Cloudflare Says Its New VPN Service Won't Slow You Down (wired.com) 73
Cloudflare has announced that it's adding a VPN service to its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver app. The 1.1.1.1 service, which first came to mobile back in November, currently attempts to speed up mobile data speeds by using Cloudflare's network to resolve DNS queries faster than your existing mobile network. From a report: "We wanted to build a VPN service that my dad would install on his phone," says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. "If you tell him that it will make his connection more private and secure, he'd never do it. But if you tell him it will make his connection faster, make his phone's battery last longer, and make his connections more private, then it would be something he'd install."
Mobile phone users can begin signing up for the service, dubbed Warp, through Cloudflare's mobile app 1.1.1.1 on Monday; Cloudflare says it hopes the service is working Monday, but it might take a few days. Regardless, Warp is a sign of things to come for the rest of the internet. The technology that Cloudflare is betting will make Warp fast is a protocol invented by Google called QUIC, and it could one day make the rest of the internet faster and more reliable. QUIC is essentially a substitute for TCP, the venerable protocol now used for most internet connections. TCP, introduced in 1981, made reliable internet connections possible, says Jana Iyengar, who worked on QUIC for Google; Iyengar is now a distinguished engineer at the cloud computing company Fastly working to help finalize QUIC with the Internet Engineering Task Force standards body.
Mobile phone users can begin signing up for the service, dubbed Warp, through Cloudflare's mobile app 1.1.1.1 on Monday; Cloudflare says it hopes the service is working Monday, but it might take a few days. Regardless, Warp is a sign of things to come for the rest of the internet. The technology that Cloudflare is betting will make Warp fast is a protocol invented by Google called QUIC, and it could one day make the rest of the internet faster and more reliable. QUIC is essentially a substitute for TCP, the venerable protocol now used for most internet connections. TCP, introduced in 1981, made reliable internet connections possible, says Jana Iyengar, who worked on QUIC for Google; Iyengar is now a distinguished engineer at the cloud computing company Fastly working to help finalize QUIC with the Internet Engineering Task Force standards body.
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April fool!
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Hey, remember that time Level-3 and Cogent had disputes and split their links, effectively making two internets!? Yeah! That was GREAT!
And none of the links work (Score:2)
Already googles accelerated server pages don't work on all browsers. Even sites like Reddit are using this. THe other day a Reddit site would not work on safari for me. Needed to install chrome.
hyperlinks that only work when you are logged into facebook and have facebook user permissions to view the page are becoming the norm.
the world wide web is getting stove piped into cable companies. Not a web anymore.
Now we get a transport protocol that requires specialized drivers or browsers to use.
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AMP pages suck, but you don't have to use them.
TL;DR: This is not a secure VPN (Score:1)
> "If you tell him that it will make his connection more private and secure, he'd never do it. But if you tell him it will make his connection faster"
So they see no value in security or privacy. Also, they are one of the silicon valley pro-censorship stalwarts.
This is a VN, with no P.
No thanks.
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If you consider private to mean between you and the site you wanted to reach, then no. It's not private. If you want to welcome Cloudflare to have access to this data, you can have that - but you can't call it private.
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Actually, you're encrypted from your network to the VPN server. Owned by CloudFlare. Then it decrypts and exits kind of like ToR which is why the US government runs tons of exit nodes. You do know how a VPN and tunneling works right?
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It will also add encryption from your device to the edge of Cloudflare's network for traffic that is not fully encrypted.
It is literally talking about https and non https web shit. Anything else done and all of your DNS queries can be recorded. You are not reading through the legalese. You must not understand how the data transfer works, and are their prime target. GLHF. Just don't tell others their wrong.
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I never claimed they could see everything you do. I was simply stating you were wrong about it being private and then went on to show the flaws in your theory.
Google not Googling (Score:4, Interesting)
NordVPN for the win (which uses OpenVPN and can be used completely without the NordVPN apps)....
But you have to get the adblocking version on Nord's website. Google, in their infinite wisdom, doesn't allow adblocking apps to be hosted on their app store.
If Google is behind anything, you can bet it will have a way to serve you ads no matter what else it does. And that is a security risk. They will always chose profits over customer safety.
