I’ve been experimenting with and evaluating a free privacy offering from CloudFlare called “CloudFlare WARP”. It does what it claims and routes all your traffic via a WireGuard tunnel through their systems. Which means it bypasses DNS and routing by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and that means your ISP can’t snoop on what you do on the internet. The easiest way for snoopers to see what you’re doing is via DNS requests to their own DNS servers. You should never use your ISP’s DNS servers anyway. Not if you can help it. They’re just harvesting your data to make even more money from you.
This is not a high security VPN like those you have to pay for. If you want that, you have to pay for it. This will not relocate your IP to a foreign country or anything like that. It relocates your IP address to the nearest CloudFlare facility to your actual location. Just as a matter of reference, BillWhittle.com is on CloudFlare’s Content Delivery Network (CDN)
This is a good thing, locating near you but not you, if you want to use any online streaming services like NetFlix. NetFlix and most such services have different rules on what content can be shown in what countries. If you can watch NetFlix at home without WARP you can watch it with WARP.
If you’re doing something questionable, quasi-legal or flat out illegal this is not what you should be using. You should be using a paid VPN and you should be relocating your IP far from where you actually are. NO torrenting or anything like that with only a WARP connection. You’ve been warned. If you’re trying to dodge DRM or DMCA systems, this won’t work for that.
That said, if you’re the run of the mill honest citizen and not a pirate or a child porn consumer, CloudFlare WARP will work just fine for you and will keep your internet forays private. For free. It even has a feature where you can check a box that makes it block obnoxious ads and another box to block “adult” content. In case you have people around you who you don’t want accessing that stuff via your computer/phone/tablet or the alien device the LGMs and BEMs implanted in your …
I’ve tested it pretty thoroughly. It works well, hasn’t caused me any ancillary problems and makes me invisible to the tests and simulators at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s reflector tests. If you want to see what information your browser is revealing click on this link, it takes you to Cover Your Tracks at EFF. For me it shows nothing at all.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
It also works and plays nice with my regular commercial VPN which adds another layer of privacy to a paid VPN connection. It never hurts to be careful …
I’m not noticing any significant hit on my system resources so it’s not slowing things down noticeably. I get about half the throughput I would get ‘nekkid’ to the internet. Which is pretty good because I have an insanely fast internet connection on the machine I tested this all on. It’s so fast that even at half speed it’s probably still significantly faster than most people who might read this would get.
I’ve noticed that it doesn’t like me having my WiFi fallback turned on in addition to my wired Ethernet connection. It likes one or the other and doesn’t care which but both makes it balk a little. I just shut WARP off while my second network interface loads up and then turn it back on again. In a few seconds it stabilizes on both and works fine. I have a gigabit Ethernet connection backed up with a 5 GHz WiFi connection and both load balanced off of each other. If you don’t know what any of that is you can ignore this paragraph and just use WARP, it won’t give you any trouble at all.
WARP also bypasses a lot of the ‘middle man’ routing on the internet so it’s a wee bit faster too. There’s a lot of information about WARP on the ‘net and you can read/learn more for yourself if you want to. One word of caution on that, WARP recently went through a major upgrade in both programming and security earlier this year so don’t rely on anything you find prior to Jan 2023. Newer information should be accurate and helpful, older information will still point out some of the things that were fixed and improved recently.
You can get it here …
https://1.1.1.1/
21 replies on “A bit of extra internet privacy for free.”
ACTS, I’ve been using Express VPN for a few years. Worked great when travelling overseas where certain great firewalls are. Still use it today on all devices. Company pays right now but on retirement I’ll keep the VPN.
Funny thing and I don’t know if you use a for pay VPN or not. When I’m on my VPN and try to comment or upload a photo along with a blogpost, It’s 50/50 that I’ll get the BWDC denial due to “incorrect email” message. If I immediately turn off the VPN, even when I’m still logged into BW, I’ll try the upload again, and this time, goes right through.
Ever had this happen to you on BW?
Yeah, I use a commercial VPN too. Not Express, a different one. I’d ‘druther not say in a public forum which one. Mine has a browser extension that can be turned on and off per browser or I can load the whole thing and run it on the whole machine. I always have FireFox and Chrome running for browsers. I just click a button up in the browser extension bar and that browser is VPN’d.
