7 ms·
How misbehaving at school made one man a multimillionaire
- tmikaeld 11y agoThe name is quite genius, common people don't know or care what a "VPN" is, but if it "hide my ass" on the internet - it sell itself.
- robmcm 11y agoWouldn't it get blocked for having "ass" in the name? Slightly ironic choise of name IMO.
- jotm 11y agoFor what reason? They connect the client's PC to an exit node... they probably also use a different domain name for authentication :-)
- robmcm 11y agoA URL in with "ass" in the domain will almost certainly be blacklisted on a school network. When I was at school there was an online amazon like site for electronics called "egghead.co.uk" which was blocked for having "head" in the url!!
- tmikaeld 11y agoThat's kind of an extreme case right? Must be hard to study medicine in that school....
- nly 11y agoSeems to be a well-deserved example of doing something unoriginal, boring and well-trodden in a no-bullshit, user- friendly way and being rewarded for it. I think Whatsapp is another great example - afaict the key innovations there were using cell phone numbers as user IDs and running on every platform known to man. Just works. Dropbox and Imgur are two others.
- skrebbel 11y agoDropbox was unoriginal, boring and well-trodden?
- UK-AL 11y agoThere were tons of online storage systems before dropbox, they just had clunkly interfaces.
- brc 11y agoThe killer part of Dropbox was multi-platform, and integrating it into the OS properly, so that you knew where your stuff was. Also the downloaded app just used a simple set of credentials to get working. I had tried many solutions before this, and they were all, without exception, a pain to use and usually ridden with ads and weird interfaces. You usually felt dirty going to download a file from the website.
- _lce0 11y agoand that is still the current state. I wanted to replace it with free software, but it's still a PITA --syncthing seems the best so far, although it requires more experience to be a DB killer
- toyg 11y agoMicrosoft added the "briefcase folder" in Windows 98 (maybe even a '95 update). It was crappy and clunky, but the concept was basically the same. When storage prices started to fall, online lockers and backup solutions were a dime a dozen, they were just painful to use and they would kill your bandwidth. DB was successful because it was easy, nonintrusive, fairly robust and came after bandwidth stopped being a real problem for most people, but particularly original it was not.
- bambax 11y agoDon't know why you're being downvoted; Dropbox was very original in that it was 1/ completely platform-agnostic 2/ completely automatic None of the previous attempts at this were even remotely addressing those two (simple) concepts... and they still aren't!!
- toyg 11y agoHMA was a triumph of marketing and usability over security concerns. They are one of the most law-friendly VPN providers out there (and it couldn't be otherwise, considering they hail from a certain GCHQ-ruled island), but they were great at selling a simple way to avoid boring office-network blocks. I remember using their web proxy to bypass some stupid block on the FreakAngels webcomic (to this day, I still can't understand why anyone would block such innocuous material).
- arvinjoar 11y agoMany filters aren't that sophisticated, it might just have been a single word that tripped it up. I remember "hackaday" being blocked at my High School because it was tagged as a "hacking website" by the filter.
- lmm 11y agoI remember not being able to look at cryptography websites because they contained the word "hash".
- __z 11y agoI remember the classic example back in the day of Super Bowl XXX content being blocked because it contained XXX. Heard this on the news.
- gmac 11y agoI had exactly the same problem with a site I made for a friend's wedding. It included a short message from the bride and groom ending with 'xxx' — i.e. kiss kiss kiss. Vodafone UK (at least) blocked it as porn.
- enraged_camel 11y agoThe funny thing is that if you visit a blocked website over HTTPS, it will often work, because the web filter won't be able to scan the contents. I used that trick many, many times to get around Websense.
- JonnieCache 11y agoI had one of those in school, as I'm sure many here did. I just gave my friends access to it for free. What an idiot. (I remember someone I knew in another school tried to sell logins for his proxy to people for £5 each or something. They hated him for this perceived pettiness and he became even more of a social outcast than before. Pricing psychology is a funny thing.) So many life lessons learned in the school IT suite!
