Cloudflare’s free Warp VPN now available for all users.
Previously launched to a limited group of users starting back in April, Cloudflare’s free Warp VPN is now available to the public.
Refer a friend via a referral link to get extra 1Gb of WARP+ (paid) data allowance.
Referrer gets an extra 1GB of WARP+ (paid) data allowance.
You understand how a VPN works? Don't use the Internet, turn off your WiFi, and there should be no noticeable battery drain.
When is your phone not on the internet?
Mine? Most of the time.
What is their free data allowance?
10Gb
Free for their lower speed and $7/month unlimited for their +speed service.
Thanks
Won't chrome have this mostly built in natively soon anyway?
You trust Google with privacy? Their business is to collect as much data about you to serve you relevant ads.
You trust a free Cloudfare app with privacy? I mean Google isn't serving my data to anyone, more that advertising agencies can provide ads to a profile that matches my profile.
Google isn't serving my data to anyone
You're kidding, right? Depends what services you use, but the latest was Google sending voice data (eg assistant/home) to 3rd party contractors to manually process/annotate.
Generally CF isn't as consumer focused, so they don't have as much interest in individual consumer data. They're more about running the internet.
@incipient: Sorry, how is voice data the same as internet browsing from my phone?
CF is interested in money, like every other company. If you think a company is giving you a product for free, without using your data, in this day and age, you are kidding yourself. If you are actually concerned about privacy, don't use the internet.
@onlinepred: All data is valuable. Google collects data. All data (as do lots of companies). CF will be collecting some data of course. They're also doing a freemium service. Loss leader to get people to buy the warp+ service, so it's not entirely free. Personal data isn't CFs game too currently. They'd be much better off getting people through their network to drive down their bandwidth costs (the vast majority of their networks are peered).
Also Google already has a very complete picture of a lot of people. The more you spread your personal data, the better.
@incipient: Spreading data just means more places for breaches which is higher risk.
If you use the internet, many more companies other than Google already have a huge profile of you.
Anyway, you will still be giving facebook and google loads of data through this, but now you will also be giving loads of data to CF. Data is the most valuable commodity these days.
I have the feeling that this will become the dropbox of VPN companies. So lots of bonus for referrals at the start.
I guess you can't post your referral code here for an extra 1gb of warp plus (this is for faster speeds) Explanation https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/products/argo-smart-routing…
Mod: Soliciting for referrals not permitted.
The referral link will be added here soon by admins (I hope), so no need to PM anyone. Otherwise I also have a referral code, so anyone feel free to PM me too 😋
Are you able to select place of origin like Nord? Was in China recently, and was able to select Australia as the host server, so I could watch Kayo and Foxtel.
Just so people know: this is not a PRIVACY VPN
It doesn’t mask your IP address (so it’s useless for using overseas content) or for hiding your PRON from prying (non governmental eyes).
It doesn’t encrypt all of your traffic like NordVPN does.
This is targeted at speeding up connections (would be good to use this with a cheap NBN provider as it should speed up international links)
Cloudflare wants to sell this as a way to take your connection and route it over Cloudflares Argo service which is Warp+. It’s essentially just taking your connection and running it over their backhaul which is extensive and giving you direct access to many sites that use their CDN. (I think they want to get as much traffic as possible running over cloudflare to decrease their transit costs)
If you want a faster connection to international servers. Use this.
Want even faster? Use warp+
Want privacy? Not this.
I guess that makes this a VFN. A virtual faster network.
Has anyone managed to get the 10GB WARP+ working?
I wanted to try and see if it would give better speeds and apparently it costs around A$6.45 which is the big mac approximation which would be pretty good if it worked to turn a crappy connection to one as good as telstra, superloop or aussiebroadband.
Is it monthly fee or one-off?
I little bit misleading calling it VPN, when it only changes your DNS to 1.1.1.1, no actual vpn server change, you will have the same IP and location to the sites you visit.
It's actually more complicated than that. It works differently than just a DNS change.
Also it changed my location multiple times, depending on the location of the site I was visiting.
Here a good brief description of WARP.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071322
WARP uses a protocol called WireGuard to secure your Internet traffic. Your encrypted traffic flows over that protocol to the closest Cloudflare data center before it is released onto the public Internet.
WARP+ takes that one step further. Rather than releasing your traffic directly onto the Internet, we use all the data we have from our Argo product [1] to route your traffic to another Cloudflare data center via the route over the Internet with the best possible performance. That data center will be closer to your traffic's destination, hopefully improving the performance. In effect your traffic will bypass Internet congestion and slow links with the goal of better time-to-first-byte performance.
Getting a '404 page not found' whenever I click/tap on the random referral section.
moderator confirmed it's been fixed now https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/139622?page=15#comment-779…
My only issue is that it runs in background and drains my battery 2x the normal rate.