? Is Cloudfare liable for the same things as the ISP? Genuinely asking, I have no clue, just a vague sense that it's not apples to apples.

derefr2• 7 years ago

How would your “better Internet” work when it reaches an ocean? Maybe this doesn’t matter to you, as someone who lives in the US and mostly access websites hosted in the US; but for the majority of the world, getting access to “the Internet” is more about tapping into the millisecond-latency backbone of submarine cables, than it is about last-mile residential ISPs. Those submarine cables form a natural monopoly, there’s no escaping that. They’re utility infrastructure, like country-spanning bridges.

And the usual (optimal?) outcome for ownership of utility infrastructure, is that it gets held as a “public resource” by the government of the country or countries that built it; and then companies are contracted to manage it. From there, you end up with multilateral organizations weaving those pieces of infrastructure together in a top-down way (like shipping routes, or the postal system, or, hopefully one day, low-earth orbit.)

Which is far from an anarchosyndicalist mesh of interested companies, organizations, and individuals (ala the early Internet, or the HAM radio network), but we’ve never seen an ararchosyndicalist mesh successfully serving as a reliable/fault-tolerant backbone for any commercial endeavour so far, and I don’t know if it could.

mwcampbell11• 7 years ago

Fair enough. But let's not add into the mix a single company that spans the whole world yet is headquartered in a single country.

kortilla• 7 years ago

Submarine cables absolutely are not a monopoly, natural or otherwise. It’s the ocean, it’s pretty fucking big, and lots of companies and countries pay more cable every day.

reaperducer2• 7 years ago

the way the Internet was -- a large number of small providers, communicating with each other over open standard protocols

I don't remember the internet ever being like that.

I remember when you couldn't e-mail someone in another city without going through gateways. When you couldn't visit the majority of major web sites without downloading plug-ins. When you knew the information you wanted was out there, but couldn't get to it because it was behind obtuse, non-searchable infrastructure.

To me, the internet today isn't perfect. But it's a heck of a lot better than its romanticized distant past.

As for WARP, I'll give it a try. I don't fully trust Cloudflare, but I trust it a heck of a lot more than I trust my ISP or my cell phone provider. Long ago, both of those entities burned privacy bridges. Cloudflare hasn't done so. Yet, anyway.

tomc1985• 7 years ago

When you couldn't visit the majority of major web sites without downloading plug-ins.

I was on the web since AOL added it to their client in the mid-90s and it was never as bad as you're hinting it is.

hinkley2• 7 years ago

I'd like to be in a world where if Cloudflare or AWS is down my websites and the sites I enjoy are still up.

But to do that I'd need to have replication not just across data centers but across providers. And it's hard enough getting your team to understand how one provider works. We'd have to go an awful long way toward standardizing and dare I say comodifying these companies to get there.

But as Fortune 500 companies have known for longer than Fortune has existed, if you have two vendors you can play off of each other your life tends to go a lot better. Right now almost none of us have that, and I suspect we are all a little poorer for it.

mdb3332• 7 years ago

sure... but I'd trust Cloudflare over Comcast anyday.

Plus, (1) you can turn on/off WARP at your leisure and (2) they've explicitly committed to limited logging and not selling data which is pretty huge.

I use a small local provider where possible... but the reality is that they have to lease their lines from AT&T anyway. In general, there are very few providers out there that have capability to offer competitive services.

tripzilch3• 7 years ago

This is exactly my scepticism. Also, they always happen to be rooted in the US where my data has no rights and come with a general cultural lack of understanding of consumer protections.

This isn't power that good intentions are going to keep straight.

philliphaydon2• 7 years ago

I switched it on this morning and switched it off again after 10 minutes. It was so slow I couldn’t load web pages or send messages on WhatsApp. Maybe too many people joining in a short time.

zackbloom8• 7 years ago

Please be sure to file a bug report in the app if you can. Every report helps us fix issues and make WARP better.

philliphaydon2• 7 years ago

I didn’t think it was a bug. Just too much load. Will try again in a day or so.

ksec• 7 years ago

Just wanted to say Thank You. I could only wish this was released a little sooner, but better late than Never. The Hong Kong people desperately need something like this to avoid ISP monitoring. I wonder if something similar is planned for Windows and Mac?

P.S Regarding the 10GB, have been on the waiting list since April 1st, nothing shown up yet.

ianmurrays• 7 years ago

I don't see it either, perhaps a slow rollout?

sigjuice2• 7 years ago

I’m still #700K on the Warp waitlist

Edit: And the wait is over!! WARP is now available!

zackbloom8• 7 years ago

We're working our way through the waitlist now, hoping to get to everyone today. If you have an up-to-date version of the 1.1.1.1 app running you'll get a push notification when we are ready for you to opt-into WARP.

