Lord man, what kind of bills were these?
And I shut it down because the support requests became unmanageable, there was rampant fraud, chargeback rates were through the roof. I had more important things to do / opportunities to focus on.
You mean selling use of residential IP addresses of people who have no idea? I assumed that was the case when I saw companies selling proxies that route through residential IPs
My point is, if 20k/month motivates you, Silicon Valley has hundreds of thousands of people in that category. And by many perspectives, they are underpaid. Really, I'm just saddened by how out of touch the rest of the world is on the subject.
HolaVPN unapologetically does this too [2].
All of this is discounting the new-age dVPNs like Orchid (not quite the Tor replacement that was promised? [3]) and Mysterium [4].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9614993
It seems, however, that at least some VPN providers use their customers' bandwidth without their knowledge to route other customers through it. I'd say that qualifies as sketchy.
Although on an entirely personal level, I'm not a fan of stuff like going through VPN to use Disney+. I think people should ideally either not watch or pirate geoblocked content. Consuming geoblocked content through VPNs is basically letting such companies get away with discrimination and still get your money.
I pay a significant amount of money for MLB streaming, only to have many games blacked out. Due to various factors, I cannot legally get access to those games.
The internet made them largely redundant, but they still had their contracts and pushed to have things like geo-blocking to maintain their "local monopoly" arrangement.
When legal options are not readily available to me due to geo-blocking, I have no qualms about pirating instead.
Just because this type of licensing contract is common in the media industry doesn't make it acceptable. People should just pirate whenever they hit a wall like that.
I just route my entire connection through it on one of my SSIDs/VLANs.
How confident can I be that the Feds wont pay me a visit at 4am?
edit: The information on how it's secured for packeteers seems a bit limited. (how do you prevent people spraying 192.168.1.1 into all endpoints?).
But it's interesting enough to hit up in a seperate docker network. I'm looking forward to seeing if it'll actually use GBs.
1. Check your ISP contract. If it is a residential connection, it probably says you are not allowed to share your connection with people outside your home (and it could be argued that you are doing so by running this).
2. Check your laws. In Spain, if your connection is used to conduct illegal activities and you willingly gave access to the attackers (which is what you are doing here) then you are a "necessary collaborator" and would be found guilty of these crimes.
In other countries, “not technically illegal” may apply. In Spain, it does not.
Or to give another analogy, it’s not technically illegal to sit in a car. It’s a different matter if you’re sitting in the car as a lookout while a crime is occurring. While there’s “intent” that matters in that particular example, when it comes to internet crime in Spain, intent doesn’t matter, facilitation is all that does.
Firstly, you really want to engineer your systems as much as possible so that you can't look at any PII -- and that includes things like usernames that aren't displayed to the public, and maybe even ones that are! -- as an administrator of your system, without going through some sort of "break glass in case of emergency" process that leaves an audit trail with a clear policy of when it is acceptable.
Second, even if you have access for job-related tasks, you shouldn't spontaneously try to tie user accounts to outside identities; that should be like line 4 or 5 in your data access policy. The right way to do the above would be something like saying "Thanks for vouching for us! If you message me your username @XYZ, I'll add some extra bandwidth credits to your account. :)"; that turns the interaction/demasking into something voluntary on the user's behalf, rather than you creepily stalking them through your user DB.
Agreed it's a little scummy to not factor your operating expenses into the price of the product, especially if that's not blatantly obvious from the outset.
My second thought was hoping traffic actually does get proxied through your network, and isn’t pure P2P, to provide anonymity between users.
My third thought was that I should sign up regardless, as this could be useful!
One nitpick: I'm seeing occasional timeouts (probably because the residential endpoint went down recently). Do you have a best practice on how to work around that?
Is being a packeter safer than running a tor exit node? I'd worry that the people willing to run this risk for a small income couldn't afford adequate legal defense if necessary.
When you “geolocate” an IP, you’re really just looking up the registered info for that IP’s ASN in the ARIN/RIPE database.
That's pretty much the whole business model of VPNs.
That, and secure encrypted traffic.
Maybe there's some similar avenue here.
AFAIU, typical reason is to compartmentalize liabilities, but aren't you doing something sketchy if you have reasons to compartmentalize?
To comfort me, the CEO told me that they would go ahead and vest my 4% shares immediately for the new entity. The checks were still cashing and I didn't think much of it at the time. The company started making decent money about 1M annual revenue, but when profit sharing season came, I was not given anything but a 2k bonus. Then one day when nobody was in the office, I happened to see some documents on a desk that dissolved the company I supposedly owned 4% of and described a 3 tier ownership scheme (dreamt up by a creative lawyer on retainer)
There are many people that will prey on young talent, get them to build their startup infrastructure by promising them 250k+ salaries plus profit sharing. After you build the thing and server your use, be warry of the people suddenly wanting to "help" or "co-administer" the system. It's code for they are trying to learn how to run things without you because you are too expensive now that the system is online. Additionally, in more conventional contracts vesting options can cost you a lot financially if you don't calculate the taxes right.
In the end the CEO and VP got sued by both their former employer and the state of california. The CEO's wife then divorced him and took half of his money after he lost nearly 500k. Karma was a little mean in my opinion on that one haha
For those reading along, States like Wyoming (and New Mexico IIRC) are attractive for these kind of LLC fillings b/c they don't have a public Company Databases.
That, and cheap taxes/fees.
Looks like the data will only be available at the Federal level and not open to the public.
> In another transparency setback, the law also exempts some entities from the disclosure requirements, including domestic investment funds that are advised and operated by a registered investment adviser.
Sounds like the practice of using Registered Agents will still be allowed to continue.
So it's a new law that will change how the Feds can access and prosecute organized crime, which is a good thing, but won't help much in allowing us to learn who really owns that new shinny LLC.
If you want to see some sketchy shit, look deeply into what the VPN companies are doing.