We use Cloudflare Warp at work. Honestly—and I say this as a Cloudflare fan in general—it doesn’t work well for me. I regularly have connection issues with it enabled. Video calls sometimes cut out for a couple seconds, and Tuple (which I use a lot) really struggles with it. It’s possible it’s my internet connection or something unrelated, but I don’t have any of these issues when Warp is disabled. YMMV and all that, so take this as the anecdote it is. For what it’s worth, some coworkers have similar issues, but others don’t, so maybe it’s region specific. (I live in Oregon.)
I have a fun story about using Warp while on vacation (Bahamas). I was finding that my net traffic felt like it was slower/more variable than I'd expect with uneven speedups and slowdowns.<p>On a whim I installed and turned on Warp and suddenly my internet speed was both palpably faster and more consistent in its speed. I think it possible that one of the side effects of encrypting your traffic may be that it evades ISP traffic shaping.
Kinda uneasy about how Cloudflare is positioning themselves to have insight into a huge chunk of the Internet's traffic (very much like Google has).<p>Even though there's no visible abuse right now, you know, Google's motto also used to be "don't be evil".
You have to click on one of the links to find out what this actually does in addition to Cloudflare’s 1^4 DNS server:<p>> Enter our own WireGuard implementation called BoringTun. The WARP application uses BoringTun to encrypt all the traffic from your device and send it directly to Cloudflare’s edge, ensuring that no one in between is snooping on what you're doing. If the site you are visiting is already a Cloudflare customer, the content is immediately sent down to your device. With WARP+ we use Argo Smart Routing to devise the shortest path through our global network of data centers to reach whomever you are talking to.<p>[0] <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-for-desktop/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-for-desktop/</a>
> Your Internet service provider can see every site and app you use—even if they’re encrypted. Some providers even sell this data, or use it to target you with ads.<p>> We believe privacy is a right. We won't sell your data, ever.<p>"We, the people who make up this company now, but not in the future, PROMISE."<p>I notice they didn't say "we don't keep the data."<p>According to the comments, this is just wireguard. I deployed my own on a webhost and I use that, probably to the same effect. I guess I have to trust the webhost not to go snooping in my private logs, but that's a whole lot more targeted and requires a lot more effort.
I’ve been a Warp+ user for some time now and I’m mostly happy.<p>My online privacy is important to me. I use ad blockers too in addition to cloudflare.<p>A couple of things I’ve noticed along the way…<p>1. Switching off my wi-fi network and then rejoining later used to be an issue but seems to have resolved some time ago (mobile)
2. It seems on macOS that almost every time I login I need to update the client.
3. Usually sites can’t resolve my IP and place me hundred of miles away which is fine by me. However occasionally I run across a site that has a pretty close to home read on my location. It seems sites that leverage cloudflare cdn might see a more accurate location because they are on the same network - I’m not sure how this works technically though.<p>I’ve never encountered a censorship situation or any website that was inaccessible. I have run into issues where steaming sites want you to turn off VPN but this isn’t consistent. I also run into issues occasionally when jumping on a hotel wi-fi or like a Lowes or Home Depot where they want you to agree to terms and likely want to snoop your traffic.
Warning: Warp exposes your IP to any site that is on CloudFlare. Do not mistake it for a general VPN. It does <i>not</i> protect you from trackers.<p>This has a surely intentional side effect of incentivizing sites that want to see the real client IP to be behind CloudFlare as well.<p>Source: <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/warp-client/known-issues-and-faq/#why-is-my-public-ip-address-sometimes-visible" rel="nofollow">https://developers.cloudflare.com/warp-client/known-issues-a...</a>
‘eastdakota:<p>How would you candidly compare guarantees/expectations of Mullvad VPN vs your Cloudflare Warp VPN with respect to:<p>- privacy, but also<p>- performance.<p>As a side note, I really value using a certain popular torrent box VM service for $10/mo is that they provide SSH and OpenVPN. I’ve used that VPN a lot when I worked in GCC countries (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain) to help me get around national HTTP blocklists. Most every other VPN I tried was blocked, or would get blocked after a certain # of GB sent in a certain timespan. I think the torrent box servers were located in minor data centers which weren’t on their list of “high potential risk” so they bypassed the otherwise pretty thorough blocks.<p>The server I used was also located in the United States which helped a ton with proper localization and accessing my bank accounts/etc which were otherwise sometimes more difficult to use from other countries.
I use Cloudflare WARP for my home and smartphone and laptop. I really, really like the content policies I can configure. Getting the combo of VPN + DNS content filtering is really nice. I use it for blocking myself from accessing pornography and their security and deceptive website categories have been useful.<p>The interface for configuring the content policies is really easy to use too.<p>I also really like the browser isolation feature too - I use it to access links from emails I feel suspicious about.
Cloudflare Warp is an extremely unreliable and frustrating end user experience that’s not worth the trouble for the vast majority of people.<p>The client software implementations are poor and unreliable. Any possible performance gain will be wiped out by constantly needing to debug issues.
Can anyone explain how Cloudflare got the 1.1.1.1 domain? I know they are an influential company that controls a large portion of the internet, but I'm still confused. Is it an IP or a name that gets matched to an IP?
Does it work in countries like China to bypass their Great Firewall?<p>Edit: Out of curiosity I searched in some Chinese tech forums. Apparently it works, but it is so slow, not really useful for any serious use.
Most of the time the fastest way to any given site is to avoid unnecessary network hops.<p>Now maybe CF have a more efficient route here or there but really I can’t believe that for most people it’ll be faster.<p>As for security or privacy I can’t imagine they’re much safer than browsing most HTTPS sites directly. There’s nothing to say they’ll be able to resist a secret US government subpoena for records either.
Cloudflare is shoving Warp down any open throat they see. It's really annoying. I recently did some sales calls with them and they really want everyone using Warp.<p>I'm <i>sure</i> that the traffic analysis it unlocks for them is incredibly valuable. But I'll never use this.
(I had this issue, not sure if its fixed now or I was doing something wrong)<p>I'm not sure if its related, but I had some DNS resolution when I switched on WARP. I know that 1.1.1.1 is DNS over SSL, some ISP don't like that? I don't remember which applications had issues(guessing it might be steam client, I could be wrong)<p>Also, never noticed a significant gain in network speed or reliability either. I don't use it anymore, but will give it a try again.
So, are they already blocking access to the parts of the Internet that they consider to be too dangerous for people to be allowed to visit? Or how long would it be till they start to?
> We believe privacy is a right. We won't sell your data, ever.<p>There’s no reason to believe this. This is the same company that publicly stated their principled position relating to the culture of free speech and then flip-flopped not even 3 days later.<p>It’s not about that issue but rather that this company has lost credibility and should not be trusted with any promises. Keep at arms length.
warp seems to stabilize my connection and 3x the download speed since I have 8% packet loss typically. I'm somewhat of an edge case though since this level of packet loss isn't normal.