StavrosK2• 7 years ago

I was in the waitlist on my old phone but just got a new one, is there any way I can get the 10 GB too?

asdkhadsj2• 7 years ago

Re HK, how could something like this even be used? I would have thought ISP traffic would ensure this is being blacklisted.

tick_tock_tick• 7 years ago

Blacklisting it would require them blacklisting all of cloudflare.

olgs• 7 years ago

Thank you! I have been waiting since April and also on the Testflight beta. Have been looking forward to recommending this to my friends and family that needs a casual VPN for those use cases where they are visiting a unfamiliar hotspot.

Heads up that the 10GB is also not showing up.

kylehotchkiss• 7 years ago

Super excited to give this a few month paid trial. I've seen time and time again that Cloudflare takes the value of privacy seriously. Alternative VPNs seem to be running on AWS or GCP anyways.

I spend a lot of time outside the USA and have privacy concerns a bit beyond USAs typical data collection. I've been enjoying the 1.1.1.1 app since April without issues.

I'd love to see the speed comparison examples soon!

kristofferR• 7 years ago

It's borderline unusable for me.

It takes 20 seconds for every YouTube video to load while they load instantaneous without WARP:

https://streamable.com/9tp1k

eastdakota4• 7 years ago

Please file a bug report.

flarex• 7 years ago

I'm having problems recording the screen and playing back the video when reporting a bug.

judge20205• 7 years ago

YT is the only problem for me, likely something to do with YouTube trying to use gQUIC (but I'm not sure).

assafmo• 7 years ago

Also for me. Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Google Photos just load forever. Android 8.1.

opdahl• 7 years ago

Same for me. Uninstalled because of this. I feel for those people that won’t understand that the app that says they will get faster speed is the one slowing them down.

atonse2• 7 years ago

Great news! I'm still 155k on the warp waitlist since April. Is there a plan to push the waitlist along?

I'd love to get my non-tech family on this.

zackbloom8• 7 years ago

Yes, we are running through the waitlist now. Our hope is to get everyone activated today.

atonse2• 7 years ago

Awesome, thank you :)

cocoggu• 7 years ago

Works fine in Beijing, thanks!

AznHisoka3• 7 years ago

Are u able to browse blocked sites with it on? IE Gmail, Youtube, etc.

Sami_Lehtinen• 7 years ago

Nobody mentioned IPv6 support yet. It's nice as well. There are many VPN providers out there without IPv6 support.

abtinf2• 7 years ago

Can someone explain the difference between warp and warp+? I’ve read the blog and the App Store description, both of which completely fail to identify the difference.

zackbloom8• 7 years ago

Hopefully I can! WARP uses a protocol called WireGuard to secure your Internet traffic. Your encrypted traffic flows over that protocol to the closest Cloudflare data center before it is released onto the public Internet.

WARP+ takes that one step further. Rather than releasing your traffic directly onto the Internet, we use all the data we have from our Argo product [1] to route your traffic to _another_ Cloudflare data center via the route over the Internet with the best possible performance. That data center will be closer to your traffic's destination, hopefully improving the performance. In effect your traffic will bypass Internet congestion and slow links with the goal of better time-to-first-byte performance.

1- https://www.cloudflare.com/products/argo-smart-routing/

commoner10• 7 years ago

Why should a user pay $4.99/month for Warp+ when they can pay less than that for a traditional VPN that masks their IP address? Does the performance benefit make up for the relatively weaker privacy?

abtinf2• 7 years ago

Thanks, this is much more clear.

the_duke• 7 years ago

I can't really see the value proposition here.

Most use a VPN to add a layer of anonymity (hidden IP) and to circumvent geo blocking.

All this does is hide unencrypted traffic from the local network and maybe give a moderate speedup, but one that will probably be restricted to non-Cloudflare properties. For other properties, especially high-traffic ones with their own fancy routing logic, this will probably be more detrimental than helpful.

Admittedly a lot of people also just use VPNs because of the countless ads telling them that the Web is terribly insecure without one. I don't see this being much of a success without big ad spending.

Might work out just fine for CF, but I will pass.

nlh• 7 years ago

I'm in the (likely) target demographic for this (and just signed up for the paid version). I don't care about true anonymity or geo-blocking - what I care about is that Verizon/Comcast both do HEAVY traffic shaping to suit them, not me. I.e. I'm promised "720p" video quality on Netflix when streaming over LTE and yet, for some strange reason that goly gee I can't quite understand (/s) it's never very good and always slow, even with full signal.

I'd rather just encrypt all my traffic and let Cloudflare make the routing decisions - that alone is worth an extra $5/month.

rsync2• 7 years ago

I don't understand how "Warp" would help you in the long run - wouldn't we expect Verizon et. al to treat cloudflare endpoints as "suspect" or "throttle-worthy" ?

