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Browserling goes viral with cheap phone users trying to use WhatsApp
- thaumaturgy 9y agoI'm completely happy to see this happen to ~pkrumins. He's always seemed like a genuinely nice, brilliant fellow, who's stuck with his project in spite of the usual startup advice. (He submitted a YC application years ago that iirc didn't go very far.) Hope this turns into some real success for him.
- jonathan_n 9y agoHe's profitable and growing like a weed. The WhatsApp hack potentially opens up a huge new market for him. Browserling has been a great investment, and he's a good friend as well. :)
- godzillabrennus 9y agoGlad to see another Hackers/Founders company succeeding J!
- abricot 9y ago> He's always seemed like a genuinely nice, brilliant fellow Really? From TFA: > "Then I got curious. Would these users tweet anything that I asked them? So I decided to troll my competitors a little bit, and asked users to tweet a popular meme Taiwan number one to them. And it worked! Suddenly Twitter was full with my troll tweets" He's also a bit of a prick.
- kindfellow92 9y agoHow is he a prick? What harm has he caused to anyone?
- StavrosK 9y agoYou mean besides lying to them and making them do things for some reward and then not giving the reward and laughing about it?
- fastball 9y agoPretty sure he gave them the reward? Can you not use browserling from India now?
- StavrosK 9y agoHe says he didn't at the time, in the post.
- christophilus 9y agoI read it differently. It sounded to me like he was trying to keep momentum up while he figured out a way to serve people. Maybe I misread it?
- mcintyre1994 9y ago> And they did! All these users started following Browserling and tweeting about it. But they still couldn't use Browserling or Whatsapp, it was just a new message in place of "fatal error". > Then I got curious. Would these users tweet anything that I asked them? So I decided to troll my competitors a little bit, and asked users to tweet a popular meme Taiwan number one to them. Then he seems to shift to actually trying to tell them when the service is available instead of pretending it will be if they send a tweet: > Then instead of just tweeting and trolling, I asked users to start following Browserling on Facebook so I could reconnect with them and let them know when the software was up and running again. And then finally he built something where they could sign up and it admitted they were building up server capacity to handle it. Then he moved to a lottery which it sounds like legitimately paid out, and he started to do legitimate monetisation of a not-entirely-firewall-blocked service.
- kindfellow92 9y ago
- thaumaturgy 9y agoI guess there's a subtlety at work here that's difficult for the most vocal people on HN to grasp, going by the overall tone in the comments here. There's a difference between someone who's spent years of their professional life, largely ostracized by a tech community that should've supported them more, who suddenly gets a massive influx of users and initially assumes it's an attack and, when they discover it's not, take a hacker-ish approach to playing with the situation before sitting down and devoting 20 hours a day for days on end attempting to make the service work for those users even though they're clearly unwilling to pay very much for it ... and other actual assholes that this site has regularly worshipped, people who have built entire businesses out of exploiting users and employees alike. I suppose that if any of us are lucky, we'll be successful enough one day to be burned at the stake on HN by a bunch of folks who can't tell the difference between "did one or a couple of things badly" and "is a bad person".
- jVinc 9y agoI'm sure if you would be of a differing oppinion if you were a competitor suffering from attempted DDOS attacks, or bashful campaigns. Or if you were just someone who though his product was great going along with it on the promis of getting access only to find out you got lied to. I guess it's just the case that for every ass-hole out there, there are people who'll stand besides him saying he's a great guy, simply because he's an asshole they know.
- grantlmiller 9y agothis reminds me of what Snaptu was doing years ago to bring access to developing countries... worked out ok for them: https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/facebook-reportedly-acquires-snaptu-for-an-estimated-60-70-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/facebook-reportedly-acquir... Also, this is a great way to bring better comms to millions of people who are likely underserved today.
- georgiecasey 9y agoi can't imagine he'll make money on cheap Indian users when he needs a server with terabytes of RAM to serve them but you never know. i might get blowback for this but I had an Instagram paid service where Indian users were blowing up the free trials and never paying so I just blocked all Indian IPs. more trouble than they're worth
- fooker 9y agoThis is why advertising works as a good source of revenue.
- candiodari 9y agoAnd what happens when advertisers realize that they, too, are obviously not going to sell anything to these users ? I mean, isn't this exploiting the market ? (perhaps for a "good" cause but that's a matter of opinion)
- fooker 9y agoThese people buy a lot of stuff online, usually through 'cash on delivery'.