I get that “incorrect email address” failure sometimes too. Haven’t really paid enough attention to it to see what’s causing it. Usually I just log off and back onto my account on the site to clear it. Now that you’ve said something I’ll pay more attention and see if there’s a pattern or a correlation.
There are lots of things that can cause that behavior but my best bet is that the site software sets a cookie with your login info (at least your email part of that) and IP address. If you connect without a VPN, then connect with one, the cookie doesn’t think you’re supposed to be a member here.
If I really want to do something that really needs a VPN I have another machine in another room that is VPN’d 24/7/365 and I just remote into that machine and work on it over my LAN from here to there.
My main machine is a gargantuan titanic humongous behemoth of a monster. 20 drives, dozens of TB of storage, six monitors, three PCI video cards, a dozen or so fans, liquid cooling plus a whole lot more stuffed into a full tower server case with ancillary and auxiliary stuff on my desk and nearby shelves. It’s a major investment so I don’t use it for things where I might really need a VPN.
I do all that on a cheap old Dell Optiplex workstation in a closet so if something gets past my defenses, that’s the one it eats. In which case, Oh Well, stuff happens. I have a spare SSD imaged that I can slap into that one and have it back up in minutes if it’s a malware issue. It’s on it’s own local subnet and there are other precautions. I don’t trust virtual machines, I have my reasons for that.
I don’t use a VPN in day-to-day operations on my main machine. I am running WARP now that after testing it I’m satisfied enough with it to recommend it to others. WARP seems to clean up and slick up my connection in addition to the security it provides. I actually get a little better performance with WARP running than without it.
I’m paranoid but I’m not that kind of paranoid. I have my main machine locked down pretty tight so it’s not leaking much to the outside world. People in here at BWC have said they don’t want the Government snooping on where they go on the internet. That’s not really a problem, the gub’mint has bigger fish to fry. It’s all the commercial exploitation that’s the issue. You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to outfox Uncle Sam if he’s got a good reason to notice you. Most of the people in here don’t have a snowball’s prayer of doing anything along those lines but fooling themselves. Then again, there’s a lot of that going around.
If the U.S. Government wants to talk to me they know exactly where to find me. But …
I’ll see ’em coming. I’m a really, really hard guy to sneak up on. 🙂
As usual, but not necessarily always, that was effort well spent to ask you about VPN’s. I concur with your assessment of safety against Washington snooping.
I see someone has been saving all their pennies for the components to build their ‘behemoth”. That’s a lotta hardware. That’s a whole lotta TB’s too. If you keep saving nickels, maybe Santa’s bringing you a Petabyte this year…..
Thanks for the advice.
Yeah, well … I use a VPN that’s a bit out of the ordinary and I don’t want to recommend it to people in here. It’s a VPN specifically tailored to my particular, peculiar requirements and it’s not something the average user should use. I’m afraid that if I say which one it is people will take that as a recommendation and I don’t recommend this VPN for ‘normal’ people. Of which you probably figured out by now I’m not one.
😉
As far as saving pennies goes, you got that right. This behemoth I’m on started life as my personal custom build in 2007. Since then it’s gone through many evolutions of update and upgrade. I don’t know for sure but I doubt that any of the original parts are still in use. It’s on its third or fourth motherboard, I lost track a while back.
It’s had a problem the last couple days and I just fixed it this morning. One good thing about being a geek is that I only have to buy parts and components. I can do all the work myself. Which can be a PITA sometimes but it’s still cheaper and more workable than trying to fix someone else’s design or taking it to a repair shop. If I dropped this machine at a computer repair shop it’s doubtful they’d even know where to start.
If computers were to be compared to vehicles this one isn’t a sports car, it’s a semi-truck.
You bring me back to the early days of going to Frys Electronics to get all the components to build a 386 on my kitchen table. Then another when the 486’s came out. Again to Frys when the first Pentiums came out. I remembered thinking ‘how can it ever get better than this?!?