TOR endpoints are discriminated against by many endpoints and providers - why not Warp endpoints ?

stunt• 7 years ago

Nothing is free!

sb057• 7 years ago

Does WARP block access to websites that Cloudflare has specifically denied a platform to their other services? It only makes sense that if they refused to do business with a website because they are "an environment that revels in violating [the spirit of anti-hate law]" that they would also prevent end-users from accessing it under the same grounds, no?

tosh• 7 years ago

Super excited about 1.1.1. Warp.

kudos @ launching, have been waiting for this

How I see it: a well operated VPN service for whenever you trust Cloudflare more than the internet connection you’re currently on (coffee shop or airport wifi, co-working space, random mobile ISP when traveling or even at home, …).

Compare this to the current best alternative: difficult to evaluate VPNs ranging from paid to free & non-trivial to set up.

Not saying there are no alternatives but even for me it is not easy to tell which ones are actually better or in the same ballpark (@ trust, speed, ops-skills, …) let alone for the longtail of users who would be better off with something like Cloudflare than with a random shady VPN or nothing.

hecatoncheires2• 7 years ago

If I were to use a VPN I'd stick with providers with proven track records of responding to court orders with empty logs, not the company with a CEO who capriciously kicks sites off their platform in response to online mobs.

I'd also feel very uneasy with continuing to feed the consolidation of the internet's traffic. Giving full control of your phone's routing to Cloudflare is sold as improving performance, but what it also does is give Cloudflare a lot of flexibility to pay less in transit costs and have a stronger position for peering agreements. Today that might be good in preventing ISP shakedowns, but very bad tomorrow if ISPs have to pay Cloudflare for the privilege of accessing the majority of the internet.

sp3324• 7 years ago

This is funny to me because CF's previous reputation was that they'd do business with anyone no matter how scummy. They're notorious for selling to both sides when criminal gangs were DDoS'ing each other. But they terminate service for a grand total of two sites and suddenly they're "capricious".

hecatoncheires2• 7 years ago

Sorry but when it comes to VPN providers you have to have a pristine track record, not a couple whoopsies here and there. And I doubt that grand total is going to stay stuck at two when they're hiring Antifa supporters/members.

makomk2• 7 years ago

As far as I know, CloudFlare are still willing to provide service to all of the DDoS services that let anyone with a few dollars knock any company which doesn't buy from CloudFlare off the internet. They just don't have the excuse that they're doing it out of some kind of belief in free speech anymore.

sigmar2• 7 years ago

[In order to not spread bad info I'm deleting my paragraph where I misunderstand what WARP is]

Even this blog post is confusing "From a technical perspective, WARP is a VPN." Then contrasts WARP with a "traditional VPN"

rrss3• 7 years ago

Pretty sure warp is a vpn. The "just DNS queries" service is 1.1.1.1 without warp.

zackbloom8• 7 years ago

This is incorrect. WARP is the VPN, WARP+ is a series of routing enhancements designed to improve performance. Sorry for the confusion, clearly we need to explain it better.

sigmar2• 7 years ago

Ah. I turned on WARP, then googled "what is my ip?" and it is returning the IP address that I had before turning on WARP. Is that not the intended behavior?

edit: read your other comments and see this is (in some circumstances) intended behavior. I don't think you should claim WARP is a VPN if you aren't offering privacy from the endpoint. Perhaps the app should say "your browsing traffic is now private" rather than "your internet is private."

xwdv• 7 years ago

Just a reminder that Cloudflare is now a publicly traded company, and if you would have bought at the IPO at $18 you would be up 15% by now, with more expected to come.

WhompingWindows• 7 years ago

Can someone here give me a layman's rundown of WARP and why I might want to use it on my Android phone?

Pfhreak4• 7 years ago

When you use the internet, your ISP (and some others) can see where you are going. They might sell that info to advertisers, or you might be blocked from accessing some websites depending on your country.

Warp essentially shields where you are going. The only folks knowing where you go are you, your destination, and Warp.

Warp+ also gives you access to a private, faster network.

xorcist2• 7 years ago

I fully understand why a company would like to launch this type of service. This is the free market after all, and it would make the company insanely valuable, should it succeed.

However I do have an issue with the marketing behind it. While not said outright, there is a clear message here that due to some unspecified magic your network performance will increase. That's clearly stretching the laws of physics, at the very least. There are also nebulous privacy statements which looks conspicuously like services that shield your identity, which does not seem to be the case here.