- GoToRO 9y agoYes. The distance between 1$ and 0$ is waaay bigger than 1$.
- temp-dude-87844 9y agoIt's ironic that scores of users on phones, which are already capable of communicating, are milking a free service on the other side of the world to connect to a proprietary messaging service that subsumes the same population, to communicate there instead.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoHow is that ironic? (Seems the battle over the correct usage of "ironic" has been lost long ago.)
- captainmuon 9y agoFunny that those cheap phones dont run WhatsApp natively. Remember when WhatsApp was new, one narrative was that it was so successful because it had a client for absolutely every system, including Symbian and Java Mobile.
- fyfy18 9y agoApparently they run a fork of FirefoxOS under the hood: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/reliance-jio-feature-phone-kaios-apps-games-battery-1727285 https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/reliance-jio-feature-p...
- naugtur 9y agoThere used to be a barely-working whatsapp client on FFOS while it was still alive. OpenWapp was the name. And you could register/authenticate via SMS. Stopped working at some point though because whatsapp api changes.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agointeresting...so FirefoxOS ended up being somewhat of a success.
- dkaigorodov 9y agoVery good point. I believe whatsapp is the one to be trolled.
- eps 9y agoThere is no value in collecting social graph data on owners of $20 phones.
- jopsen 9y agoIt's a long play... Being the defacto messaging system in a country like India is certainly a position worth protecting.
- 9y ago
- rabboRubble 9y agoWhat a fun story! So happy for the dev. I hope he can pull together the influx of people / usage into a good paying platform. That would be the best ending :-)
- virgilp 9y agoI feel like what he did at the end was the right thing to do (talk to Indian people, figure out a way to monetize it), but the initial antics are childish and distasteful. Those are real people man, not toys... don't play with them.
- netsharc 9y agoHear hear. Also that click-baity title. I guess I'm old because reading it I thought what a little brat. Or is the term brogrammer?
- diamondo25 9y ago"Brogrammer" is a slang term for a stereotypically masculine programmer. The word is a portmanteau of bro and programmer. I'd say he's more of a scriptkiddy/skid, as i feel he is not capable to handle the opportunity. Heck, he could even become that programmer from Black Mirror S04E01! Toying around with your customers, blegh. People were desperate, couldnt he see?
- theon144 9y ago>Then I got curious. Would these users tweet anything that I asked them? [...] And it worked! >That was super hilarious. I was literally rolling on the floor laughing. TAIWAN NUMBER ONE! COMPETITORS NUMBER NINE! Hahaha, people in dire financial situations who have to use my service are doing what I tell them to! Ain't that just hilarious? Distasteful, really.
- 4ceofspades 9y agoHN always thinks lowly of freeloaders, why do these guys get a free pass? Just look at the Facebook messages, they really thought they were entitled to the free service and were unwilling to pay even $0.10
- abhirag 9y agoHN is not a hive-mind, stop trying to make it one and get off your high horse. The Facebook messages didn't seem like they were from people who thought they were entitled to anything, I saw two people trying to ask him politely, with sir and please, and others trying hard to spell weird app names. People were using the trial feature browserling provided on its main page and not breaking any terms and conditions while doing so, so not freeloaders. Browserling is entitled to blocking these users or limiting the trial feature and the Facebook messages were from the time when they were not trying to monetize by asking for $0.10 I know sweeping generalizations about a group of people most certainly less fortunate than you are easy and you definitely are entitled to your opinion but don't try and label it as something "HN thinks".
- martinald 9y agoI don't quite understand how this works. WhatsApp web just lets you access your messages on a different device, it doesn't let you register an individual account or anything. Surely that means this people already have a phone that has WhatsApp? Why not just use that instead of this complex workaround to get it on the other phone?
- tgtweak 9y agoWhatsApp native and WhatsApp web doesn't work on those phones.
- StavrosK 9y agoWhatsApp has a J2ME version, no? Do those phones not run Java apps?
- ricardobeat 9y agoFirefoxOS
- Sean1708 9y agoBut (unless it changed since I tried it) WhatsApp Web requires you to have WhatsApp running on a phone already, so as far as I can tell these people must be running WhatsApp on a phone that can run WhatsApp so that they can run WhatsApp in a browser on a phone that can't run WhatsApp.
