14 ms·
What are they doing?
by aritmo 6y ago
What 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
- NetOpWibby 6y agoWhat an incredible ending. Glad it worked out for you in the end.
- 6y ago
- pc86 6y agoOr good business sense, maybe? If you're in real estate and own a bunch of properties, you're going to have an LLC for each property, and maybe even one LLC for each state that owns the other ones. You could easily end up with a dozen LLCs for <10 properties in multiple states. Maybe there's some similar avenue here.
- labawi 6y agoIs there a non-sketchy reason why having multitudes of LLCs makes good business sense? AFAIU, typical reason is to compartmentalize liabilities, but aren't you doing something sketchy if you have reasons to compartmentalize?
- rualca 6y ago> 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.
- HeWhoLurksLate 6y agoOh yeah, secure connections. Wouldn't want to forget that...
- 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.