If the real intent here is to help underprivileged Internet users escape their great firewall, onboarding some regular users might be necessary to make the service more legitimate. However even a generous reading of this announcement does not seem to support this use case. The consumer VPN business is a questionable business at best, and this does not look different.

rrss3• 7 years ago

That's clearly stretching the laws of physics, at the very least

This is not clear to me. Few mobile users have pings to anywhere pushing up against the speed of light, and the bandwidth/loss/routing is not close to being limited by physics.

zzzcpan3• 7 years ago

No, he's correct here, it's an extra indirection and so overall it can only hurt performance, not improve it. For example, ISPs often have caching servers from Google installed and Google is the biggest traffic generator. If you route traffic through somewhere else you are going to reach different Google's caching servers that are farther away and over more congested links.

xorcist2• 7 years ago

It was not meant in a literal sense, I hope that much was clear. The language was suggestive on purpose considering the article being commented on. A longer path takes longer time as speed of light varies comparably little, that much is physics.

And sending traffic by way of a third party is very likely to make for a longer path, for most people in most circumstances. Not by necessity but because few have that lousy routing agreements, unless we're talking about special circumstances such as 6to4 tunnels and the like.

kev0092• 7 years ago

What basis are you making this on, have you worked on a multi-homed BGP environment before? There is a lot of latency hiding in the route maps and interconnections most providers use, and running your own lines can reduce a ton of jitter, route instability, congestion, and other common issues where most tech people oversimplify the constituents of the Internet.

dzhiurgis• 7 years ago

They could speed up your international traffic (they don't tho).

AlEinstein• 7 years ago

"due to some unspecified magic your network performance will increase"

In this post, they say that routing over cloudflare's network can be up to 30% faster because they maintain more efficient routing information than the public network:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-technical-challenges/

scoutt• 7 years ago

Now that Cloudflare has their own VPN, will there be an increase in showing those annoying captcha/challenge pages for connections made from every other VPN/Tor?

rsync2• 7 years ago

I think it is more appropriate to say that Cloudflare has their own TOR ...

As I ask elsewhere in this comment section, I don't see why "warp" endpoints won't be discriminated against the same way TOR endpoints are.

commoner10• 7 years ago

Tor masks a user's IP address, while Warp does not.

Warp endpoints will most likely not face the same kind of "discrimination". However, Warp does not provide any anonymity, which is the main reason people use Tor.

vijaybritto• 7 years ago

Installed on android. Doesn't work. Says "connection interrupted". Looks like it needs more work.

sebasmurphy2• 7 years ago

Just going to throw this out there for anyone who is hesitant using a vpn managed by another service. You can set up your own easily using the ansible scripts provided by trailofbits, which supports both IPSEC and wireguard.

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

a small DO (Digital Ocean) instance is only $5 a month and comes with 1TB outbound bandwidth (last I checked), which ends up being cheaper than most commercial offerings.

mr_puzzled3• 7 years ago

On their patreon goal of $1600/month : "We can start working on an easy-to-use mobile app that let people deploy their own VPN server without touching a terminal window."

Damn, that would be so cool.

sebasmurphy2• 7 years ago

I hadn't heard about that yet. Will have to look into it.

tucif2• 7 years ago

Or host it for free in one of Oracle's cloud 'always free' tier VMs.

Disclaimer: I'm an employee

IOT_Apprentice2• 7 years ago

Oracle? Yikes.

megous• 7 years ago

Does it have public IP?

jlgaddis• 7 years ago

"Oracle" and "free" in the same sentence? Has hell finally frozen over?

Havoc• 7 years ago

Cool. Didn't know about free oracle vm. Thanks

fc_barnes• 7 years ago

I'm confused about who sees what IP when. I'm also confused about the bandwidth limits on plus. Having essentially two products blended together, and using new technology that behaves uniquely, makes the communication lift here that much heavier.

judge20205• 7 years ago

Plus uses their priate backbone, so it costs them money to send traffic through it.

The IP discovery is currently only available for CF websites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070828

OrgNet3• 7 years ago

is that a VPN? why did it take so long to implement as they stated multiple times?

I try to avoid Cloudflare if I have an option because they are getting too big.

rmateu• 7 years ago

1.1.1.1 DNS and mobile app have improved my internet experience considerably outside the US (currently in Costa Rica). I'm very excited about WARP and totally buy the "everyday user" premise.

As soon as it feels stable I'm telling my activist brother-in-law in Venezuela to install it and enable WARP. Personally I trust Cloudflare above any ISP. I see myself installing it over holidays to the rest of the family there.

I understand and celebrate HN's high level discussion about concentration of power on the internet and its effects. But at the same time I want to celebrate a geeky company, releasing something cool, with a free tier – and an evident openness about its plans and how it works. Congrats on the launch!

ummonk3• 7 years ago

Congratulations on launching another great feature! I've been patiently on the waitlist for a very long time now, and it's great to see it out now!

fooey• 7 years ago

I wonder if there's any chance they'll add an ad blocking feature.