- DennisP 11y agoThis guy gave it away for free too. He just added affiliate links.
- brc 11y agoHasn't HMA discontinued the free web proxy?
- _lce0 11y agonope, it's still there; it's just a couple more clicks so they can upsell to support their living https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy
- seahorse 11y agoWhat happened to "you'd better get a co-founder"?
- raverbashing 11y agoYeah, it's like he's set up for failure!!! Oh wait
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- masterminding 11y agoIts all in the name.
- bluedino 11y agoVery surprised by this, I had no idea VPN companies were so widely used.
- giarc 11y agoCompletely depends on your location/school/work place etc. In Canada, many people use VPNs to access American Netflix, so here, the companies that specialize in that are doing very well. I think the average cost is likely about $5 per month, almost the same cost as Netflix itself.
- Scoundreller 11y agoThat, and I imagine that a lot of them moved into offering seedboxes too.
- slm_HN 11y agoI've found a lot of content on Canadian Netflix that wasn't available from the USA so I do the same thing, but in the opposite direction.
- giarc 11y agohttp://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.com/ http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.com/ The best source I have seen.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoDo these school admins not have the basic filtering abilities to stop proxies? Its trivial to do on several firewalls. Education IT sounds like a nightmare in general. If students are outsmarting the firewall trivially, then it says a lot about how IT is run there.
- philbarr 11y agoI think schools find it difficult to compete with tech companies because they can't afford to pay the salaries. So the people they DO get tend not to, er, be very good... I remember at my school the IT teacher had no IT qualifications, she just happened to know more about those computer-y things than the other staff.
- c0wb0yc0d3r 11y agoYou have to remember, this guy's story started 10 years ago. Many schools just contract this sort of thing to a 3rd party. My school used Websense, you could easily bypass their solution by using https or simply having google translate the site from english to english. Additionally, you also assume that there is a formal IT staff. An old roommate I had used to be in charge of selecting the hardware for the computerlab in his small town school. He was a student, his school was too small to have a real IT staff.
- mahyarm 11y agoIf your staff have to access a school district VPN and you want to block random VPNs that happen to use your same protocol, yet not have the overhead of managing which MAC addresses can use VPN services... It just becomes a headache. Just block it nominally to avoid liability but let those kids who bother alone.
- Normangorman 11y agoIt amused me to be reading this article at my school, using my own proxy server because the bbc.co.uk website is blocked!
- Rudism 11y agoThe article mentions that HMA makes/made money via affiliate programs, but also that there were no intrusive ads or popups. Does that mean it would hijack users' normal shopping activity when signed on to HMA by injecting their own affiliate codes to make commissions? I think that kind of behavior would violate most of those commission programs' terms of use.
- WiseWeasel 11y agoI read it to mean they ran their own affiliate program where affiliates could run links to sign up for HMA services, with commission payouts when traffic converts through those links (signs up for a paid HMA account). Nothing affecting the VPN traffic itself.
- downandout 11y ago"Within a month HMA had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, and revenues of £15,000 per annum." Which means that he would have been losing money like crazy on bandwidth, and yet the article says he had no investors. Obviously the business survived and was successful, but I have an extreme dislike for articles that leave out or misrepresent crucial details either for the sake of simplicity or out of sheer ignorance.
- jotm 11y agoI used HMA ~2 years ago. The speeds were throttled, it's entirely possible they saved a lot of money that way. Also, xxx,xxx of users and 15,000/annum? The service was $10/month back then, I'd imagine the number should be way higher for hundreds of thousands of users...
- downandout 11y agoThe service was free back then.
- aerovistae 11y agoHow did a 16 year old know how to write something like this? Very, very unusual. It certainly takes some know-how to put together an effective and highly usable VPN service.
- aw3c2 11y agoYou might enjoy this video of people that age working on one of the most famous demos of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU