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I used to own 10k IP addresses that I sold as proxy servers to internet marketers. I made about $20k a month and it paid my bills through college. I had no ide
by TechBro8615 6y ago
I used to own 10k IP addresses that I sold as proxy servers to internet marketers. I made about $20k a month and it paid my bills through college. I had no idea what I was doing and eventually shut down the company, but damn, I wish I at least kept control of those things.
If you want to see some sketchy shit, look deeply into what the VPN companies are doing.
- mepkn 6y agoI wish I had the same idea.
- TechBro8615 6y agoYou could probably still do it and do fairly well. Go on BlackHatWorld as a starting point. I did this circa 2011-2013, but really all I did was arbitrage between webhostingtalk and BHW/Wickedfire. I ran a bunch of squidproxy instances and let the server providers convince me that I couldn’t have more than 256 IPs per server, so I way overpaid.
- sam1r 6y agoSpoken like a true tech bro.
- xacky 6y agoIt’s the same mindset with Bitcoin, Tech Stocks or even Pokemon cards. It became valuble because not many people knew.
- aritmo 6y agoWhat are they doing?
- TechBro8615 6y agoI think there was a lawsuit against one of them recently. But the gist of it is they’re opening a bunch of LLCs and registering their IPs with ARIN. When you “geolocate” an IP, you’re really just looking up the registered info for that IP’s ASN in the ARIN/RIPE database.
- hobofan 6y agoSo the "sketchy shit" they are doing is fulfilling their marketing promise of obfuscating the geographic location for their users?
- WhyDoesDangSuck 6y agoWhat's the issue with this if it accomplishes the goal of proxying your connection? I assume the LLCs are designed as a legal shield but would probably have their veils pierced.
- TechBro8615 6y agoI mean, I don’t have any moral problems with it. But any time you’ve got one entity opening a bunch of LLCs, I think it qualifies as sketchy.
- WhyDoesDangSuck 6y agoHahaha definitely a red-flag if you ever work for a place that plays the LLC game. Wish my younger self knew that
- TechBro8615 6y agoIt’s also how Enron found so many buyers for its energy contracts ;)
- justafriend 6y agoOut of curiosity, did anything particularly bad happen due to working for a place playing this game? Asking for a friend..
- My8thAccount 6y agoYea I got hired as a CTO for a startup in my late 20s and thought I had found my dream job. They offered to double my pay as a JR engineer which was a good amount of money for my age and was given 4% ownership that vested over 4 years. Well about 9 months in, the CEO decides the current business plan isn't viable and wanted to setup a competitor to his previous employer. He knew that this could very easily result in litigation from his former company as he was also the CEO there and started playing the LLC umbrella game and suddenly I'm getting paid by some company in Wyoming with a totally different name. 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
- ignoramous 6y agoIndustry leaders like NordVPN and ExpressVPN may engage in P2P routing (to use residential IPs especially) to unblock services like Netflix and Disney+ [1]. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9614993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9614993 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15576457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15576457 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14331049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14331049
- kornesh 6y agoHow does residential IPs actual work?
- kbumsik 6y agoMaybe ISPs have a list of IPs to assign to residential customers?
- InvaderFizz 6y agoTorGuard's "Streaming IP" certainly does. It allows me to use streaming services and sites that are normally blocked for me at my home in Mexico. I just route my entire connection through it on one of my SSIDs/VLANs.
- viraptor 6y agoYou filter by block's AS. It's not always 100% correct, but with enough people you can collect your own list of most common VPS / hosting companies.
- cosmodisk 6y agoBack at home the company behind NordVPN is touted as a top company.Recenly was reading an article that they'll be moving to new premises, as they've already got 1500 working for them.
- tpetry 6y agoVery often your residential connection is sold as proxy to e.g. circumvent rate limits. Companies like luminati are used for example for scraping google search results and many more things.
- rdbell 6y agoMy startup offers a residential IP sharing model where users get paid to share their bandwidth: https://packetstream.io https://packetstream.io
- bluesign 6y agoThis is the one of the best (if not the best) solution out there I tried so far, congratulations. I am very happy to see it is from fellow HNer.