I'd probably give WARP a shot but I'm not willing to give up DNS66 to switch over

sascha_sl• 7 years ago

Argo is really cool... and also really unaffordable and solving a problem we wouldn't have in the first place if "net neutrality" was something tier 3 ISPs took seriously and stopped routing me across the world to save a few cents because one of their upstream provider provides cheaper bandwidth on a less congested route.

ikeboy• 7 years ago

Speedtest showing download speeds 3X slower (around 35MBPS vs 110).

On PIA, which costs me around $3/month when I buy yearly, I get around 75MBPS, it does hide IP, and I can select the country and region I want. Also it's available on my computer and on multiple devices at once.

I don't see the value of WARP+ at $4.99/month. Less features and slower.

cpeterso2• 7 years ago

Netflix's fast.com speed test on my iPhone:

  * Comcast without WARP:  460 Mbps
  * Comcast with WARP:      30 Mbps
  * T-Mobile without WARP: 500 Kbps
  * T-Mobile with WARP:    600 Kbps

Regular WARP doesn't claim any performance speedups, so I'm curious to see how WARP+ compares. In the meantime, I will disable WARP for my home Wi-Fi.

mapniels• 7 years ago

fast.com speed test on iPhone:

  * Hi3G (Carrier Aggregation) without WARP+: 39 Mbps
  * Hi3G (Carrier Aggregation) with WARP+:    39 Mbps
  * Hi3G without WARP+:                       12 Mbps
  * Hi3G with WARP+:                          32 Mbps

mr_puzzled3• 7 years ago

Really cool service. Using warp on my phone and it surprisingly makes a big difference in locations with spotty 4G. Couple of questions :

* I read that cloudflare generates a unique id for each install and the purpose was to track referrals. Consider adding an option to opt out of the unique id tracking since some users will be concerned about it.

* Any plans to add an option to use an ip from cloudflare instead of my ip address being visible to the websites I visit, at least on the paid plan? I know this opens a can of worms dealing with abuse of the service which could lead to certain ip addresses belonging to cloudflare being blacklisted.

pedrocx4863• 7 years ago

Cloudflare has made pretty clear in this thread that they don't plan on stopping the IP from being exposed, they also plan to expose to all sites, even the ones on non-CF networks.

tptacek2• 7 years ago

Exciting! We're a tiny company and have sponsored WireGuard two years in a row; you can see us on the WireGuard home page. Cloudflare is a gigantic company who just used the WireGuard design work to fork the project. Has Cloudflare given a cent to WireGuard? Why isn't their logo on the site?

spearo77• 7 years ago

s/home page/donations page/

https://www.wireguard.com/donations/

coolspot2• 7 years ago

AFAIK They acted same with nginx.

fragmede2• 7 years ago

And why should they? WireGuard is free† so it seems (to me) a bit futile trying to shame them on a niche site like HN and expect them to change their behavior and support the community that they draw from. Mind you, this problem is not limited to Wireguard/Cloudflare. The NTP servers, curl, libssl prior to Heartbleed, the list of important open source software in need of funding goes on. It's fighting also a basic refusal or desire to pay. When was the last time someone you know paid Redhat for CentOS or Canonical for Ubuntu on principal?

What/how can we do more to encourage corporate sponsorship (either time or money) of code that's critical to a company? There are various ways the community has tried to enable this, in different ways. Librapay and platforms like it try to make it easier (Think Patreon but less commercial). The Linux Foundation takes large corporate donations and distributes it out to a large number of projects they support. Stick a paypal email address or bitcoin address in the Readme.md as a "serverless" way to receive money.

However at the end of the day, that seems to not work. Curl is used in billions of devices but the majority of the work on it has been done by one person for 20 years.

Something is not working as we hoped.

†) specifically Open Source under the GPLv2 license ‡) https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/

tptacek2• 7 years ago

I don't know. That's certainly a way of looking at the world. To answer that question, I'd have to give you a deep reason why companies like ours and Trail of Bits and the VPN providers donated. I can't tell you any more than "it seemed like the right thing to do".

krn2• 7 years ago

And why should they?

Because that's a sensible thing to do when someone's open source project is at the very core of your commercial product?

When was the last time someone you know paid Redhat for CentOS or Canonical for Ubuntu on principal?

Netflix and Tarsnap have donated to FreeBSD Foundation multiple times[1], and Jan Koum has donated over $1 million after selling WhatsApp[2].

Also, look at how many companies are sponsoring LetsEncrypt[3] – including Akamai and Fastly – but not Cloudflare.

[1] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donors/

[2] https://www.freebsdnews.com/2016/12/02/jan-koum-founder-what...