- jjeaff 9y agoI believe you can signup on WhatsApp web. You simply need a phone number to verify your account.
- b3lvedere 9y agoI've put Whatsapp on several tablets by using free sim cards and an old smartphone. Still works.
- mankash666 9y agoThis seems like a perfect use case for advertising. Need to watch/see ads every 15 minutes for continued use. As long as the ad revenue exceeds operations cost.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoBut as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the people who purchase $20 are not likely the type of people who advertisers are interested in, since they don't have much disposable money. Now if he finds another way to profit off of these users beyond advertising or just spamming twitter, then could be successful.
- arve0 9y agoHere is an update on Africa/Cameroon: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/ http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/
- dkaigorodov 9y agoWell, that's an awesome story. Love the fact you found a way to commercialize your product and find a way to sustain and serve low-money customers.
- z3t4 9y agoI find it annoying that it's virtually impossible to get such a phone in "the west". I've been looking forever for a phone that enables usb tethering and is not a touch screen. Touch screens sucks when it's cold outside and you are waring gloves, so I need buttons, big buttons.
- Pharaoh2 9y ago5 mins on amazon will find you what you are looking for. There are a whole bunch of feature phone and basic carrier/prepaid phones out there. Some of them will also do usb tethering but its a bit difficult to actually set up since it needs obscure drivers. You can also go for the higher end blackberry which still keeps physical keys and runs full blown android. Even sold by Amazon: Blackberry: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DGYW83E https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DGYW83E TracPhone: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M3VI4Q6 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M3VI4Q6 TracPhone: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01L2DE1G2 https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01L2DE1G2
- vit05 9y agoThere are tons of cheap phones in Chinese markets. https://www.gearbest.com/unlocked-phone-_gear/c_11293/?odr=low2high&odr_value=1 https://www.gearbest.com/unlocked-phone-_gear/c_11293/?odr=l...
- eps 9y agoThis gets blocked on WhatsApp end in 3, 2, 1...
- peteretep 9y agoWhy would it? It seems like lots of additional WhatsApp users, but they don't need to support a shitty phone.
- ec109685 9y agoThis guy has access to all of WhatsApp credentials that flow through his virtual browser.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoI don't see why WhatsApp would want to block...rather it is the Jio phone company that sees this as a threat to Jio's own messaging app.
- v1nc 9y agoDo you really think WhatsApp doesn't work on phones like Jio because WhatsApp doesnt has enough capabilitys to support it ? WhatsApp actively blocks phone models that doesn't fit in their needs. WhatsApps first priority is blocking chat-/spambots, because they are only making money with selling access for companies. To enchant the bot detection, the WhatsApp API needs to get more and more complex. If a older or cheaper phone doesn't support the complex API anymore, botblocking is more important than backwards compability. It follows that great tools like the Matrix bridge never will working with WhatsApp.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoI don't know for sure why it doesn't work on Jio phones. What you said makes sense, though. WhatsApp should be able to figure out a way to perform human user detection on these cheap phones. What type of API does FirefoxOS lack?
- 9y ago
- skrebbel 9y agoIt interests me that the author treats his Indian users more like some sort of "human botnet" than like real people. I feel like it fits nicely with YC's favourite interview question, "When have you most successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage?", which in my mind neatly translates to "what's the most psychopathic thing you've ever done?". If that question is the success predictor YC says it is, Browserling probably has a great future.
- jgtrosh 9y agoI was surprised to see that at no point in the article does the author express any appreciation at the opportunity his service seems to have given its new users. There is no step between hating the situation because of its cost to accepting it because of its potential revenue. I get that the author is acting as an economically reasonable agent but the lack of humanity is jarring.
- kindfellow92 9y agoYou’re the one showing a lack of humanity by judging him based on a single blog post.
- mcjiggerlog 9y agoI found the article pretty distasteful, too. I wonder if he would treat the users with so little respect if they were from a rich white country.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tomhoward 9y ago"When have you most successfully hacked a non-computer system to your advantage?", which in my mind neatly translates to "what's the most psychopathic thing you've ever done?" If this is a correct translation, YC would be using it as a no-invest signal more than anything else, given how much the two original founders have talked about the importance of good character and decency in being a successful founder: http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-did-at-y-combinator http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i-... http://www.paulgraham.com/mean.html http://www.paulgraham.com/mean.html http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
- Sami_Lehtinen 9y agoThis is one of the areas where Telegram is way better than WhatsApp. Actually their web client is totally awesome.