Re:Google not Googling (Score:4, Interesting)
NordVPN has a rather close partnership (shared office space, shared executives) with a major data mining company (Tesonet) that brags about how much data it mines.
People from both companies have given explanations/excuses in the past - but it's still rather suspicious to me.
Don't trust the great cloudwall with your DNS (Score:5, Insightful)
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"A VPN that doesn't slow you down? "
They have the full Internets cached in a truck in front of your house.
"more private and secure" (Score:5, Insightful)
I just shot water out of my nose. Funniest thing I read all day.
Re:"more private and secure" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: "more private and secure" (Score:2)
"The question is not how much should I trust Cloudflare as a VPN... because that one is easy. The real question is do I trust Cloudflare more than AT&T."
Why are those ypur only options? Because you don't want to set up a recursive caching DNS service (or use some network appliance that does this for you)?
In my case, it's a choice between trusting an American company subject to American laws/secret letters etc. vs. my local telco/ISP (we have virtual ISPs that are effectively VPNs over the incumbent's DS
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Your traffic is running through Cloudflare anyway. It may as well do so in a way that your ISP doesn't also see it.
"battery last longer"? (Score:3)
I run a VPN on my phone already and I notice that there is substantially more battery usage with it than without. It makes sense: You're taking all that data and encrypting it. I don't know how you could encrypt the data and use LESS battery?
Anyone have an idea?
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Using a dedicated chip would help. Manufacturers have in fact included dedicated units in their CPUs for operations like AES encryption, but I’m not sure mobile chips include those.
Relevant to today (Score:2)
VPN Not Secure (Score:1)
A guy who, by his own admission, woke up one morning and decided he didn't like what some people were saying on the Internet and decided to use his company to wipe them off the Web now wants us to trust his company with our privacy. Are you fucking kidding me you utter moron?
QUIC is a bit of a nightmare (Score:5, Interesting)
All the finely-tuned network stacks out there are basically being thrown out the window... congestion management, buffering/resend, parsing, etc. are all being re-written into the QUIC protocol. The spec is so large that they had split it up into several smaller specs -- to start, things are going to be buggy, incompatible, and perform poorly. QUIC makes me nervous.
And Google's QUIC, which was very HTTP focused, is almost unrecognizable now that it's gone through IETF, where it was split into the two protocols HTTP/3, and the generic multi-stream transport QUIC.
On the other hand, it's full of experience (Score:2)
TCP is bad because it's basically set in stone. It's not possible to change a single bit in the TCP/IP spec without breaking untold millions of badly designed middleboxes.
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All the finely-tuned network stacks out there are basically being thrown out the window... congestion management, buffering/resend, parsing, etc. are all being re-written
And Google's QUIC, which was very HTTP focused, is almost unrecognizable [and] split into the two protocols HTTP/3, and the generic multi-stream transport QUIC.
So in other words: InternetD for ALL!
Just like movies, why do something new when we can re-invent the wheel doing the same thing but with newer actors that don't know what they're doing?
Other things Matthew Prince promises... (Score:1)
Weaponizing congestion control (Score:2)
The technology that Cloudflare is betting will make Warp fast is a protocol invented by Google called QUIC, and it could one day make the rest of the internet faster and more reliable.
Most operators I know are blocking QUIC because it's way too aggressive.
When a single QUIC session intentionally consumes twice the bandwidth of the sum total of 20 TCP sessions over a bandwidth constrained link Huston we have a problem. Not a small problem but a massive unsustainable one.
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Congestion is the fault of the network operator. There are literally no excuses. They don't need to build or buy more bandwidth than their customers actually use, so overcommitting their network is acceptable, but only up to the point where there is congestion on a regular basis. Then they need to provide more bandwidth. If they don't, then their customers are not getting what they paid for.
When I say "congestion" it's not necessarily a bad thing like being stuck in rush hour traffic type of congestion. What I'm talking about is universal. Congestion is applicable globally in every network regardless of whether you believe anyone is at fault for the characteristics of the network.
Nowhere is bandwidth infinite and so over any given route between peers one path will act to constrain rate of information able to be transmitted between peers. Even under the best possible outcome where I buy 20mb
Has China already blocked it? (Score:2)
Anyone tested this on the dark side of the planet yet?