[3] https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/

OrgNet3• 7 years ago

use wireguard instead if you want to be safer... not exciting at all unless you are invested in cloudflare

mr_toad2• 7 years ago

If I’m not mistaken, they’ve open sourced their “fork” (actually more of a rewrite than a fork).

https://github.com/cloudflare/boringtun/

Which is more valuable to the community? I don’t really think you can quantify it.

cj3• 7 years ago

I signed up for Cloudflare Warp last night.

Any idea why iOS apps seem to not want to update using Warp? I’ve noticed the same when using other VPNs (including on Android).

I disabled Warp this morning after the Apple App Store wouldn’t update apps.

quotemstr• 7 years ago

I'm sure as hell not going to trust Cloudflare with my DNS, and I'm especially not going to route all my traffic through them. That company shredded its credibility. Centralization always leads to corruption.

trollied2• 7 years ago

Someone’s already got it working on macOS: https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1176893448445558784

OJFord2• 7 years ago

Fast work indeed, the meat of it:

(registering a `wg` generated public key with CF)

    api=https://api.cloudflareclient.com/v0i1909051800
    ins() { vrb=$1; shift; curl -s -H 'user-agent:' -H 'content-type: application/json' -X "${vrb}" "${api}/$@"; }
    sec() { ins "$@" -H 'authorization: Bearer '"${reg[1]}"''; }

    cfg=($(if [[ -e "${usr}" ]]; then
        reg=($(cat "${usr}"))
        test "${#reg[@]}" -eq 2
        sec GET "reg/${reg[0]}"
    else
        reg=($(ins POST "reg" -d '{"install_id":"","tos":"'"$(date -u +%FT%T.000Z)"'","key":"'"${pub}"'","fcm_token":"","type":"ios","locale":"en_US"}' |
            jq -r '.result|.id+" "+.token'))
        test "${#reg[@]}" -eq 2
        echo "${reg[@]}" >"${usr}"
        sec PATCH "reg/${reg[0]}" -d '{"warp_enabled":true}'
    fi | jq -r '.result.config|(.peers[0]|.public_key+" "+.endpoint.v4)+" "+.interface.addresses.v4'))
    test "${#cfg[@]}" -eq 3

cosmojg• 7 years ago

Will this work on Linux?

throwid• 7 years ago

I just bought a monthly 1.1.1.1 + WARP subscription, and it's slow as hell. Maybe because I'm in Indonesia. But it works just fine with WARP disabled.

Another problem is 1.1.1.1 suddenly disconnected when I'm not browsing the internet, like watching videos or reading something on my phone.

Hope you guys fix these problems soon.

StavrosK2• 7 years ago

I have a 300/300 symmetric connection in Barcelona and only get 80/0.07 Mbps with Warp. The 80 is fine, but what is up with 0.07 Mbps up, and why is it so jittery?

EDIT: Anyone in Barcelona want to go axe throwing in an hour?

coolspot2• 7 years ago

86.3/0.28 with Warp, 109.4/117.8 without. I am in LA, CA, US.

steeve• 7 years ago

Same in Paris:500 down/60 up without Warp, 300 down/1.25 up with Warp

toothandtail• 7 years ago

My upload speed is horrendous using this. Usually 15mb now 0.72?

bigmattystyles• 7 years ago

Damn, I thought they had switched to OS/2

nocman• 7 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one who thought of that.

:-D

bithavoc2• 7 years ago

Love Warp, I was lucky enough to get into their Beta program via Testflight and it's been great and stable. many times I disabled it thinking my internet is broken because of Warp VPN and turns out to be my provider or wifi that is just down.

I wish they provided a desktop version, or at least to change all the traffic from my central MikroTik router to use Warp.

xeroaura2• 7 years ago

This might be interesting to you for running on desktop (its for Mac, but probably can do something similar for Windows?): https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1176893448445558784

losvedir• 7 years ago

Great that it's finally launched. I've been on the waitlist for months.

That said, I'm very ambivalent about Cloudflare.

On the one hand, I love them because they're doing a lot of cool stuff (shoutout to kentonv whose sandstorm project I loved, who works there now), and even own a bit of their stock.

On the other hand, them being an infrastructure company but also wading into what travels over their pipes makes me uncomfortable. I get that 8chan was horrible (and Stormfront before that, IIRC), but it shows more discretion than I'd like that that level of the stack. They seemed to be more hands-off in the past, so I wonder if the IPO changed that at all.

A policy question: forbidding 8chan as a Cloudflare customer is one thing, but what if someone was using Warp and tried to load wherever it is they moved to? Would Warp block that?

allworknoplay• 7 years ago

They didn't block requests to 8chan, they simply won't provide services to the site. If you're using cloudflare for DNS lookups, 8chan resolves just like any other non-cloudflare customer.

teddyh• 7 years ago

…until someone gets the media going about it, at which point they block it. And that time, they will have a precedent.

kentonv• 7 years ago

Thanks for the shoutout!

