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WARP is here

blog.cloudflare.com

101–110 of 386 posts

Re: WARP is here

#101

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.

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

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

Re: WARP is here

#102
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.

Re: WARP is here

#103

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.

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

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?

Re: WARP is here

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

If you are hoping to mask your IP you should probably use a traditional VPN and not WARP. WARP doesn't compete with VPNs, it is for everyone who would or could never use a VPN.

Re: WARP is here

#105

All I have to say about this is 8chan.

You know why I'm comfortable with Cloudflare after the 8chan decision? It's because they were uncomfortable making it.

Cloudflare is not a government. While we've been successful as a company, that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad. Nor should it. Questions around content are real societal issues that need politically legitimate solutions. https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

This is an unsolved problem so I don't blame anyone for not having the solution. But I especially appreciate people and companies who are humble enough to admit that they don't have the solution.

Re: WARP is here

#106
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 require…

> the talent required to clone Cloudflare is rare

Talent is everywhere, but a lot of people who have it don't want to move to a big city. So IMO, the next Cloudflare's developers should be as widely dispersed as its POPs.

Edit: The more recently added part of your comment is very insightful, and I hadn't thought about it that way. Still, I think we could go a lot further with old-school hosting providers if we traded PHP and Ruby for Rust, Nim, and the like. Note that I didn't mention garbage-collected languages, because lots of applications running efficiently on a shared host is incompatible with a garbage collector that really wants the whole heap to itself.

Re: WARP is here

#107
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.

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."

Re: WARP is here

#108
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.secureworldexpo.com/industry-news/cloudflare-sta...

But it's ok, 8chan is a 'hate site,' right? We all know which ones those are.

Re: WARP is here

#109
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?

Re: WARP is here

#110

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…

> 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.

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