Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Warp – Mobile VPN

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 500 posts

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#331

Post by ksec »

lapinot wrote: post #260
ksec wrote: post #241

193 Comments and No one has asked yet. How do they make money? So, the price plan and extras from Business, Professional and Enterprise CDN is enough to cover all the cost of running the network + free tier CDN + Domain Registration Operation + DNS + Free tier VPN? There is a reason why I am using Apple. Their interest is in me using iPhone or Apple devices with a very decent profits margin, and hopefully up sell me…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_subsidization They don't make money, they just want to gain market leverage. This will make their network more interesting because of crowd effect. Akin to fb letting people create profiles/chat, google giving free search results/emails/file hosting, etc. Just finished reading a book about this, see [1] for a review. [1] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/06/05/book-rev.…

Yes, Cross Subsidisation assumes you have one market segment or product where you have heavy leverage / control and margin to subsidise another. Example Intel could afford the billions of R&D on 4G Modem and losses on Mobile SoC when they have 90% of Server Market and Mobile PC Market. None of those CDN Price Plan I mentioned in the original comment works in those margin, and has little lock in ecosystem.

Facebook's business modem is simple, Ads. And its business model only works once you reach a certain level of user and usage.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#332

Post by knowuh »

I have enjoyed the elitist jokes that were on the internet

and which you were probably saving for April 1ˢᵗ

Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and

IRONIC

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#333

Post by kristofferR »

ignoramous wrote: post #293
kylec wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest concern with any VPN is: do I trust you? I’ve been reluctant to sign up with any of these VPN services that seem to be advertising everywhere nowadays because I don’t know what they’ll do with my internet traffic. The CloudFlare VPN is interesting to me because they’re a large, established company with a good reputation, so I trust them more than TunnelBear or ExpressVPN or PIA or whoever’s sponsoring YouT…

We thought about the trust aspect of it (we have gone through numerous VPN related threads here on news.yc and r/privacy and this has been one of the top concerns). Here's how we plan to convince folks (in our own naive way) we mean business (do serveral or all among): 1. OpenSource vpn server and client, with ability to Cloud-SSH to the server and view what's running. 2. Hands-off, one-click, spin up VPN servers on…

Sounds like something HN readers will like, but which also would be completely commercially unviable.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#334

Post by wmf »

broknbottle wrote: post #309
jedberg wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only near you when you're at home though. This works around the world.

wouldn't be that difficult to write a script that checks geoip and launches a VPS in the region closest to your current devices public address. You could even create an iOS shortcut to allow you to do it from your iPhone

Classic HN comment. I predict that Warp will fail just as hard as Dropbox.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#335

Post by fc_barnes »

One thing about using VPNs on the phone is that a lot of mobile/public networks only allow port 80, which prevents the VPN from connecting. If CF makes a version of wireguard that can do port 80, that would be great.

As far as their bottom line, I guess this helps them sell services by having a documented number of people suckling the internet straight from the CF teat?

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#336

Post by brunoqc »

Some Android app doesn't work well with VPNs. It might those set to only sync on wifi. I wonder if it will improve.

Google photos didn't want to sync when using the CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 app. I think I had problems with podcast apps in the past too.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#337

Post by eximius »

dwighttk wrote: post #328
eximius wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, for DIY you only need one because you're only one user . Pick a VPS host with a data center near you... done.

sometimes people move around

I mean, I guess. But not often. If you are flying around the world, then sure, this is probably better. But if you're like the vast majority of people, then you will be in the same city most of the year.

Even if you change residences, you'll typically be in the same state. Even if you change states, you can just set it up again in, what, super conservatively, under an hour (you've already done it once so fewer missteps).

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#338

Post by tomjakubowski »

obenn wrote: post #101
apexalpha wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From personal experience: When coupled with an DNS based ad blocker Wireguard can actually make your internet faster than when not using it. More so on Android than iOS and more so on mobile than fixed, but still feels so much smoother. you can even only forward the DNS requests and not the rest of the data so your home upload speed won't become your bottleneck.

This is precisely my setup, and I couldn't be happier. I have a lot of internal infrastructure including pi-hole, confluence and a number of self-hosted services. WireGuard lets me go anywhere on my laptop and its like I never left home, and I just keep two configurations for when I want to forward only internal IP addresses, or all my traffic.

> I have a lot of internal infrastructure including pi-hole, confluence

Confluence as in the Atlassian software? What do you use it for at home?

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#339

Post by eastdakota »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #243
bbx wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same reaction. As I was reading the article, I started asking myself "Hold on, what's in it for you? You're still a private company. How are you going to make money?". I then reached the "Ok, Sure, But You’re Still a Profit-Seeking Company" section. It's as if the article was reading my mind. Every free product comes with a catch. When this catch is not clearly explained by the company, I always feel it's b…

The choice to omit any sort of sign-in or account feature for the app is also a very stark difference. Even most apps with the stated goal of improving your privacy requires some sort of account. While it's true that if Cloudflare was evil, they could fairly likely identify you from metadata, that's a lot more complex and a lot more error-prone than having you sign in. I am curious though if this will extend to their…

We'll have to take payment for the paid feature, obviously, but plan to use the Apple and Google payment systems for that. I'm not an expert on the nitty gritty of that, but I don't think that gives us access to any of your personal details. We've always thought of personally identifiable information as a toxic asset and something we try to minimize collecting whenever we can.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#340

Post by eximius »

obahareth wrote: post #320
eximius wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, for DIY you only need one because you're only one user . Pick a VPS host with a data center near you... done.

For me, VPS hosts with data centers near me isn't a thing, but CloudFlare has edge locations near me.

Color me curious. Where is that? And by what definition of near? There isn't even an AWS AZ near you? A t2.micro is literally free and is bigger than the one I'm running mine on (which I'm paying for, so maybe I should swap... though, I don't think AWS has AZs closer than my current $1/mo host).
Post reply on HN