- xref 9y agogreat story, hope Peter does something like an indiehackers.com interview to learn more details about browserling
- swang 9y agoi don't know if peter or substack reads this but whatever happened to testling? it seems to be down.
- naugtur 9y agoTestling's been down for years. It got discontinued. Nothing this convenient came from the competing services.
- jxramos 9y agoSo entertaining on many levels
- al_chemist 9y agoI'm amazed how positive reaction this article gets on HN. This guy is an asshole! It starts with author calling his users "fools" for not randomizing useragent (while he himself is a fool for not using useragent correct way - to know what hardware/software accesses his service). Then he goes super happy "hah, great, let them crash competitor websites". Then he realize "This is the biggest opportunity ever!". He tries to sell his service for small amount of $1 per day for using free WhatsApp. "I had no idea how much money Indian users spent on online services." Quick google search reveals that daily wage labour gets 2-3 $/day. What he does next? He sends his users to promote his website at social media. Follow and tweet about my service and I will allow you to use my service - he promises, except it is not a payment method - it's a lie. But free advertisment is not enough for this guy. It's "his biggest opportunity ever"! He sends his army to "troll my competitors". "That was super hilarious. I was literally rolling on the floor laughing." "users would tweet, follow, like, and do anything I tell them to get access to Browserling" except he didn't let them access Browserling. They are just numbers for him, a viral mob that will do whatever their god tell them to do. And as a god, he doesn't care about his promises. Well, he could, but it's too much work and there are more interesting things to do for him. His final solution - more lies and unethical behaviors. "Increase your chances in lottery by promoting my service" - chance does not change Depending on your luck, the same amount of money will give you day, week or month of a service. This guy is an asshole, his behaviour is unethical and wrong. I can't believe it gets positive feedback here.
- 2pointsomone 9y agoAgreed, he is an asshole and this is an unethical way to monetize
- l4yao 9y agoWhat about his monetization is unethical? Where is the moral conflict?
- Pharaoh2 9y agoWhat is he supposed to do? His initial reaction when he thought he was under attack was fine and the second reaction was immature and lacked empathy but he was likely facing an unexpected problem that he couldn't figure out how to handle but very soon got on the right track. Those servers and bandwidth aren't free. Bandwidth to tier three countries is actually more expensive. Advertising revenue is basically non-existent for tier three countries, conversion rates and LTV is super low, ltv for the group of user that are using his service for whatsapp will be in the range of 1-5 Rs, ~(1-8 cents). He will eventually have to block these countries again if he can't figure out a way to indirectly monetize these users. Or he will run out of money and the servers go down. The best thing for these users would be if he can figure out a way to make it sustainable, and that means to monetize these users.
- jondubois 9y agoIt sounds like it's going to be difficult to monetize. It's better to build apps for iOS because those users have the most money and spend the most on apps. Android is further behind but still reasonable... If you're targeting users of some cheap $20 phone, then obviously there won't be much money in it. Plus the cost of running a virtual environment for each of these users would be too high I suspect. This could be used as a tool for mass social manipulation though. Browserling could transform Instagram feeds into whatever it wants... Could potentially be used to spread fake news and spark protests.
- adrianmonk 9y agoSure, individually those users don't have a lot of money, but have you considered the population of India? It's pretty large. Also, basically all those users were at some point able to cough up $20 for a phone. Messaging is pretty important (and WhatsApp is near or at the top of the list), so maybe a lot of those users could manage to cough up another $1 for something.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoThe author's attitude towards his users reminds me of the young Zuckerberg who called his users "Dumb fks" for giving him their emails, pictures, addresses, SNS because they "trust me". He might also be successful if he plays his cards right.
- christophilus 9y agoHe wasn't calling his users dumb. He was calling the attackers dumb (for not randomizing their useragent), and then he realized it wasn't an attack. And while the way he herded the users to spam others was distasteful, I think his pivot in the end was a positive thing.
- tzahola 9y agoLooks like it’s okay to treat poor people as slaves and make fun of them, as long as they don’t live in the first world. Shame on you, “startup enterpreneurs”.