I wish we could have an actual conversation about the 8chan thing, but the public debate is far too emotionally charged for me to touch. :(

president• 7 years ago

How does the end user know if WARP is actually working? As I understand it, a regular VPN will mask your IP so you can tell very easily if you’re protected by checking your externally reported IP. How would you know with WARP?

judge20205• 7 years ago

It uses "connect on demand", at least on iOS, so iOS will block all traffic that doesn't go through the VPN (other than a few iOS services iirc).

Animats• 7 years ago

One backdoor to rule them all. They just have to be a target for NSA, the SVR, and the Third Department. How would you audit Cloudflare to find that?

acdha4• 7 years ago

The same way you audit Comcast, Verizon, Starbucks, etc. This is changing who you trust from many to a single provider but not otherwise removing the need for legal reform.

fragmede2• 7 years ago

I have a different reason for being unable to use Warp: I don't want to access a "proper" DNS server, I want a DNS server that blocks ads for me in Mobile Chrome (I am aware that ad-blocking is fully integrated w/ Mobile Safari). I currently use AdGuard to get this feature, which sets the DNS server to one that blackholes ad servers.

Still, it's quite exciting that Cloudflare's finally released Warp, and that the waitlist for Warp was so long.

hendersoon• 7 years ago

Rather than using the Adguard local VPN app, you can set your DNS to them.

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

Unfortunately this is only possible on wifi on iOS. On Android 9+ you can set custom DNS on both mobile and wifi.

godelmachine3• 7 years ago

Would anyone kindly elucidate on the difference between Warp vs VPN?

I recently purchased Adblock by Futuremind from AppStore, since I got really worried about my privacy. It has some features like local proxy DNS and setting up new rules. I keep my VPN on all day.

Before that, I used to use Hotspot Shield since that was free. I used to get only one server viz. USA.

I see internet speaks highly of NordVPN but that’s a whopping $85 which kinda burns a hole in my pocket. They claim that PWC has done an audit on them and confirmed that they don’t save users data.

Would someone here kindly guide me on the most reliable VPN out there, for iOS?

Thanks in advance for sorting me out :)

iamd3vil2• 7 years ago

Don't ever user free VPNs and especially something like Hotspot Shield. You can check https://thatoneprivacysite.net/ for a comparison of VPN services.

I use Mullvad VPN which supports both OpenVPN and Wireguard(which is the reason I use Mullvad) and costs 5 euros per month. You can use something like Bitcoin to pay if you want anonymity.

godelmachine3• 7 years ago

Thanks for opening my cautioning about HotSpot Shield.

5 euros/ month sounds expensive but does it give a bigger bang for your buck?

commoner10• 7 years ago

The main difference is that VPNs mask your IP address, while Warp does not. If you're using a VPN for online privacy, Warp would not be an adequate replacement.

cpeterso2• 7 years ago

The 1.1.1.1 app's original UI was nice and simple: just a big switch. But trying to cram WARP and WARP+ into the same UI is confusing. The same switch is now used to show and control multiple states: Disconnected, Connecting, Connected to WARP, Connected to WARP+, and Paused. In addition, there is redundant UI to switch between WARP and WARP+ in the "Additional Settings" menu and to unpause on the main screen.

hdivider• 7 years ago

I love it. You always have to make privacy and security tradeoffs -- and to me WARP is a promising initiative.

Question: is there an OSX version? Or am I just blind? :)

steveklabnik7• 7 years ago

Elsewhere in this thread the folks who work on this have stated that there are plans for desktop versions in the future.

acdha4• 7 years ago

This looks like a neat idea but I’ve haven't gotten it to connect on two WiFi networks or T-Mobile LTE. The one thing which could explain that is it showing me as having 0MB of WARP+ but there’s no way I’m paying before I can test it and it seems pointless if it requires the network provider to enable it.

steveklabnik7• 7 years ago

You should file a bug from within the app; you don't need WARP+ to use Warp and it shouldn't require anything from your provider.

acdha4• 7 years ago

I did, and was later able to connect using LTE so I suspect this is due to UDP being blocked on those WiFi networks but I don’t have an easy way to confirm that other than seeing the timeouts in the logs.

kev0092• 7 years ago

This is a huge technical accomplishment if you peruse the related blog post https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-technical-challenges/ around network topology. If you compare CF to Fastly, Akamai, and LLNW (the other 3 publicly traded CDNs) CF is so much better staffed and managed it is mind boggling to see how the others will remain relevant over a longer timescale. CF is one of the few recent tech IPOs where I haven't rolled my eyes and groaned. I used to work at one of the others so know quite a bit about this industry and how far behind the major players are.

dang• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21070315 is a related post.

leoplct• 7 years ago

Can you tell me a what I am risking not using WARP?

lighttower• 7 years ago

Does anyone know if it breaks VoWifi?

