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I was openly critical of Cloudflare when they announced Warp the first time. My accusations were over-reaching, and I ultimately retracted them. But I'm still s
by mwcampbell 7y ago
I was openly critical of Cloudflare when they announced Warp the first time. My accusations were over-reaching, and I ultimately retracted them. But I'm still skeptical, and I still won't use Warp.
Here's what still bothers me: Cloudflare is a single company with points of presence all over the world, handling traffic for websites all over the world (including some big ones), and now trying to attract consumers worldwide to proxy their traffic through its network. That's a lot of power, and we all know the saying about power and corruption. It doesn't matter how conscientious the leadership are. I'd prefer that the temptation to abuse that power was just not there at all.
My idea of a better Internet is a return to the way the Internet was -- a large number of small providers, communicating with each other over open standard protocols. So, yes, I should switch to something other than Comcast here in my apartment. So far, I've been afraid that doing that would leave me with a truly abysmal quality of service. (I'm in Bellevue, Washington.) But at least I can avoid adding Cloudflare, with its terrifying power, to the mix.
Granted, I mostly use the Internet on a stationary computer with a cable connection at home. About the only thing I do on my phone away from a WiFi connection is request an Uber ride. And I do need that to work reliably. But it is working just fine without Warp. So, maybe Warp is just not for me. Still, for the people that would benefit, I'm afraid of how much more power they're going to be giving Cloudflare when they tap that "on" button.
- aasdasdasdasd 7y agoWhen I look at friends and family, they use their phones for everything because Computer UX failed. And they will switch to whatever public WiFi is available because their expensive yet small mobile data plan. I can see how some people would benefit from this kind of VPN.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mwcampbell 7y agoAnother commenter on this thread said that there are already VPN services with Wireguard support and easy-to-use apps. Why not recommend those to friends and family?
- privateSFacct 7y agoThe history of most of these is terrible. Many actively log / aggregate and in some cases sell your data - are based in non-US jurisdictions so no recourse. There is going to be a reason cloudflare does better - they are more trusted.
- slig 7y agoThose are paid and this one is free?
- mwcampbell 7y agoRemember, if you're not the customer, you're the product. These days, even if you're the customer, you may still be part of the product for another kind of customer.
- slig 7y agoYes, sure, but it's harder to convince people to pay for something monthly when there's a good (and free) alternative available.
- afiori 7y agowhile that is true it can be meaningfully qualified. On facebook you are the product in the sense that they sell access to your eyes. On linkedin you are the product in the sense of aiming to the network effect (and also for ads I imagine) If I am the product on warp in the sense that websites hosted on cloudflare are faster it is not that bad. (it is your choice to trust them or not, but that truism just says that the profit needs to come somewhere and you should be aware of it)
- ummonk 7y agoBecause I don't trust any random VPN service provider not to spy on my friends and family, the way I trust Cloudflare.
- tmikaeld 7y agoCan't the same be said about any of the huge hosting companies such as OVH, Hetzner, 1&1, AWS, etc. And any VPN provider that hosts their servers and routes their traffic through unknown datacenters? I'd rather trust Cloudflare that has a great track-record (+Public Canary and are on US Privacy Shield), than any random VPN provider.
- mwcampbell 7y agoMaybe I'll feel better if some other company releases a product that directly competes with Warp.
- tmikaeld 7y agoAren't there a lot of them? The bigger VPN providers also offer Wireguard and a simple UI (Basically click the map and you're connected).
- crankylinuxuser 7y agoAccording to Saurik, Warp IS Wireguard. https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1176893448445558784 https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1176893448445558784 His provided script is cache.saurik.com/twitter/wgcf.sh
- tmikaeld 7y agoYes, it is a modified version of it. That's why I wrote "also" :)
- zzzcpan 7y agoTrust with what? Warp is specifically designed to reveal your IP address. This is as anti-privacy VPN as a VPN can be. Which is absolutely not surprising coming from a US corporation.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eastdakota 7y agoEarly on in Cloudflare’s history when we were asked who our competition was we said Facebook. The concern was that the challenges of being online would get so hard that individual websites would give up and just move to run Facebook pages. We saw our role as providing the security and performance needed to compete without making you give in to use an all-consuming platform. We haven’t said that in a long time, but I was reminded of it while we were on our IPO Road Show. One investor we met with said: “Here’s how I think of you: Cloudflare is to Facebook as Shopify is to Amazon.” That resonated to me and reminded me of our earliest days and why we started the company. So I appreciate the concern but hope there will always be more independent web because we exist than there would be if we didn’t.
- rogerkirkness 7y agoTotally agree with that analogy having worked @ Shopify. We shall see which is more durable long term.
- trenning 7y agoBasically we should trust you because you're not facebook. Haven't you personally shut down websites because you don't like their content?
- afiori 7y agoI think sharing sources would help your point.
- sverige 7y agohttps://www.secureworldexpo.com/industry-news/cloudflare-statement-shut-down-8chan 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.
- IOT_Apprentice 7y agoA site where mass murders are encouraged to post their killing spree videos? Where hate groups and anonymous cowards promote hate, violence and other ideas? Spare us your "" defense of the indefensible.
- cj 7y agoI agree using Cloudflare proxy (or really any VPN) gives the company a lot of power. But the idea of Cloudflare intercepting all of my traffic doesn't bother me since the alternative is simply another company (Spectrum, or my random friend's wifi, or Starbucks) intercepting all of my traffic by virtue of being my ISP. It's up to you which is the lesser of two evils. I suppose Cloudflare may have more insight into the data being proxied if they're also managing the SSL certificates at the other end, however.
