Last year, Cloudflare made the interesting decision to launch its 1.1.1.1 DNS app on April 1, which, despite being a troublesome date, does match the name of the service. Now, celebrating its first birthday, the firm has announced the next step in its evolution, Warp.
1.1.1.1 was meant to provide both greater speeds and more security to your internet traffic, and Warp aims to make that even better by encrypting the data you send and receive from your phone. As the company explains in a blog post, VPNs traditionally slow down the experience and can cause issues with a variety of scenarios, such as transitioning from Wi-Fi to the mobile network or accessing the internet through a captive portal.
Warp aims to not only protect your privacy online, but it aims to improve the connections speeds and reliability over typical VPN connections, which Cloudflare says can be a hard sell for users who don"t know what VPN means. The firm says it will leverage its massive infrastructure to deliver fast connections to users all over the world, and that it might actually make your internet faster than you"re used to. The worse your connection is right now, the better it"ll be with Warp, Cloudflare claims.
Additionally, the technology is designed to minimize problems derived from spotty connections with faster recovery times from lost connections. It also uses WireGuard, a VPN protocol which aims to lower battery usage for VPN connections, so you shouldn"t see as much of a drain as with other VPNs.
Warp is actually going to arrive as a free update to the 1.1.1.1 app, but not everyone will get it at once. You can sign up for the waitlist through the app right now if you want to reserve your spot in the beta program, though. If you want even more speed, Cloudflare will also launch Warp+, a premium version of the service which will cost you a "low monthly fee" if you want access to the company"s virtual private backbone and Argo technology for even more speed.
And, as before, Cloudflare is promising to uphold your privacy. It says it won"t log any of your data to disk, and it won"t sell it for advertising purposes either. You also don"t need to provide any personal details to use the service, and the company says it will hire independent auditors to keep its promises in check.
If you"re interested in 1.1.1.1 with Warp, you can install the app for Android or for iOS right now, and sign up for the waitlist. Desktop versions are also coming soon.
Source: Cloudflare via ExtremeTech