On: Warp – Mobile VPN

[kristofferR]

Sounds like something HN readers will like, but which also would be completely commercially unviable.

[ignoramous → kristofferR]

True. That's the part where we might need to think hard: A business plan. We haven't thought that far yet, tbh.

Our intention is to: Put the control of the mobile device back in the hands of the consumer and empower them with simple but powerful tools. Think keybase, Stripe, or pre-2014 WhatsApp in terms of UX.

Mobile VPN is key part of that vision, including building other apps around it.

A lot of things triggered this:

1. The prism/carrier-iq snafu from 7yrs back.

2. The uptick in government censorship prevelant in multiple nations (India, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, etc).

3. Rise of app-economy and the relentless tracking behaviour that entails, esp from Facebook.

4. pi-hole and it's elegant solution to shut out trackers. Though I first saw this solution impl by Sam Hocevar (one of the VLC devs) in 2002 (?): http://sam.zoy.org/writings/internet/doubleclick.html

5. Not very many firms developing products like DuoSecurity did but for the end-consumer. There's a few I could find, like SecureMix (glasswire developer), Objective-See (LuLu Firewall), Jigsaw (primarily for journalists?), Purism, and KeepSafe.

[fonosip → kristofferR]

Filtering, Adblocking, VPNs are commercially viable. More of a B2B play than B2C though