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Comment by mcintyre1994 | Hacker News Reader

mcintyre1994

This is always interesting when it’s pointed out, but are teenagers in US high schools really using a fake security spyware VPN in high enough volume to give Facebook useful data?

Now that I say that, I wonder if they’ve tried marketing it to clueless people via their apps by touting it as a way to improve the security of their accounts or something.

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A lot of high school WiFi networks have blacklists for social media sites. Many kids use VPNs to get around it.

Yep. Or web proxies; I remember one that was disguised as an educational site, but if you entered the right credentials into the "admin area" login, unlocked a PHProxy instance.

This was also what led me to first install Tor.

"start using cgiproxy" used to be all you needed back in my day.

You could also throw the tor browser on a usb stick when i graduated.

Tor doesn't work everywhere. I'd don't know how they did it but it was blocked in my school's computer lab.

Probably just blocked the port.

Back in the day I've had a website ranking in the top 3 of Google for "start using cgiproxy". Honestly, I never knew why people would search for such a complicated phrase, but I've found the keyword somewhere and optimized the website for it.

Do you mind telling me why where you searching for that phrase instead of something like "free proxy" or "cgi proxy"?

Free proxy and CGI proxy alone used to generate lots of fake results. As "start using cgiproxy" is the title of a cgiproxy page you'd typically get less false positives.

In my era it was all about war dialing and AOHell.

Not if the filter system you were subjected to attempted to block any URL containing the substring "proxy"... This led to as many false positives as you might expect.

I remember my school network used to block the Sun Java SDK docs, for "hacking"... it made studying for AP computer science interesting. I forget the slightly dodgy vpn/proxy I wound up using to get around that - I think it had fire in its name, and was a super Web 1.0-style site filled with anarcho-libertarian rhetoric.

May Bess rot in hell.

This article is dated and I’ve never used Onavo myself but I think the pitch is it saves you money on your data plan:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.imore.com/onavo-app-claims-...

Teenagers are pretty cheap so I can see the appeal if that’s still true.

You'd think the kind of people who use HN would know better than to share AMP urls.

I refuse to click on that URL.

HN is a diverse community with many views.

If you understand the view of those who share these URL's, could you explain the merits of their case?

Now I'm not talking about using AMP on websites as I know the arguments for and against.

But as for linking to a resource from a third party site, why would one link to a mirror instead of the canonical URL?

Why not? The link works fine for me.

When the mirror is a faster-loading page (as experienced by normal users who don't have javascript blockers), then that makes perfect sense, no?

Just edit AMP out of the URL.

https://www.imore.com/onavo-app-claims-shrink-iphones-data-u...

It's really irritating to click on those links, so I think the request is reasonable. AMP pages take many seconds to load on some browsers.

> We will not sell the data or introduce ads to Onavo.

:-(

Even back in middle school in the early 2000's, credentials to bypass the web blocker or address to a proxy that hadn't been blacklisted yet was a hot commodity - they were mostly sold/ distributed by entirely non-technical kids too.

Yes but that was back in the day of locked down desktop machines. Teens have smartphones now, they don't have to care about that.

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