A 386 with a math coprocessor if you please … 🙂 Do you have one up there or did you have to go to the one in Manhattan Beach? I always went to M-Beach. They had everything I needed for both my own stuff and as a quick way to grab something (like for instance a managed Ethernet switch) that had failed at a client’s.
I still build all my own main systems, I can’t buy a tailor made system off the shelf that will do what my builds will do. I’m gearing up/saving my pennies for a new build in the next year or two. When Windows 10 goes EOL, I’m going to use the one I have now but install a “requirement free tiny” version of Windows 11. Then I can still run it as my local server inside my perimeter. I’ll build something that well exceeds specs for future OS upgrades to use as my personal main system. I’m in no big hurry, yet. At my age that may well be the last system I build so I want to get it right.
Hey, I did some more experimenting with VPN connections while here at BWC and my VPN causes that “incorrect email” error reliably too. It doesn’t matter if I’m running the full TAP adapter and VPNing everything or if I use the browser extension button. Running VPN it gets the error. Shut off the VPN, the error clears and I don’t even need to reload the page or log out and back in. So …
That means that CloudFlare CDN or something/someone on the site is probably blocking the exit IP of our VPN servers.
Which sadly is a very, very common thing because of several reasons. If you want me to name a few let me know, if you already know why then it’s redundant for me to list some of them. They’re good reasons, I understand why providers do that, but it’s a PITA sometimes too.
CloudFlare WARP doesn’t have this issue at all here on the BWC site. Which is not surprising because CloudFlare is the CDN here.
I’ll shoot straight to the VPN issue. I’m seeing more and more sites, ecommerce and just company sites, doing things in their code which forces a shut off of my VPN in order to proceed. Once in, I can quickly turn on the VPN and operate again, but at that point…what’s the point?
I did the same experiment a couple of times with the BW site and it now happens regularly. Something’s changed. NBD, but still it’s a change.
Frys…(sigh and a poetic wax….) man I loved going in there. There were 4 in the South San Francisco Bay area – Mountain View, San Jose, Fremont and Los Gatos. All with that bizarre Egyptian motif on the outside and inside. The one in Los Gatos, CA was closest to my house, and it was located in an old building which was originally built by Hewlett Packard, and I believe it was an old assembly plant for HP.
Just to line up for MB’s, Ram, Processors and Power supplies, then walk over to get the bare-bones cases, and finally the video cards, cables, etc. And when that was done, grab some software, and on the way out pick up an iron or washing machine or vacuum too! So much fun. My 3 daughters really got an education of “what’s inside the box” and why each component was there, as the kitchen table became the assembly bench.
Sad to see Fry’s go the way of the Sphinx. Video Killed the Radio Star…and internet shopping killed Frys Electronics.
Creepy to see the hulking, mammoth and very dead Fry’s building just south of the Las Vegas Airfield.
There was a Fry’s in Orange County that had a Space Shuttle motif. Inside they had all the Bose audio gear set up inside a mock Space Shuttle. Just going there was cool, didn’t matter if I bought anything or not. That one closed long before the main death of Fry’s.
My Dad and I went there once and as we walked up there was a sandwich board out front advertising a sale on gigabyte drives. I didn’t even know that those were in production and available. Yes, gigabyte drives, not terabyte or multi-terabytes, gigabytes. That was a long time ago, my Dad’s been gone since 1995.
It was my Dad that got me started with computers. That’s a long story for another time. Thanks Dad, I haven’t forgotten all the great things you did for me, usually when I needed them most 🙂
(Insert poignant smiling emoji here)
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Been thinking about getting a VPN. Right now, all my access is on a Kindle Fire. Not sure if Cloud flare works on one. I will find out. Money being tight right now, no laptop is in my near future.
But my “that’s too good to be true” indicator is going off. TANSTAAFL applies. That is why I never got on Facebook knowing they were profitable. Knew either they were going to have ads, or they were using my data.
Cloud flare can be doing this in the goodness of their heart (still does happen) , using my data themselves, or using this as a “loss leader” to get you to buy something else they have. Odds are, its a loss leader.
ACTS, if this were anyone else but you, id say they are using the data themselves. You’d would not recommend it if so.
Will look it up for more detail.
