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Cloudflare Says Its New VPN Service Won't Slow You Down (wired.com)

Posted by msmash on from the interesting-services dept.

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.

3 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Google not Googling by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:Google not Googling by ron_ivi · · Score: 3, 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.

  2. QUIC is a bit of a nightmare by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 4, 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.