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Comment by prvit | Hacker News Reader

lol, OP completely missed out on the biggest IG ratelimit bypass. You could just use IPv6 and make literally millions of requests per second from a single server with a /48. (Oh! And before that you could just spoof X-Forwarded-For)

I printed money using this to automatically take good usernames as they became available.

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Knowing someone who ran a public bibliogram instance, using IPv6 and rotating through addresses of a cellular provider's /32 it was, at the barest minimum, possible, but really annoying as Facebook would lock down any /64 once it felt it had looked at too many profile pages, and the limits were just as tight, if not more so, as the v4 limits.

Yes, but you could easily defeat this limit by switching to a /48, which gives you 65536 /64 subnets. Of course, even bigger IPv6 allocations are easy to get.

How do you get a /48? Tunnelbroker? Can you set external IP per request? Curious how this works.

You could just get an allocation from RIPE for example, they'll give you a /29 without any justification required. Pretty much all dedicated server hosts will have a plenty of IPv6 space they can give you for a few $ per month.

Tunnels would've been too slow for my purposes.

> Can you set external IP per request?

Yeah, of course. You can just use the IP_FREEBIND socket option.

Thanks.

How much did you make total?

A little over $2M, but that number keeps growing because I still have loads of usernames despite instagram patching the ratelimit bypass.

Jesus, more power to you I guess

Holy balls

What are you doing now? Do you still have a day job?

I've never had a day job, I've spent almost two decades funding my lifestyle with silly projects like this. Everything from large scale world of warcraft botting to instagram registrations.

Wow. Where do you live? What's your net worth, if you're willing to reveal?

[edit] I’ll heed

They are a scammer. Don't be surprised if you get scammed.

Unnecessarily harsh, but I'm not interested in selling trainings anyway.

Man, do an AMA. This is more fascinating than 90% of what's posted here.

If you're able to find an edge and exploit it in numerous disparate markets, I bet you'd be amazing in algotrading.

It may interest you to know that the guy you are replying to is Julius “zeekill” Kivimaki of Lizard Squad fame.

Are you not worried about running into legal trouble with these things? It seems like a gray area.

Also, what platform do you use to sell these things? How do you know the buyer won’t just take the credentials and not send payment? Or how do they know you won’t take payment and refuse to hand over the credentials?

> Are you not worried about running into legal trouble with these things? It seems like a gray area.

No, not really. I get the occasional nastygram from Hogan Lovells, but just shrug them off. I don’t do anything interesting enough for them to bother litigating.

> Also, what platform do you use to sell these things?

There are many, swapd.co is a good one.

> Or how do they know you won’t take payment and refuse to hand over the credentials?

Reputation, there are also a plenty of reputable escrow services available.

Very cool. I’ll echo what others have said, it would be very cool to see some sort of how to or read an AMA, about the strategies that maybe no longer work (since obviously you wouldn’t want to reveal something that is still making you money). I’d definitely read a blog post about how you used to make WoW bots or automate creating accounts

I am guessing that the $2M is from selling the usernames? Are the buyers individuals who want a good username, or bot farms who just need a large number of accounts?

Buyers are individuals who want good usernames. People will pay like $5k for any random 2 character username. I've sold words for 50.

Interesting. Where does one go to buy usernames for social networks?

Man, fuck that. Name scalping is wrong. This shit is part of why platforms lock down in the first place.

You brilliant bastard.

Is there an email I can reach out to you at? Not for this particular use-case of IG but would love to pick you brain on rate limit bypasses.

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