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WARP is here

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: WARP is here

#91

Post by jstewartmobile »

Spooky23 wrote: post #59
jstewartmobile wrote: post #21

So, pay money to the unaccountable de facto internet police in the age of "HTTPS everywhere" for a VPN that " will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit "? It's not April Fools... Is this SV's version of " pull my finger "?

Sometimes you need to make pragmatic choices. There are scenarios where you may be more concerned about the folks running (or not running) the local network that you are operating on than the larger surveillance operation.

Fair enough, but what's the advantage of this over any other VPN that doesn't expose your IP?

Re: WARP is here

#92

Post by xwdv »

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.

Re: WARP is here

#94

Post by mwcampbell »

derefr wrote: post #89
mwcampbell wrote: post #17

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 world…

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, ther…

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.

Re: WARP is here

#95

Post by derefr »

mwcampbell wrote: post #76
eastdakota wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> The latter number will inevitably be smaller, but shouldn't be single-digit.

The space Cloudflare is in could afford plenty of players, I think—more than a single-digit amount. There’s nothing about Cloudflare’s business strategy that implies/necessitates that they’d become a monopoly in a market equilibrium state. The only reason you don’t see a pack of Cloudflare clone-companies, AFAIK, is that the talent required to clone Cloudflare is rare.

(Interestingly, an ISP—especially a cellular ISP familiar with routing roaming circuits—could totally pivot into Cloudflare’s business to expand globally. I wonder why we haven’t seen that?)

> 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?

I feel like the perspective you’re coming at the problem from here is already heavily influenced by the contraction and centralization that the web went through in the early 2000s. Yes, right now, businesses just want essentially an online business card, and Facebook handles that just fine. But their desires are more of an acknowledgement of the practicalities of what’s economical for them to have built and hosted in the current (or recent-historical, since it takes a while for people’s thoughts on this to shift) web landscape.

Look around the internet of the 90s. Companies didn’t used to build business-card websites. The dreams of even the most run-of-the-mill SME used to be far more grandiose. At the very least, every company who knew what the options were, wanted to host a forum for the community composed of their customers. Many of the web’s most prominent standalone forums were started back then. Why so few today? Because ambitious, dynamic, user-generated-content-filled sites like these do get hurt by spamming and DDoSing. They’re hard to run—and not just in a community-management sense, but in an ops sense.

Cloudflare’s tech (which, again, anyone could offer, not just Cloudflare) can and does provide the protection required to allow SME websites to be a little bit more ambitious again, to the point that they’re not just doing something commoditizable by Facebook.

Re: WARP is here

#96

Post by kyle-rb »

commoner wrote: post #34
zackbloom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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?

What's the actual vulnerability when simply using an unsecured wireless network? Sure, it's easy for them to MitM you if you're using http, but if you're only using https, what's the harm?

Re: WARP is here

#97

Post by rrss »

sigmar wrote: post #87

[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"

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

Re: WARP is here

#99

Post by afiori »

trenning wrote: post #61
eastdakota wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

I think sharing sources would help your point.

Re: WARP is here

#100

Post by zackbloom »

sigmar wrote: post #87

[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"

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.
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