Beta for WARP for macOS and Windows

https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-the-beta-for-warp-for-macos-and-windows/

42 14 6 years ago

blog.cloudflare.com

One of the fun things about working at a place is you get to try stuff out early; as a Windows user, I was one of the first folks outside of the team to try out Warp for Windows.

I would say "I'm happy to answer questions" but I'm not sure what I could answer; for a while now, I frankly forget that I have it even installed. It pretty much Just Works.

Cyberdog• 6 years ago

Here's a question. I've read the article twice and I can't figure out what the product is. What is it? Is it a VPN service?

steveklabnik5• 6 years ago

So, 1.1.1.1 is Cloudflare's public DNS resolver. It's the fastest resolver on Earth: https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers It's fast because Cloudflare has 200 data centers all over the globe, and you connect to the nearest one.

Warp is a set of apps that will set your phone (and with this, today, your computer) to use 1.1.1.1 for resolving your DNS. But additionally, it uses the Wireguard protocol to connect, which is a VPN protocol. This hides the contents of your connection from your ISP or network provider. It does mean you're connecting to Cloudflare, and so we've made a bunch of privacy commitments, and gotten external auditing to back those up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22747770

The above is all free. You can pay a small subscription fee to get access to Warp+, which uses Cloudflare's "Argo" product to route your requests faster.

Does that make more sense?

zamadatix• 6 years ago

It's Wireguard to the nearest Cloudflare node. WARP+ is the same but will route your traffic over their private infrastructure for parts of the journey where they think it's faster/better than the normal internet path.

toomuchtodo• 6 years ago

This is awesome. Are there any plans to integrate with device firmware like openwrt?

steveklabnik5• 6 years ago

I don't know; I'm not on that team.

splitrocket• 6 years ago

Can I run my own WARP server? If not, I'm not that interested.

If I'm trading one centralized service for another, there is no net gain.

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 years ago

I dunno; I don't know if I really like or trust cloudflare, but I'm sure I trust them more than my ISP.

asdkhadsj• 6 years ago

Yup, that's exactly where I sit. A well implemented VPN is useful because I heavily distrust my ISP. I _could_ use some other big VPN provider, I guess, but I've always admired the tech stack of Cloudflare.. so I'm interested.

And fwiw, since I'm sure someone will think it - I don't want to manage my own VPN on some remote server. Not only would I put myself at risk because I don't have the experience to manage a secure server of such importance, but all I did was move my risk from my ISP to some other endpoint (VPS hosting/etc).

It feels like a game of risks no matter what you do.

jedieaston• 6 years ago

It's just Wireguard that doesn't route to Cloudflare servers and that's pretty easy to setup with Docker or algo or whatever. But self-hosting a VPN for privacy is questionable as to how much it helps (since the VPN server is probably sitting on your home network unless you put it in AWS/Digital Ocean/Azure).

(if the address you are trying to go to is hosted by Cloudflare, they route it using your normal connection so that it'll be quicker than going an additional couple hops to the WARP server and then to the Cloudflare dc nearest to the WARP server. you could say that this kills the privacy argument, but using their VPN at all means they can see what sites you are going to, so you'd already be trusting that they don't log.)

Beta for WARP for macOS and Windows

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