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Comment by tome | Hacker News Reader

Why can't you just sell them a capped data allowance? I don't see any reason why you need to know where their traffic is going.

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Because they want all their grandchildren's pictures too.

Telling a customer they have full access to anything on their email vs telling a customer they have 500mb a month. Which do you think sells better?

What happens when the photos are on Google Photos? What happens when they need to update their browser because theirs is outdated and becomes incompatible? What happens when one of their grandchildren sends them a YouTube link to their concert performance from school? I absolutely guarantee you that in each of these scenarios they will call and complain because their email isn't working.

They think that they only want email, but what they really want is to access the internet via their email.

To eliminate support calls I would simply design a system where any place they went FROM their email would work - maybe up to 3 or 4 links past email.

And of course monitor account usage and call up tech-savvy granddads who email themselves youtube videos to get around the block.

So not only do you want to snoop your legitimate customer's traffic, you also want to own their personal computers at a level that would allow you to make that distinction? I find that disgusting.

Also, I don't think I've ever heard such a misuse of the word "simply"

>To eliminate support calls I would simply design a system where any place they went FROM their email would work - maybe up to 3 or 4 links past email.

What? What constitutes a "link"? This doesn't make any sense.

be on gmail -> click google images picture -> click caption link to small video -> click another youtube video -> ERROR

4 links away from gmail - not allowed. Pretty simple

How are you determining this without sniffing everyone's traffic? How do you know if someone typed youtube.com into their browser window or clicked a link from an email without access to things like referral headers?

this is basically entirely incompatible with SSL

NN does not unfairly inconvenience you. You are the type of person NN exists to stop.

Sorry, not interested in giving it up so you can bilk and spy on the elderly.

After reading a variety of the parent's comments, I agree with you.

In this scenario, how would you handle software patches requested by the user's OS?

Are the pictures attached to the e-mail? Or on the web? Is this e-mail only, or e-mail + web? How do you figure out where to draw that line?

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