Bulă comes out of its warren!

Hi,

My name is Bulă, and I live in a beautiful country, Romania. It turns down the "multi eyes", the directives from Europe or NATO that strip us of our privacy and assault our digital intimacy. Respect.

If I am arriving now, it is to give that privacy back to you, because you have lost it.

What was needed was not just one more VPN on the pile. They all make the same promises and run the same sales, but those promises hang by a thread: declarations and an in-house policy. It is an internal setting, barely visible, revocable.

I wanted an undetectable VPN, one that does not need to be believed.

#Knowing nothing, by construction

You can keep a secret, but only when nobody knows it exists. You can protect a piece of data, but only when it does not exist at all.

I was struck by the news in April 2023, when six police officers showed up at Mullvad, a Swedish VPN, to seize customer data. That data did not exist. They left empty-handed. That day, an architecture did what no promise ever could.

That is where Warren starts.

• No account. The app generates a secret key that never leaves your device, a twelve-word phrase like a crypto wallet. I know neither your name nor your email. Hard to lose a customer file that does not exist. Even harder to sell one.
• No logs, carved into the metal. My exit servers run entirely in RAM: nothing is written to disk, a reboot wipes everything. I spell out here what I never see.
• In Romania, naturally. The Romanian Constitutional Court struck down blanket data retention twice. No law forces me to watch you, and the country belongs to none of the 5, 9 or 14 Eyes intelligence alliances.

#Why not a classic VPN?

Because a classic VPN tunnel shows. On a monitored or locked-down network (hotel, bar or train wifi, any company or organization fond of captivity, sometimes a whole country), the traffic of the usual VPN protocols gets blocked, because it has a recognizable signature.

I do not like that captivity. I built my own protocol, WarrenGuard. Your traffic travels through a QUIC tunnel, the technology of the modern web: from the outside, you look like someone browsing perfectly ordinary sites. And that is it, nothing more.

No need to take my word for it: all the code is public, under free licenses (AGPL, GPL). Better to read it, compile it, hunt for the flaws.

#Everything has a cost

Saying no has a price, so I might as well show it.

No customer file means no "forgot password" button: if you lose your secret phrase, nobody can give it back to you, not even me. Tough luck. A single price of 7 EUR per month, prepaid, means no bait offer. It always catches up with you in the end anyway. And instead of a world map inflated with virtual servers, a network small at first, documented machine by machine. But the warren will grow, the way a bird builds its nest.

Uncomfortable? Sometimes. Bourgeois. I'm kidding, it will get better. On top of that you are starting in beta mode, so be nice. Oh, thank you.

Something bothering you? You can write to me at bula@warren.ro. I will try to reply, but I have a lot on my plate, always too much, so the old adage holds: "all things come to those who wait". I can't wait to see your little notes on the forum, even if they are perfectly anonymous.

See you soon, and bună ziua.