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Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by wild_preference on Sunday October 07, 2018 @04:37PM (#18162489)
My critique is that Hola VPN users don't realize that they are peers, nor what that entails even if you were to use more direct language than the vague "share your idle resources with the community!" rhetoric on Hola VPN's homepage.

But since you brought it up, we both know residential proxies are especially attractive to bad actors and circumventors.

It's like how we're both capable of pitching Tor as the emancipator of the sanctioned journalist trying to publish the truth in the face of mortal danger. Yet 99% of Tor traffic to my websites is malicious despite our feel-good hypotheticals.

Of course, residential proxies are even better than Tor because a network can't just block the residential IP address space. ;)

Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by exolymph on Sunday October 07, 2018 @10:27PM (#18163757)
Upvoted for realism, but I want to respond to this:

> It's like how we're both capable of pitching Tor as the emancipator of the sanctioned journalist trying to publish the truth in the face of mortal danger. Yet 99% of Tor traffic to my websites is malicious despite our feel-good hypotheticals.

Of course. That's the reality of freedom on the radical edges — bad actors need it more than pro-social actors. Many of us choose to support radical freedom(s) anyway because the capacity for anyone to act* freely is judged to outweigh the negative effects from bad actors.

*browse, post, etc.

Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by dragonwriter on Sunday October 07, 2018 @10:36PM (#18163778)
Phrased a different way, the argument is that the benefit of the freedom for those incorrectly assessed to be bad actors outweighs the cost of the freedom for those correctly judged to be bad actors.
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by exolymph on Sunday October 07, 2018 @11:00PM (#18163862)
Yes, well-put.
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by extremum134 on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @11:11AM (#18185608)
Most users from third world countries can't distinguish between ads and content.