Cloudflare's CTO Wants to Shake Up How We Think About VPNs

Is this an entire story about Warp, which is what I understand Cloud Flare to have named their Rust fork of WireGuard, that does not once mention WireGuard or Jason Donenfeld? Jason is the hardest working person in show business. A "thank you" might be nice, even if Cloud Flare can't work up the class to contribute directly to Jason's projects. Even if they're not using his code, they're using his design and formal verification work, which, in a cryptosystem, is at least as important.

This headline reminded me to check my position on the waiting list. On April 1st, I was at #166319. Now I'm at #166208.

If they keep adding capacity at the same rate, I should get access about 100 years from now :(

Cloudflare is a MiTM on the internet at large.

> But it would definitely be good for the public to understand, at least to dismiss this notion that the internet is a free-for-all. It's not, in itself, resilient against interference.

> And would you want that freedom? I wonder if the individual ultimately would. Maybe there are things governments should be protecting us from. That's a valid discussion that should be had.

Governments, of the past, of the present, have left us with plenty evidence that they are perfectly incapable of protecting their citizens when it doesn't serve either their collective self-interest or the interest of whoever they happen to serve at the time. Imo, there is literally no alternate reality where handing the governments unabated control ends well.

- For starters, the govts don't even get technology.

- As a parallel to the Internet, look no further than the regulations, the standardisation processes that plague the telecommunications industry (who are under influence of the governments world-wide and are actively trying to wrestle the control of the internet away from traditional bodies). It's clear who wins (hint: not the end consumer, and occasionally the governments sneak in backdoors).

There's a reason BigTelco is what it is today (a no-escape surveillance dragnet). It'd be sad if the Internet plunges to such depths.

I'm glad initiatives like tor, i2p, ipfs, datproject, freedombox, nyc-mesh, community-broadband, matrix.org are trying to solve the problems in a myriad of ways. The threat of govts meddling with the Internet irrevocably is real though, esp since a functioning Internet requires quite an expensive yet co-operative infrastructure which is, for all intents and purposes, in control of the BigTech... but I don't see why individuals world-wide should go down without a fight to keep the Internet as neutral as they can, while they can.

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That aside, I'm interested to know if anyone has seen any huge latency difference between using Cloudflare Warp and using Wireguard behind Google's GlobalLoadBalancer or AWS' GlobalAccelerator (or equivalent StackPath/Cloudflare offering)?

"Do you really want that? What if you can't take down the website? Daily Stormer is really interesting; we shut off service for it, but you can go to Google and read it."

I don't even know what type of content is on Daily Stormer but I presume it is controversial. I find this quote just a tad disingenuous. I understand Cloudflare is well within its rights to decide there are certain companies they won't work with, but to say this causes no harm whatsoever isn't entirely true.

There are very few CDNs that can withstand a DDOS attack, and certainly very rare for a small publishing company to have that capability in-house. If the content you want is under a DDOS attack and unavailable because no CDN will carry it, then yeah, that would kind of suck.

One can always publish to various P2P platforms that are highly DDOS-resistant, but now the audience has some more work to get to it; it's a barrier. Not an impassable one, but a barrier nonetheless.

For the record, I like Cloudflare, but I also really love free speech. The quote struck me as overly minimizing.

Perhaps off topic but this was very difficult to read because PC Mag’s advertising was constantly changing sizes. Thank God for Reader View or I’d have abandoned it early

"Not looking to get around country-blocks" - yep, as found it does not work in China

I’m not very familiar with this topic. Would this be considered a competitor to perimeterless security like Google BeyondCorp?

I'm just waiting for them to clarify if they're ok with torrenting over their VPN.

I will stick with a couple VM's in a couple countries and tinc vpn + ssh client for remote access. I can destroy and recreate them periodically to change out IP addresses.

I installed 1.1.1.1/warp+ a day or two after April 1st. My waitlist number has stayed at 243635-something for a couple of weeks now.

Anyone know at what pace they’re letting new users in?

"We're not looking to compete with the free" - this seems garbled. Any guess what he meant?

(All of the comments on this post say they are from 10-15 minutes ago, but I remember reading them hours ago, and Algolia shows they were made days ago. <- For potential future reference, my/this comment was posted at 3:42pm US/Pacific on April 28th of 2019.)

VPNs for everyone - literally the worst idea of all time

Cloudflare just wants access to your traffic info to resell it.