- adrianmonk 9y agoThe maintainer of this software is a bit nutty, but actually this is pretty timely and captures two important truths that a lot of people might not appreciate: 1. International payments are hard because every country has its own system, and the people there have their own payment methods. In the US, you take it for granted that anyone with money to spend has a credit card that can make payments in US Dollars. It isn't valid to assume that for users outside the US. People may not have credit cards at all, or if they do they can't necessarily (economically) pay in US Dollars as the currency. 2. There are a LOT of potential users in international markets. Focusing on the First World (US, Europe, Japan, etc.) might be a great way to keep your project simple or speed up your launch, but you're leaving literally billions of potential users on the table if you don't even try to consider India, China, etc.
- dominotw 9y agoBack in the day as poor kid in India, my hardest stumbling block trying to apply to international universities was finding a credit card to pay for TOEFL. I had to move heaven and earth to find someone who had a credit card.
- therealmarv 9y agoWhatsApp should invest in clients for feature phones on this markets. If not WhatsApp (with their really really big resources) which other company can make sure that everybody can communicate to eachother no matter if you have a smartphone or feature phone.
- sigi45 9y agoStrange security implications he opens himself up to. He offers an VPN Service / more or less without the proper knowledge. I think he could be sued for distributing child porn and other things VPN companies take a lot of ressources to make sure they are protected by that stuff.
- santialbo 9y agoI'm amazed hn users are bashing Peter for wanting to monetize the trafic. This is not a cheap service to run. He has to raise entire virtual machines and he's getting ddosed by thousands if not millions of people. The fact they are indian is totally irelevant here. Maybe making them tweet stupid stuff was a mistake but hey, we all do mistakes, that doesn't make us assholes. You don't know the relationship he has with his competitors, maybe they are in good terms. Why are people judging him this easily?
- StavrosK 9y agoWe're not (I'm not) bashing him for wanting to monetize. We're bashing him for lying to his users and laughing about it. "Haha, I made those stupid idiots tweet about Browserling and then blocked them anyway! Isn't that funny! Interesting that they'll tweet what I tell them. Dance for me, puppets, dance!"
- GoToRO 9y agoIt seems to me he blocked them because he had no solution to offer. He tried to get rid of the traffic any way he could because he had no solution to offer.
- l4yao 9y agoI wonder if the fact they are Indian is relevant here, especially given the timing of the influx of critical posts. It may be a difference in cultures and values. It seems like an absolute non-issue to me as an American, but I may be in the minority. From my perspective, the tweets were not a mistake. They certainly weren't done with malicious intent to the tweeters, and they all for the purposes of marketing (with some meme humor mixed in). Isn't this pretty run of the mill for some twitter marketing campaign?
- GoToRO 9y agoDo they use a real smartphone to pass the qrcode screen in web whatsapp?
- leephillips 9y agoAfter reading this I was surprised to see that @browserling only has about 7,500 followers on Twitter. Why aren't there hundreds of thousands?
- dingo_bat 9y agoJust as a note: These cheap Jio phones are not old. They are also not your usual $20 phones. They only work on Reliance Jio. This is unusual because it means they must support LTE and must have a fully IPv6 network stack.
- mmirate 9y agoWhy the personal attacks on this CEO? I don't see anything in this article that merits them.
- maxencecornet 9y agoAmazing read
- ionwake 9y agoI agree. I can only think the negative components are ironically from the readers who lack the empathy to understand what OP was going through - both his limited understanding of what was happening and the implications. Most importantly, I appreciated the honest writeup - something quite rare these days.
- buro9 9y agoI would love if WhatsApp made a commodity phone. An Android, that wasn't even Google Android, and may even look like candy bar. All it would do would be: 1. Phone 2. Contacts 3. WhatsApp 4. Brave Browser (or Firefox Focus) Perhaps it would have a camera, but only sufficient for WhatsApp. Perhaps GPS/Maps would be built in, but only accessible for WhatsApp "share my location". The browser would open links and allow browsing, but would not integrate too deeply and would focus on security and battery life where updates may not be applied and signal is sometimes terrible. Just the simplest phone, dirt cheap, durable, capable of communication in an age of WhatsApp. It would also be a near perfect travel/emergency phone for people in the West, and would likely have a huge market amongst outdoor types.
- Mahn 9y agoThe demand in India for something like this is evidently there, so you may be on to something. Someone at Facebook better take notes.
