Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshmn | Hacker News Reader

Luminati.io merely uses the Hola extension to power a massive residential IP network. Hardware is so 2000.

They've gone well beyond the extension now. These days you have no idea if that "free" app you've installed has made a deal with Luminati to sell your bandwidth to the highest bidder. They also have an Android SDK too. I've received several emails like the following:

> My name is Lior and I lead the SDK partnerships at Luminati. I assume your

> software earns money by charging users for a premium subscription or by showing

> ads - both models do not pay out much and harm the user experience.

> We now offer you a third option.

> Luminati’s monetization SDK for Windows desktop provides your users the option

> to use the software for free, and in exchange we pay you $30,000 USD per month,

> for every 1M daily active users.

> More information is available on http://luminati.io/sdk_win.

That is sketchy and unethical as fuck.

I would like to give them an A+ rating for whatever graphic artist drew their artwork and did the CSS/webpage layout, however.

I dunno, to me the icon is reminiscent of the Hades character from the Disney movie: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/disney/images/c/cf/Hercu...

3 cents per user per month. Is that right?

Is it hard to make 3 cents a month from a user?

3 cents more than what you were making before. It's free money

This is honestly a pretty neat idea. Don't get me wrong, it's sketchy as hell and I'm sure gets abused, but residential proxies... well played.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com