Again, thanks so much. 🎉
I use several Kindle Fires, they’re really reliable little tablets. I always “jail break” ’em so I can load apps from the Google Play Store. The Fire OS is just a rebranded Android system. If you need pointers on how to do that let me know and I’ll post some links.
WARP works on Windows, Macs, iPhones, iPads, Linux and Android. It comes in an easy to install app and basically just modifies the network stack. It can easily be turned on or off with a tap/click.
You’re right about TAANSTAFL but CloudFlare provides the basic WARP hoping to get people to upgrade it to the premium paid version. You don’t have a need for the premium services, those are more aimed at commercial IT systems.
When I say I’ve tested it, I mean not only the functionality and utility of the service but I’ve also “snooped” the network packets it’s sending to know what it’s connecting to and what it’s sending.
I checked it out pretty thoroughly over a period of months. I wouldn’t recommend it here if I hadn’t done so.
WARP follows the standard guidelines for a VPN as far as log deletion goes so in that regard it’s like any other VPN.
As with anything, there’s a degree of trust involved. A paid VPN can log your activity too, and commercialize your traffic if they want to. You’d never know. I haven’t seen any indications that would make me suspicious of WARP.
Boy, your timing is excellent. Haven’t installed it yet, but probably not be a problem. I did look into it and noted that I had an android version. That should be sufficient. And fairly easy .
If need a link I will post the need it here……if I can’t figure it out myself. I learn better by It doing myself and I can be quite stubborn about it. Franklin: “Tell me and I forget; teach me and I may remember; involve me and I will learn.”
When I looked at it, and other products they have I thought to myself “Ah ha! It is a loss leader. They want me to buy something else.” I love being proved right when it is a good thing. Being right about a bad things means I am better prepared.
I know from other posts on computer things you brought up and your thoroughness that from every test you could try it was not sucking up my data. You would do no less. It would violate your personal ethics. Not happening!
Not only would that violate my personal ethics, they would be sucking up my data too. I NEVER recommend anything I don’t use myself.
That’s not always applicable to others because not everyone does the things I do with computer and digital equipment. Also sometimes I’m in a position where I have to make a recommendation on something that doesn’t apply to me so I can’t actually be a user. That said, if I recommend it, I use it. I’m running WARP right now and have it set to run on startup so I don’t forget to turn it on.
Bear in mind, WARP is a VPN system but it’s more oriented towards security than privacy. Whereas a commercial paid VPN is more oriented towards privacy than security.
WARP gives you a decent balance of both for free. It used to expose your IP to the website(s) you visit when they load up in a browser. CloudFlare changed that with the upgrade this year and no longer do that, not even on their own CloudFlare network (which BTW is huge).
WARP started out to be a way to speed up your internet and kind of morphed into a VPN too. The CloudFlare DNS servers are the fastest in the world and that shaves some time off internet connections. As I said, this year they went whole hog and released the new version which does a lot more than speed up your ‘net.
Another thing to bear in mind is that no matter what you’re using if you’re doing something illegal (not that you would) the powers that be (FBI, mostly but not exclusively) can get a warrant to monitor your traffic no matter what you’re using. If that were not so then criminal enterprises (the Biden Crime Family?) could just use a VPN to hide all their criminal activities. There really isn’t any such thing as perfect privacy on the internet BUT using a VPN means you have “signalled” a desire for privacy and security that it takes a warrant issued by a Judge to get around. That’s true for a lot of things. Like your phone. If they can’t get a warrant to tap your phone they can’t get a warrant to tap your data streams either.
There are ways to get at your stuff but if you’re using a VPN or WARP it’s difficult though not impossible. (For instance they can install a small parasite program on your devices that captures what they want before it ever gets to the ‘net. Stuff like that.) Those sorts of things would only apply to people who already know they’re doing illegal things. So if you want to use WARP it’s a step in the right direction and helps quite a bit to counter commercial data harvesting. No sense in making it easy for the bastards.
I’ve spent hours, including with amazon support and cannot get this to download. I guess I have to “jailbreak” my Fire and I have no idea to do that. 1.1.1.1 only knows about my Samsung phone. If I need to have a laptop or desktop to do I’m stuck right now. I don’t have either except my work computer, and if I use that for non work, I can get fired. If there is a link for my situation, please post it. If not thanks anyway. And if there is a link for a.laptop or desktop Windows please include it. I may have to get one soon anyway.
