Hi, all. I just got the MVP of my new app out the door and I'd love to get your feedback on it!

If you'd like to give it a go, drop me an email [davepeck at getcloak.com] and I'll send you a special Hacker News invite code. (Or you can just sign up on the Cloak home page.)

Cloak is a personal VPN, only (1) it's super easy to set up and get going, and (2) we terminate in the cloud [AWS], which means we can scale dynamically to meet load and can pick a data center near you to decrease the latency. Under the hood, Cloak is built on top of the OpenVPN stack.

Cheers, and thanks for checking it out!

I like your site, but I'm unsure how this would be better than simply using the built-in VPN stuff. I have paid VPN account configured and I use it when on public wifi.

Also, I can share my VPN account with my mobile devices -- can I do this with Cloak? I don't think OpenVPN is iOS compatible.

This is a compelling idea, but how do users know whether or not they can trust your service? You would have access to all unencrypted internet traffic from your users while the app is active.

Living in Japan, I am familiar with a number of people who might try to use your software to make it appear as though they are coming from the United States, so that they could access Hulu or similar websites which are blocked abroad.

I know that, with AWS, you can choose a data center in Asia, so I suppose this type of action will not necessary work with Cloak. I am just interested if you have a policy for dealing with such behavior? It might represent a drain on bandwidth, for example.

It seems to me that the largest problem with this type of service, however it's dressed up, is on the VPN endpoint. We could argue forever about which transport is easier/has more security/etc - but if the VPN endpoint is not extremely secure, resistant to subpoena, etc - then it's not all that useful over a regular homebrew vpn.

I've seen so many of these VPN-for-rent services that this is becoming an obligatory reply. But I don't see anyone saying "ssh" on the comments yet, so:

Here's how to tunnel on OSX via ssh:

    ssh -fnNMD 8080 -S ~/.tmp-ssh-socket you@server.you.own && sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy Airport localhost 8080

  ssh -S ~/.tmp-ssh-socket -O exit localhost && sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate Airport off

Granted I don't have the time to wrap a pretty UI around it, but those commands work, and I trust my own servers more than any service.

If anyone does have time to wrap a pretty UI around it... OpenCloak could exist mere hours after the commercial project went into beta :)

Have you considered some sort of pay-by-usage (by time, by bandwidth, whatever) plan for people who don't know how often they'll need a VPN?

It's not every month that I'm in a hotel or a coffee shop, so it's hard to justify a monthly subscription.

Quick question about your implementation. Do you generate a key for each user using PKI, or is there a shared key for all users? I had a previous VPN provider that used a shared key for each user, which was a security issue.

Very cool stuff, something I would most like use myself :)

undefined

This isn't entirely constructive, but I like your design. It's close to some of the stuff I've been building lately, and gives me a few ideas for my next design project.