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This is always interesting when it’s pointed out, but are teenagers in US high schools really using a fake security spyware VPN in high enough volume to give Fa
by mcintyre1994 9y ago
This is always interesting when it’s pointed out, but are teenagers in US high schools really using a fake security spyware VPN in high enough volume to give Facebook useful data?
Now that I say that, I wonder if they’ve tried marketing it to clueless people via their apps by touting it as a way to improve the security of their accounts or something.
- cududa 9y agoEven back in middle school in the early 2000's, credentials to bypass the web blocker or address to a proxy that hadn't been blacklisted yet was a hot commodity - they were mostly sold/ distributed by entirely non-technical kids too.
- untog 9y agoYes but that was back in the day of locked down desktop machines. Teens have smartphones now, they don't have to care about that.
- htormey 9y agoThis article is dated and I’ve never used Onavo myself but I think the pitch is it saves you money on your data plan: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.imore.com/onavo-app-claims-shrink-iphones-data-usage-save-money%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.imore.com/onavo-app-claims-... Teenagers are pretty cheap so I can see the appeal if that’s still true.
- markdown 9y agoYou'd think the kind of people who use HN would know better than to share AMP urls. I refuse to click on that URL.
- if_by_whisky 9y agoHN is a diverse community with many views.
- markdown 9y agoIf you understand the view of those who share these URL's, could you explain the merits of their case? Now I'm not talking about using AMP on websites as I know the arguments for and against. But as for linking to a resource from a third party site, why would one link to a mirror instead of the canonical URL?
- marmshallow 9y agoWhy not? The link works fine for me.
- lmm 9y agoWhen the mirror is a faster-loading page (as experienced by normal users who don't have javascript blockers), then that makes perfect sense, no?
- idle_processor 9y agoJust edit AMP out of the URL. https://www.imore.com/onavo-app-claims-shrink-iphones-data-usage-save-money https://www.imore.com/onavo-app-claims-shrink-iphones-data-u...
- JoshMnem 9y agoIt's really irritating to click on those links, so I think the request is reasonable. AMP pages take many seconds to load on some browsers.
- codeisawesome 9y ago> We will not sell the data or introduce ads to Onavo. :-(
- kyle-rb 9y agoA lot of high school WiFi networks have blacklists for social media sites. Many kids use VPNs to get around it.
- mintplant 9y agoYep. Or web proxies; I remember one that was disguised as an educational site, but if you entered the right credentials into the "admin area" login, unlocked a PHProxy instance. This was also what led me to first install Tor.
- KekDemaga 9y ago"start using cgiproxy" used to be all you needed back in my day.
- alexdumitru 9y agoBack in the day I've had a website ranking in the top 3 of Google for "start using cgiproxy". Honestly, I never knew why people would search for such a complicated phrase, but I've found the keyword somewhere and optimized the website for it. Do you mind telling me why where you searching for that phrase instead of something like "free proxy" or "cgi proxy"?
- KekDemaga 9y agoFree proxy and CGI proxy alone used to generate lots of fake results. As "start using cgiproxy" is the title of a cgiproxy page you'd typically get less false positives.
- nejenendn 9y agoYou could also throw the tor browser on a usb stick when i graduated.
- dingo_bat 9y agoTor doesn't work everywhere. I'd don't know how they did it but it was blocked in my school's computer lab.