- rdbell 6y agoThanks for the encouragement! I think I found your username in our DB, and I've added extra bandwidth credits to your account :)
- saalweachter 6y agoI know you're being nice here, and I have no idea if that particular user cared, but like, as someone who has to take frequent user data/trust/privacy/handling trainings, like, don't ever do that. 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.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago> I made about $20k a month and it paid my bills through college. Lord man, what kind of bills were these?
- arpa 6y agoCollege bills i would guess
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agobut $20k is like, a year's tuition at a University. Did parent also rent a mansion to live in while attending?
- vikramkr 6y agoDepending on the university that might not cover a semester. Still, within 6 months of making money at that level, your post tax earnings are going to be enough for even the most expensive undergraduate programs
- jghn 6y agoIt also depends on when this was.
- geek_at 6y agoOr like a whole degree from bachelor to masters and a 15.000$ car (in Europe)
- jjcon 6y agoBut then afterwards he would barely make more than a barista
- vinay427 6y agoGood luck paying living expenses for years with only $5k in one of the many European countries that don't generally provide stipends for that. I'm a student in Switzerland where my university recommends more like $2,300 a month.
- nodesocket 6y agoHow did you acquire the original 10k addresses and what year was this?
- kbumsik 6y agoYeah I am curious too. How to own a public IP? Does it work like getting a domain name?
- bswinnerton 6y agoGenerally speaking you request them from a regional internet registry (RIR). In North America, the RIR is ARIN https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/request https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/request. Bear in mind it’s harder and harder to get V4 addresses from an RIR these days, but it’s still possible. Once they are allocated to you, you have to find a place to announce them. Some “cloud” based solutions are Neptune Networks (https://neptunenetworks.org/ https://neptunenetworks.org/) or Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/ https://www.vultr.com/).
- tinus_hn 6y agoYou used to just ask for it with a reasonable story. Before that you used to just ask.
- J0_k3r 6y agoman I'd have just stuck with it for 20k a month damn, good luck getting a salary that high working for some company.
- iamgopal 6y agoI think he must have sold it for couple of mills at minimum.
- pc86 6y agoCome on man everyone here works for a FAANG making $600k/yr plus stock, don't you know that?
- __lazybyte 6y agoThis cracked me up :)
- J0_k3r 6y agofucking apparently, I don't even know why I bother sometimes.
- shmoogy 6y ago> If you want to see some sketchy shit, look deeply into what the VPN companies are doing. 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
- sammax 6y agohow do they do that?
- judge2020 6y agoOne example is the Hola VPN which, in itself, is a VPN that uses other users' connections to act as a VPN to almost all countries, but they also sell access to this network of IPs via https://luminati.io/ https://luminati.io/.
- freehunter 6y agoBasically like Tor, some VPNs route someone else's VPN connection through your VPN client. If I want an IP address in Sweden and someone in Sweden wants a US address some VPN companies would just route our traffic through each other's home addresses (potentially leaving you on the hook for what the other user was doing).
- judge2020 6y agoTor doesn't automatically turn your connection into an exit node when you connect to it.
- alephu5 6y agoLuminati does this too, the provide an SDK to app developers that lets users decide between seeing ads, paying a fee or allowing use of their IP when it's not being used.
- overcast 6y agoWait, you were making $20,000 a MONTH, and you gave it up? I don't understand.
- freehunter 6y agoThere's a lot to be said about the anxiety of "I'm making a lot of money doing something I don't understand". I've backed out of businesses where I could have been a millionaire but also could have been in prison for violating some law/regulation that I knew nothing about. It starts feeling like you're running a scam.
- hamandcheese 6y agoFor $20k a month I would have started educating myself real fast.
- jldugger 6y agoIt's only 240k a year, which is pretty standard SV wages.
- Jowsey 6y agoGod, I just _love_ how out of touch the American tech industry is from the rest of the world.
- jldugger 6y agoMe too, pays the bills =) 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.
- hamandcheese 6y agoYes, I'm aware that $20k/month salary is readily achievable SV. But $20k/month to be your own boss is a bit harder to come by.
- iJohnDoe 6y agoIs there still a market for this? I own a lot of IPs and would be interested in learning more. It would depend on what they’ll be used for, but maybe there is something beneficial.