Warp – Mobile VPN • Hacker News Board

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#251

Post by dsl » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

redwards510 wrote: post #228

Currently I use PIA VPN when browsing. When I go to Cloudflare sites, I often get captchas because, in the past, I imagine someone was using PIA to abuse a Cloudflare site. So what happens when people start using Warp to hide their IP so they can hack, scan, scrape, upload malware, etc? Is Cloudflare going to show captchas to Warp users and slow down their experience? What is the plan to mitigate abuse on a free VPN…

That is why Cloudflare wants you to use their VPN rather than an anonymized one. If they can track you, they can have more data about whether to block you.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#252

Post by ignoramous » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

There goes me and my co-founder's plan of disrupting the Mobile VPN market. Or may be, we still have a chance?

Anywho, congratulations Cloudflare! I long held an opinion that the VPN market was ripe for disruption when I looked at privacy policy of some of the top players. Having analysed the market, I find that its defragmented with no clear run-away winner. I hope you're able to make a headway with all the interesting innovations that you plan to offer on top of it.

Here are some ideas that I had in mind for a Mobile VPN:

1. Ability to run a dns-blacklist, tag-based blacklist, and a ip-firewall at cloudflare's end (not on the end devices). May be you could add that as an option to your wrap+ product?

2. Auto change exit IPs underneath the covers.

3. Take over the dialer and route calls over IP whenever possible.

4. Provide ability to analyze traffic on a PC.

5. Track and warn mode per app, where the traffic is analysed for a particular app to generate a report on what its doing and how much.

Basically, bring enterprise-grade security to the end consumer.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#253

Post by dsl » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

prdonahue wrote: post #227

woofcat wrote: post #159

I wonder if when accessing a Cloudflare website if they'll be presenting the website owner with the original origin IP, or passing along the 1.1.1.1 endpoint IP addressed when staying within their network.

We'll be presenting the original IP. If you wish to block or otherwise take action on, e.g., malicious traffic from the IP being used to connect to Warp, you'll be able to do so.

Is this in X-Forwarded-For?

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#254

Post by tuxone » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

> That many VPN companies pretend to keep your data private and then sell it to help target you with advertising is, in a word, disgusting. That is not Cloudflare’s business model and it never will be.

When I read something like that I feel protected and cared about. Now, can someone explain me why this should be in any form different from the WhatsApp case?

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#255

Post by prdonahue » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

mysterypie wrote: post #203

Just as an aside, I thought that was an exceptionally well-written product announcement, or press release, or whatever you'd call it. It was long, but I didn't mind reading the whole thing. It answered all the basic questions about why I should use it, how they plan to make money, and with enough technical detail that I understood essentially how it works. It was very much the opposite of the marketing material you g…

One of the first (and most important) lessons I learned from @eastdakota when starting at Cloudflare ~4 years ago was how to write a product announcement.

Nobody does it quite like him, though @jgrahamc is great too, and I try to encourage my team to follow the lead here as much as possible.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#256

Post by dsl » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

packet_nerd wrote: post #109

moreentropy wrote: post #77

While this might improve user experience for some, I don't see the greater value in a VPN solution like this. It's the fast path to replacing the decentralized internet with a few proprietary CDNs. I'm much more excited about those projects that actually try to fix the raised issues: Unencrypted connections -> TLS / Letsencrypt TCP sucks on mobile/roaming devices -> QUIC & HTTP/3

Having Cloudflare's weight behind Wireguard seems like a great thing for an open decentralized Internet.

If only they were willing to work with Wireguard: https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-March/00404...

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#257

Post by skybrian » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

maltalex wrote: post #121

I'd wager that the Super Secret Plan is geared towards further centralizing the Internet. Preferably on Cloud Flare's infrastructure. This is one part of a tug-of-war that's going on in recent years between Internet network operators and cloud providers, with the cloud providers slowly but surely winning. For better or worse, we are moving away from a distributed Internet composed of many autonomous networks into a f…

This is still better than only having competition at the ISP level since it's easy to switch VPN's. Building a network like Cloudflare is no easy task, but neither is building a mobile network or installing fiber.

While not in itself neutral, it seems like it should help to preserve the competition that network neutrality is supposed to enable, since it's easy for small organizations to hook up with Cloudflare and they do encryption where they can.

I'm reminded of Galbraith's theory of countervailing power, which seems like a more realistic approach than always thinking in terms of centralization versus decentralization:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervailing_power

Also, consider how companies try to commoditize their complements, which having competition at different layers tends to do:

https://www.gwern.net/Complement

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#258

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #219

tracker1 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite criticisms, I've been using the Brave browser on Android, which is pretty much Chrome with integrated AdBlock plus. Though there is some level of irksome override with some advertisers, it's been about the best overall experience for me. May actually switch my desktop browser at home when I build my new computer.

For browser I already use firefox, so I could easily add ublock origin (or, I suppose, adblock plus). Having a DNS level adblocker is just a nice to have for anything not browser based that decides ads are a good idea. In all honesty it's pretty rare that I use anything not browser based that might have ads, but on principle I'd like to keep it around.

I understand... I tried Firefox (mainline and beta) on Android with ublock, and it was just unstably slow for me, let alone the alien UX.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#259

Post by jgrahamc » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

dsl wrote: post #251

redwards510 wrote: post #228

Currently I use PIA VPN when browsing. When I go to Cloudflare sites, I often get captchas because, in the past, I imagine someone was using PIA to abuse a Cloudflare site. So what happens when people start using Warp to hide their IP so they can hack, scan, scrape, upload malware, etc? Is Cloudflare going to show captchas to Warp users and slow down their experience? What is the plan to mitigate abuse on a free VPN…

That is why Cloudflare wants you to use their VPN rather than an anonymized one. If they can track you, they can have more data about whether to block you.

Nope. We want you to use our VPN because we think it'll make your mobile Internet experience better (faster and more secure). That turns into an upsell opportunity to us and makes our core service (which people pay us for) more valuable.

Re: Warp – Mobile VPN

#260

Post by lapinot » Mon, Apr 01, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

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...