Lifehacker’s Australian site featured a post about icanhazip.com and traffic went through the roof. My little Slicehost instance was inundated and I quickly realized my Apache and Python setup was not going to work long term.
I migrated to nginx and set up nginx to answer the requests by itself and removed the Python scripts. The load on my small cloud instances came down quickly and I figured the issue would be resolved for a while.
SPs (Internet Service Providers) generally offer DNS services to their customers, so when you don’t set up DNS servers on your computer or router, your DNS queries will run on your ISPs DNS servers. Using the default ISP DNS servers can result in certain problems while browsing the Internet:
Issues can happen with DNS requests themselves; most of the time they’re unencrypted and this leaves room for different types of DNS attacks.
Cloudflare announced their new VPN product called Warp, which is based on their own implementation of WireGuard. This product seems to fit into their general strategy of wanting to man-in-the-middle (MITM) themselves into most of the traffic on the Internet, like I discussed in a previous post. As I explained there, they did the same thing with IPFS as well.
Knowing their willingness to deplatform people and block content, it would be stupid to trust them with your Internet traffic. The fact that they also refused to work with Jason Donenfeld (at least so far), the creator of WireGuard, seems highly suspicious in light of their history.
WARP is not designed to allow you to access geo-restricted content when you’re traveling. It will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit. If you’re looking for that kind of high-security protection then a traditional VPN or a service like Tor are likely better choices for you.
