Warp – Mobile VPN • Hacker News Board

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#181

Post by newaccoutnas » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #157

newaccoutnas wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the reasoning behind this[1]? It strikes of ulterior motives and turns me off, as a potential user. Any official response from Cloudflare? [1] https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-March/00404...

We're really happy to work with the WireGuard. We communicated with Jason throughout the process and have a ton of respect for him and the entire WireGuard community. In the short term, we need the flexibility to quickly update our code base to support the project we built it for. That's harder when you need to coordinate with people outside Cloudflare and when we need to move as fast as we plan to. However, we reall…

Thanks for the reply.

From what I understand, Jason was willing to make your guys head of a sub-project. I'm failing to see how this would hinder your development, considering you've probably got your own build and deployment systems anyway. The way you've done it feels like a 'chuck the code over the fence' style of interaction, which again - I can't see any rationale, from a project perspective (imho)

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#182

Post by PopeDotNinja » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

fooqux wrote: post #71

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #10

I wonder how well this works when using using wifi on and accessing a corporate intranet. I discovered https://myhrportal didn't work when I pinned my DNS to 8.8.8.8.

What made you think your corporate HR portal's DNS entry would be global? You're going to at least need a TLD there, buddy.

I didn't think it would work. From my own experiences...

One day when away from the office, I pinned my wifi DNS settings to 8.8.8.8 just to try it out & compare it to the DNS I normally use at home, but then I forgot to undo it. When I got back to the office, the office Intranet was unsurprisingly inaccessible, and I removed the pinned DNS settings. I knew how to solve the problem, but less savvy folks trying out the Cloudflare product might not, which could create some confusion for IT helpdesks.

Cloudflare is concerned with the user experience of people who don't know what a VPN is, and that's why I mentioned it. Normally I would have just tried it & reported the edge case I it exists, but the app isn't usable yet, so I posed the question instead. Judging by the downvotes, I should have mentioned that in my comment above :)

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#183

Post by jgrahamc » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

martingxx wrote: post #162

jgrahamc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not right now. The burden of supporting that as open source would be too high.

Why not release anyway (for transparency) but with explicitly no support?

Because that doesn't really work. We put the code out there and people start working on it. You think we're going to be able to _not_ look at what's people are doing?

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#184

Post by stavros » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

Shank wrote: post #149

arendtio wrote: post #85

> We built Warp around WireGuard So basically Cloudflare created an app with Cloudflare branding and set up a Wireguard server for everyone. No bad, but just check out the original: https://www.wireguard.com While I am not a big fan of VPNs in general, I have to admit, that Wireguard performs exceptionally well. I tested it a week ago and the added latency is pretty much just the network latency and the bandwidth los…

I consider myself fairly competent, and I couldn’t understand the wireguard documentation enough to setup my own install without resorting to algo [0]. There’s real value in wrapping a system like WireGuard into a product, because it democratizes technology rather than making it available only to those knowledgable enough to understand how to set it up. I think Warp is great in that regard. [0]: https://github.com/tr…

I was in the same boat, hopefully this will help:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-to-configure-wireguard/

It's actually very easy to set up, I don't know why the official docs make it seem super hard.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#185

Post by jgrahamc » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #180

jgrahamc wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get where you are coming from but I think there's a significant headwind to us doing something weirdly proprietary. If we were to create some two-tier Internet then our clients (who have web/API servers) would start having part of their audience/consumers get poorer performance or security or something. So we'd be sticking a finger in the eye of the people who pay us.

Hmm, I didn't consider that angle. Maybe I'm just a cynic, a byproduct of the 90s Microsoft monopoly and Linux backlash.

Nothing wrong with some cynicism. And I totally understand the concern, but one thing people always miss with Cloudflare is... follow the money. We get paid by people with web servers and API servers. We have to do things that keep them happy.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#186

Post by roberttod » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

rattray wrote: post #179

An aside from the comment, but I don't appreciate the derisive tone of their first paragraph: > a handful of elite tech companies decide to waste the time of literally billions of people with juvenile jokes that only they find funny. I sort of agree, but it's not nice, and not necessary. It also isn't particularly classy to then go on to say "and we're so much better, because we do useful things". (I do happen to fin…

Absolutely, that part left a bitter taste in my mouth reading the rest of the article. Feels like they released this on April 1st just so they could make this claim, strange move.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#187

Post by StavrosK » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #142

floatingatoll wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking an upstream project to implement decisions without upstream’s consent is a tried and true open source software process, implemented by thousands of projects over the years. Claiming that they don’t support standards, solely because they don’t support another implementation of those standards, is incorrect and inflammatory.

> Forking an upstream project to implement decisions without upstream’s consent is a tried and true open source software process, implemented by thousands of projects over the years. Claiming that they don’t support standards, solely because they don’t support another implementation of those standards, is incorrect and inflammatory. If upstream is doing something you don't like and refusing to work with you, sure. Wh…

Can/has anyone from CloudFlare commented? This refusal to work with WireGuard has left a bitter taste in my mouth from a company that I otherwise like.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#188

Post by noja » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

And HN said concentration of power is a bad thing - hey look at this free altruistic VPN!

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#189

Post by azinman2 » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:42 PM UTC

zackbloom wrote: post #158

azinman2 wrote: post #78

There’s a lot of claims about how mobile internet sucks and this makes it not suck. But then it’s revealed it’s a WireGuard based VPN. What I don’t understand is how my internet will be so much faster than any other use of WireGuard?

There are a few reasons: 1. When you use WireGuard as a VPN your device is connecting to wherever you happen to have hosted your server. Cloudflare's PoPs are located in 165 different Internet exchanges and ISPs, giving you a pretty good chance to be closer to you wherever you are in the world. 2. We (Cloudflare) have tech through our Mobile SDK product which can optimize the actual way the Internet TCP traffic is ma…

Can you go into more detail about #2? This is what I want to know more about — especially how this is faster than without any VPN.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#190

Post by martingxx » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 4:43 PM UTC

gok wrote: post #175

martingxx wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not release anyway (for transparency) but with explicitly no support?

If you don't trust them with a binary, you shouldn't trust them just because they posted source code somewhere. If they don't have the bandwidth to manage this as an open source project this is the right call.

There are plenty of companies who have released their source code but don't support it in the same way a typical community driven project like other open source projects do.

This is especially true for certain privacy and security focused applications. For example, Signal release their code, have quite a lot of users, and don't report an unmanageable overhead due to having released their source code.

It's not just a matter of trusting their intentions, it's a matter of knowing that their code matches their intentions. I trust OpenSSL (mostly, these days) and I always trusted the intentions of the developers, but if their code was not open it would not be half as secure today.