I thought the most interesting bit was the privacy OHTTP which they’re building a service around[0]. How this will differ from a VPN will be interesting. The gist of it is that the http connections are naive and don’t really record an “accurate” up address or trace, if I understand correctly
The idea is to compose intermediaries run by different parties, so that no single entity has access to both the unencrypted payload and client ip address / connection context. It’s a controlled form of proxying where the proxy doesn’t have access to the plaintext. Not currently designed for everyday browsing; the use cases are things like collecting telemetry.
CloudFlare's solution is significantly less secure than Tor; it's more like visiting an HTTPS website using a VPN service. You have to trust that the VPN and the website operator aren't colluding to de-anonymize you, and that they aren't both being monitored by the same third party (who can de-anonymize you using timing information).
I thought you were being facetious about what could have been a throwaway comment from a throwaway account, but then I checked their bio; this particular type of interaction is one of the things that I love about HN.
Same here, I've learned to check. I really should have explicitly pointed out who, so it was less blown off. Almost came back and did so. And yes, why HN is great.
[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-privacy-into-internet-s...