Zenst• 7 years ago

I'll give it a go, still have 1.1.1.1 installed, though disabled/stopped using it as upon my phone it just eat up battery. Kept trying on updates every now and then, but same. Though beyond that, can't say I've bothered to dig/look into it and figured due to my phone being a 3 year old mid-range affair, now what you would call low-end - though QC 430 2GB Ram kinda works ok.

david_shaw• 7 years ago

It will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit.

This is an interesting design choice.

I'm sure the idea here is to reduce the number of abuse complaints directed to Cloudflare, but it also seems to significantly reduce the value of the service.

I'm excited to try WARP, but without IP masking, I'll need to keep paying for a commercial VPN service. If I'm already paying for a commercial VPN, I don't see why I'd ever use WARP.

That said, I definitely trust Cloudflare more than PIA/NordVPN/etc. Some more "bulletproof" providers like Mullvad are probably even more trustworthy, but I don't think Cloudflare is going to mine (or sell) my data.

At this point, I'm just not sure what use-case WARP would really fill for me.

commoner10• 7 years ago

Warp is still useful for secure web browsing on public Wi-Fi networks that aren't protected with a password.

It's not a good option for you, since you already have a VPN, but you can recommend the free version of Warp to people who want to be more secure but don't want to pay for a VPN subscription.

Warp+ is less defensible.

gregimba• 7 years ago

days before the April 1 planned roll out. Please don't launch actual software on April 1st.

sabujp• 7 years ago

what is this exactly? proxying all your data through cloudflare or just dns traffic?

GauntletWizard• 7 years ago

I did a ctrl+f for "Onavo" and got nothing, so I'm going to say it loudly and publicly: There's no such thing as a free (lunch) VPN. Sure, Cloudflare has a premium product available, but the availability of a free version (not a free trial) means that, most likely, you're not the customer - You're the product. Your data, your browsing history, encrypted though they may be, are valauable to Cloudflare.

mleonhard• 7 years ago

Cloudflare WARP is an easy-to-use free VPN which protects your IP address from businesses who haven't paid Cloudflare yet.

Companies like InfoUSA can convert 95% of US IP addresses to physical addresses and household resident names. By inserting themselves in the network between users and websites, Cloudflare will soon be able to get a chunk of InfoUSA's advertising profits.

Remember, if you aren't paying for it then you are the product.

Stay away from Cloudflare WARP and use a real VPN.

est2• 7 years ago

FTA:

What WARP Is Not
From a technical perspective, WARP is a VPN. But it is designed for a very different audience than a traditional VPN. WARP is not designed to allow you to access geo-restricted content when you’re traveling. It will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit. If you’re looking for that kind of high-security protection then a traditional VPN or a service like Tor are likely better choices for you.

kabacha2• 7 years ago

Then what does it do?

WARP, instead, is built for the average consumer. It’s built to ensure that your data is secured while it’s in transit. So the networks between you and the applications you’re using can’t spy on you.

Isn't that what ssl does already lol? What a load of sham.

c256• 7 years ago

“Use a real VPN” is actually pretty hard for a random user: there are constant ads for VON services that turn out to not protect their users’ traffic, and/or harvest and sell their users traffic, and yet are harder to use and more expensive.

Just like how “but they can see your email” isn’t enough of a deterrent to convince the majority of people to switch from free gmail (hotmail, yahoo, etc.) to a paid service with actual privacy, “Cloudflare can see your traffic” is unlikely to convince people who are more worried about nebulous sniffers and scammers at their local coffee shops than giant internet infrastructure companies.

RyanShook• 7 years ago

Having a hard time seeing why consumers want or need this.

acd10j• 7 years ago

Can't connect to Warp+ and Warp on phone when connected with office Wifi Network.

kevincox• 7 years ago

One nice thing about this is that it allows accessing IPv6 sites over and IPv4-only connection.

I'll definitely be using this as I can only connect to my house via IPv6 and my mobile provider doesn't offer it. This means that I can just toggle on the VPN for when I need IPv6 connectivity.

gorbypark• 7 years ago

I'm confused as to the difference between Warp and Warp+. Upgrading to Warp+ says it routes all your traffic through Cloudflare's servers. So I guess regular Warp doesn't, then. Is Warp "just" DNS over HTTPS/TLS and Warp+ is a more traditional VPN?

lone_haxx0r• 7 years ago

After they abandoned 8chan, I don't think I'll ever trust this company again.

antpls• 7 years ago

Tried on Android 9, installed the VPN and turned on "always-on" mode and "disallow non-VPN connections". Telegram and Instagram stopped to work, so I uninstalled.

WARP is here

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