Warp, Cloudflare's Free VPN, Is Now Publicly Available for iOS and Android | Hacker News Reader

Warp, Cloudflare's Free VPN, Is Now Publicly Available for iOS and Android

warp.plus

23 pointswhitepoplar19 comments

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Is that an affiliate link? (the "pWpA" after the domain in the URL)

But more importantly, is it just me or does using a free VPN seem like a super risky idea? haha

Thread without affiliate link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067602

> Is that an affiliate link? (the "pWpA" after the domain in the URL)

Looks to be yes. It redirects to https://one.one.one.one/ref?referrer=a029b85e-cfc8-47f1-8e83... then https://one.one.one.one/

I tried it, and it appears to be freemium. The basic level is WARP, and then there’s WARP+ which costs $4.99/month.

The difference isn’t entirely clear though. It says that WARP+ will “route your internet requests to avoid Internet traffic jams.”

It is. Confirmed by generating a link on the app which gives credit and it's the same format.

What's the underlying technology? WireGuard (via BoringTun)?

I see there's two tiers, Warp and Warp+. Supposedly Warp+ has better/optimal routing that lets you avoid local ISP congestion. It's $7 CAD/month. This would be pretty cool on desktop for gaming, etc.

In the original blog https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp-better-vpn/

"We also knew it was critical that we ensure Warp doesn’t meaningfully increase your battery usage. We built Warp around WireGuard, a modern, efficient VPN protocol that is much more efficient than legacy VPN protocols."

And Warp is why we wrote BoringTun: https://blog.cloudflare.com/boringtun-userspace-wireguard-ru...

Cloudflare controls a great portion of the web. How useful is hiding from websites with this VPN?

Warp isn't designed to hide you from websites you visit. It's designed to secure the connection from your device. https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp-better-vpn/

The app has a permanent notification stating 'Your Internet is now private.' while using warp. That seems very misleading to the end user in my opinion.

I'm under the impression a lot of people fall for the marketing and use VPNs for privacy.

Still protects you from hijacking at public wifi hotspots. Doesn't let you watch geolocked content (US Netflix), and probably doesn't let you torrent either.

Is it better than Tor in your opinion?

In terms of privacy? Definitely not. With Tor, it's extremely hard to trace a packet from end to end but in this case there is a high chance that Cloudflare is both your VPN provider and the CDN for the site you are visiting meaning they could theoretically know exactly who is looking at what.

I signed up some months ago and am using the DNS service on my iphone, but is says that I am #192604 on the WARP waitlist and that they will let me know when it's ready.

Try updating the app.

Eating my iphone's battery like crazy

Cloudflare is doing a great job improving privacy and security on the Internet. Not only they helped websites move to HTTPS, now they also do that on the client side too! Soon, 99% of the traffic on the Internet will be encrypted. Except, of course, for the traffic that goes through Cloudflare data centers, but that's a small price to pay for privacy and security.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Gosh I hope this is sarcasm.

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