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1. We offer a free service. 2. With free support. 3. And we somehow have enough ips to go around for everyone? 4. Btw, we are not MITMing you or logging anythin
by hobs 12y ago
1. We offer a free service.
2. With free support.
3. And we somehow have enough ips to go around for everyone?
4. Btw, we are not MITMing you or logging anything.
What?
- ToastyMallows 12y agoYou know what they always say, when something is free, you are the product.
- vdaniuk 12y agoThis phrase should be put down with a shot in a back of its metaphorical head. Whisper Systems, TOR, tox are free. Should we apply the same principle to those products? (I am not defending this shady VPN service)
- dethstar 12y agoThis phrase refers to stuff free as in free beer.
- ceejayoz 12y agoAnd Whisper Systems, TOR, tox are free as in free beer. What's your point?
- explorigin 12y agoProbably a better disambiguation would be "services" that are free. Open-source projects can always be validated to make sure that they are not monetizing their user-base. Tor is a service but by reading the source code, you can see (if you understand the code) that nothing monetizable leaves your computer. I don't have as much confidence in Tox just because it hasn't been around as long (and I haven't read the source).
- icebraining 12y agoWikipedia is a service.
- jdiez17 12y agoWikipedia is a service puts up a huge banner every year asking you to please give them money if you don't want them to be forced to show advertisements, implicitly making you the product.
- icebraining 12y agoI say, the lengths people go to justify a trite thought-terminating cliché don't fail to astonish me. If the mere possibility than a service you use might in the future have ads is sufficient to justify the phrase "you are the product", then I don't see how anything can be an exception to that. After all, the next release of Tor might have ads! Who knows?
- teamhappy 12y agoTOR isn't free. The support and development is paid for by donations and funding, the bandwidth (currently over 12000 MiB/s) is paid for by lot's of volunteers. I get your point though. The question isn't whether something is free to use, it's who's paying for incurring costs.
- exelius 12y agoYou're talking open source software vs. free services. Free software is write once and release; it costs the author nothing to maintain it. Free services require maintenance and incur operating expenses that need to be covered somewhere. The original quote was always about SaaS anyway.
- exelius 12y agoYou don't need enough IPs to go around; you can always assign a private IP address and do NAT (this is how most VPNs work anyway). But yeah, I don't understand how they're paying for it. My best guess would be they found a loophole to exploit peering agreements, similar to how small rural telephone companies will set up free conference bridges because the big telcos have to pay them connection fees. Or they're just capturing info and selling it (unlikely; personal information just isn't worth that much and it's easy enough to buy already from data brokers). Or they're MITMing the big ad networks and showing their own ads instead. I consider this the most likely scenario.
- hobs 12y agoOh sure, sorry I meant to imply that effectively those external ips they will be exposing to outside services will be banned fairly soon by a lot of things and marked as a vpn/proxy service. On second reading I realize that I basically in no way say that. Agreed with everything you said though, it's not legit.