Again thanks for the info and time put in.
You are much appreciated.👍
Here is a simple, step-by-step tutorial on how to get the Google Play Store on your Amazon Fire Tablet. I do this to all my Fire Tablets* as soon as I take them out of the box. Amazon is a PITA about their apps and the things available on Google Play Store are a much larger selection.
This is easier than it looks at first glance. Just follow the steps in order, do what they say to do when they say to do it, don’t get in a hurry and don’t get ahead of yourself. Once you’ve done it you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.
https://www.howtogeek.com/232726/how-to-install-the-google-play-store-on-your-amazon-fire-tablet/
You get all the versions of WARP at the same place, which I posted above. They’re all on that page, just select your operating system and click on it.
As far as laptops go, I don’t own one. Not an actual Windows laptop anyway. I have a couple of very cheap Chromebooks and some tablets. The closest I come is an RCA Cambio Tablet that runs Windows 10. I got it cheap, it’s a refurb. If you don’t NEED the portability of a laptop you’re better off with a desktop. You don’t need to buy a new one, there are tons of cheap refubs on the ‘net.
(* I have 3 and will probably get another one or two soon. They’re sold on Amazon’s “outlet” store on a regular basis and cheap. Like $15-$25 or so. The outlet store is “Woot.com”. Sign up for the emails and watch for tablets.)
Spent hours after reading several times to make sure I got the steps right….. And still no Google Play on one Kindle Fire. Haven’t tried the other yet. Haven’t given up yet, but I need a break from pounding my head against the wall.
Probably caused by my getting interrupted multiple times and maybe losing track of what.I’m am doing. Need uninterrupted time I dont have with 4 house dogs, one being sick, and a semi handicapped wife.(Still recovering from knee replacement surgery. And still has back issues)
But thanks so much in any case😀
Yeah, you definitely have to do things exactly the way that tutorial says to and exactly in the order it tells you to do them. You’re digging around in the guts of an android OS and it’s not at all intuitive.
The good news is that you can’t really screw anything up even if you mess up on following the instructions exactly. You’ll just end up with files that don’t do anything. There’s no code execution unless you do all that in the right order because Android never gets the instruction to call anything.
If you’re using a file explorer go back and delete all your downloads and start over. You might also look in Apps and see if anything got installed, then uninstall it.
If you have a printer you might trying printing that page and marking off the things on it as you complete them. Otherwise taking notes always helps me too.
In your situation the way you describe it the problem probably isn’t being interrupted, it’s urgent interruptions where you have to drop everything and deal with them. You have my sympathies, I hate trying to get things done in that kind of environment. Good luck, let me know if you take a stab at it again.
I will try again….some day. And will let you know. As to printing instructions off……if only my printer to kindle connection worked consistently. I can print, but right now, only one Kindle works every time🤔
Printing is next. That way I can black out ads and do check marks for each step.
And once again, thanks.
I forgot to add that I am in no way affiliated with nor compensated by CloudFlare. I don’t get anything from this but satisfaction and in fact it costs me in time.
This is simply a helpfully intentioned public service announcement for BWC subscribers.
And appreciated as such. About to change my ISP so this is a good time for me to review what I have and see if there is something better or less expensive and equal
If you check into and decide to use WARP bear in mind that it’s a VPN in the general definition of the term. It creates a private tunnel from your device to the website you’re connecting to. It works much the same as a business VPN, not much like a private VPN like Nord VPN or Express VPN.
It’s private between you and your endpoint connection. It’s not private to the endpoint you’re connecting to. If you want to keep your ISP and such like middlemen from snooping on your internet browsing, it works great for that and will speed up your connection a bit. Places like Google can still harvest your personal data revealed by searches and such. They won’t see your real IP address though, they’ll see the IP of whatever WARP server you’re connecting to in order to establish a tunnel. It also has a malware blocking feature so that helps quite a bit.
There is no antivirus program that is 100% effective, every little bit helps in keeping control of your own devices.