- mwcampbell 7y agoI can believe that Cloudflare's current leadership are currently more conscientious than, say, Comcast's. But, especially post-IPO, what is that actually worth? I think that, worldwide, it's likely that Cloudflare is already bigger than Comcast. So, unless I'm given evidence to the contrary, I think Comcast is the lesser evil.
- rrss 7y agoMy sense was that Comcast is far bigger than cloudflare, and from my googling that appears to be the case. Xfinity: $52 B revenue 2017 Comcast holdings (the parent of xfinity, couldn't find numbers for xfinity): 184,000 employees Cloudflare: < $ 0.2 B revenue 2018, several thousand employees (looks like less than 2000)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- CodeMichael 7y agoIf size is your only criteria then you might be right, but look at the company policies on privacy. Cloudflare has some pretty specific customer-oriented privacy policies. Comcast's policies are specifically set up to sell you and your information. That's a meaningful distinction and one with some (not much, but some) legal weight in the US.
- elithrar 7y agoI'm consistently amazed at how many people [on HN...] over-estimate the size/scale of Cloudflare. Comcast is a huge, multi-billion $ operation with global contracts and broadcasting capabilities, and > 184,000 employees globally (that's more than Google, and even MSFT). That's not to say that we shouldn't be wary of Cloudflare for many other reasons; but that they have more influence over the Internet than one of the world's largest consumer & corporate ISPs is definitely "a take".
- derefr 7y agoHow would your “better Internet” work when it reaches an ocean? Maybe this doesn’t matter to you, as someone who lives in the US and mostly access websites hosted in the US; but for the majority of the world, getting access to “the Internet” is more about tapping into the millisecond-latency backbone of submarine cables, than it is about last-mile residential ISPs. Those submarine cables form a natural monopoly, there’s no escaping that. They’re utility infrastructure, like country-spanning bridges. And the usual (optimal?) outcome for ownership of utility infrastructure, is that it gets held as a “public resource” by the government of the country or countries that built it; and then companies are contracted to manage it. From there, you end up with multilateral organizations weaving those pieces of infrastructure together in a top-down way (like shipping routes, or the postal system, or, hopefully one day, low-earth orbit.) Which is far from an anarchosyndicalist mesh of interested companies, organizations, and individuals (ala the early Internet, or the HAM radio network), but we’ve never seen an ararchosyndicalist mesh successfully serving as a reliable/fault-tolerant backbone for any commercial endeavour so far, and I don’t know if it could.
- mwcampbell 7y agoFair enough. But let's not add into the mix a single company that spans the whole world yet is headquartered in a single country.
- IOT_Apprentice 7y agoI'm not sure how being headquartered in 2, 20 or 200 countries is going to make a difference, can you please explain? At most, those would be satellite or region offices, which in the end will report to a central HQ.
- laughinghan 7y agoI think it's extremely clear that mwcampbell is pointing to being 'headquartered in a single country' as one of the aspects they don't like about a single company having too much power. It's clear they're not advocating more headquarters for companies with too much power, they're advocating more companies each with less power.
- reaperducer 7y agothe way the Internet was -- a large number of small providers, communicating with each other over open standard protocols I don't remember the internet ever being like that. I remember when you couldn't e-mail someone in another city without going through gateways. When you couldn't visit the majority of major web sites without downloading plug-ins. When you knew the information you wanted was out there, but couldn't get to it because it was behind obtuse, non-searchable infrastructure. To me, the internet today isn't perfect. But it's a heck of a lot better than its romanticized distant past. As for WARP, I'll give it a try. I don't fully trust Cloudflare, but I trust it a heck of a lot more than I trust my ISP or my cell phone provider. Long ago, both of those entities burned privacy bridges. Cloudflare hasn't done so. Yet, anyway.
- tomc1985 7y ago> When you couldn't visit the majority of major web sites without downloading plug-ins. I was on the web since AOL added it to their client in the mid-90s and it was never as bad as you're hinting it is.
- reaperducer 7y agoI was on the web since AOL added it to their client I was online before there was AOL, or a web, and before there was an internet, back when it was dozens of networks, with varying degrees of interconnectivity. it was never as bad as you're hinting it is. It was bad. You had to be there. (Think an e-mail from the east coast of the United States taking 10 days to reach Norway. For many destinations, snail mail was faster.)
- hinkley 7y agoI'd like to be in a world where if Cloudflare or AWS is down my websites and the sites I enjoy are still up. But to do that I'd need to have replication not just across data centers but across providers. And it's hard enough getting your team to understand how one provider works. We'd have to go an awful long way toward standardizing and dare I say comodifying these companies to get there. But as Fortune 500 companies have known for longer than Fortune has existed, if you have two vendors you can play off of each other your life tends to go a lot better. Right now almost none of us have that, and I suspect we are all a little poorer for it.
- mdb333 7y agosure... but I'd trust Cloudflare over Comcast anyday. Plus, (1) you can turn on/off WARP at your leisure and (2) they've explicitly committed to limited logging and not selling data which is pretty huge. I use a small local provider where possible... but the reality is that they have to lease their lines from AT&T anyway. In general, there are very few providers out there that have capability to offer competitive services.
- tripzilch 7y agoThis is exactly my scepticism. Also, they always happen to be rooted in the US where my data has no rights and come with a general cultural lack of understanding of consumer protections. This isn't power that good intentions are going to keep straight.