- applecrazy 9y agoThe Indian government isn’t on good terms with Facebook due to the failure of the Internet.org experiment (links elsewhere in this thread)
- majani 9y agoSince Whatsapp joined Facebook, they are now only interested in ideas that have potential billion dollar upsides. The phone you are suggesting is more likely to be built by an entrepreneur who's eyeing a small but steady business.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoDidn't know they'd "joined" FB -- wonder if they're going to federate messaging between their services.
- detaro 9y agoNot sure that would be much better than existing cheap rugged android phones? Internet.org-like plans haven't exactly gotten much love, and that seems to me like the biggest differentiator Facebook could introduce. (purely business-wise, their brand name of course could help, but that's not much actual merit IMHO)
- fs111 9y agoI don't understand how you can use web.whatsapp.com w/o having a phone connected as well. The web version pipes everything over to the phone, at least for me. You cannot use it, if your phone is not connected. What am I missing?
- applecrazy 9y agoA lot of users in the Indian market own two cellphones. One is a smartphone with (usually) a prepaid data plan, and a “dumber” feature phone with a cheaper data plan. This allows people to effectively use WhatsApp from both phones, making it convenient to leave one at home and still be able to access your messages.
- fs111 9y agoI see. Sounds weird that having 2 phones is cheaper than just one. Esp. since the smart phone is powerful enough to run WhatsApp. Why would one want a second phone and pay for a second data plan? I don't understand how that works out.
- ikeboy 9y agoThe one at home uses home internet, not a data plan.
- vijaybritto 9y agoIt's weird but some carriers offer basic phones with free data everyday. They don't give that in smartphones.
- Abishek_Muthian 9y agoWhen Jio Phone was announced, I was excited as there was a possibility that FireFox OS (KaiOS) had a chance of gaining significant user base in India. With millions of units sold, it actually has. But as this article points out, the dependency on WhatsApp in India is too high to ignore; the last I heard was that the effort to bring WhatsApp to Jio Phone failed and the Jio Phone 2 would run on Android.
- vit05 9y ago> "It turns out users in India can't easily make online USD purchases with credit or debit cards as it requires a special bank permission." And people still think Cryptocurrency will not unbank the world. I am not talking only about Bitcoin, but there is a necessity for a new way to exchange value, store value and buy things without the limits that the place where you live decided to impose.
- akhilcacharya 9y agoThe author's immaturity aside, the buried lede here is the Jio - crazy, I hadn't heard of it. $20 for a phone with LTE, FirefoxOS fork, WiFi and 5 day battery life. I'd buy one for 3x that price!
- secfirstmd 9y agoI wish there was a cheap phone that had huge battery life and ran Calls, SMS, WhatsApp and Signal and that was it. Both are now such an important part of how people communicate to me that it's impossible to ditch a smartphone. How come no one was built a mobile app that locks down all apps other than those you select (e.g WhatsApp/Signal) for X amount of time until you put a code in or (even better) a partner/friend sends you a code. Would be great for enforce non device time.
- detaro 9y ago> How come no one was built a mobile app that locks down all apps other than those you select (e.g WhatsApp/Signal) for X amount of time until you put a code in or (even better) a partner/friend sends you a code. Would be great for enforce non device time. Isn't that exactly what the kid-friendly modes of the various mobile OSes do?
- sireat 9y agoI am amazed at the backlash on Peter for a rather considerate response to a crippling attack. He could have skipped the Twitter jokes but otherwise he did more than most businesses would do by providing a solution to these unexpected customers. These users were (ab)using the free tier of Browserling beyond its intended use. PS I highly recommend reading back issues of catonmat to see how much value to web and programming community Peter has provided over the years.
- totierne2 9y agoHow do I get a dumb phone (simple browser, Java) to access Google hangouts get/send messages? Prepared to make it a (java/rest?) side project. (Son has feature phone).
- totierne2 9y agoI am thinking Google Chrome headerless on a pc, and Java2ME rest calls or simple feature phone web browser front end on the phone.
- ComodoHacker 9y agoWhat really amazes me in this story is what a powerful force an army of desperate and somewhat ignorant users can be. If they were told to post some memes and fake news or write some troll comments, they would do it without a bat of an eye.
- Muthupattan 9y agoPt.mgajgt2dmdptjpg1p876mqtgmg6j8g6dgbpjpthmgjgmg6gm6mhm6mg6gm4h6g6g64455