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Comment by herpdyderp | Hacker News Reader

Would be great to read about it but my residential internet has apparently been blocked for "malicious activity".

From the pictures, this is the kind of vehicle that you would gladly pay extra to have delivered to your second vacation home so you can park it next to your 6 other semi-exotic cars and drive it half a mile to the country club on Saturdays.

If that is not your demographic, they might have geo-located your IP and blocked you based on the median income of your area. (Only half joking.)

It's about 44 grand. It's definitely not "country club" money.

Not a hell of a lot more than say a Fiat 500E convertible, and quite a bit cooler.

Oh, c’mon, it’s 44K. One can easily spend 30K or more on a motorcycle these days, we are a long way from “country club” prices. If it came to the U. S., I’d probably pick one up to park next to our Hyundai (yeah, a Hyundai, not a Range Rover).

30k? What motorbikes would they be?

It’s not hard at all if you go Harley-Davidson. My BMW R1200GSA was $27K when I bought it ten years ago, I can’t imagine they’ve gone down in price.

About $51,000 USD if it were even eligible for import.

$44k for something useless.

Why are you guys ignoring that part of the equation and only talking about $44k as though it's the same as the $44k everyone else spends on that Hyundai that they actually need to be useful and haul kids and tools and furniture around a country that's bigger than the Netherlands all day every day like a mule?

Those are two entirely different $44k.

$44k for something useless.

Pretty sure I can get groceries in that thing, but that isn't the point.

Why are you guys ignoring that part of the equation...

Because that wasn't the question at hand. I was responding to the idea that to buy this thing one must have a country club membership and two Ferraris in the garage already. I'm just saying that this is wrong, and plenty of "ordinary" people would drop that on a weekend toy. But if you're poor, yes, this is not the car for you.

You're Web browser probably isn't leaking enough identifiable information for the site to judge whether or not you're a bot, so it default to denying you.

Residential internets are now proxies for AI scrapers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45741357

specifically, “free” VPN isn’t free. They use your computer that has the VPN software installed as an exit nodes for other customers. Those other customers hammer websites for their AI until it gets blocked. Sucks for you, unfortunately.

Talk to your kids about the dangers of VPNs before it's too late.

Which VPNs are like that?

Hola is the big one, but in practice, if we hypothesis that no one's running a VPN as a charity, free VPN products need to make money someway, and if you're not paying to use it, how else are they gonna make money?

So basically be suspicious of every single "free" or suspiciously cheap VPN. Go with known brands that come recommended by mulitple people, especially from people "in the know".

Though PirateSoftware (a person) has a good bit on why he doesn't advertise for VPNs on his channel.

Hola's worst division got spun out into a separate company, Bright Data. Bright Data's worst innovations since "Free VPN" are using those "Watch this ad for 30 seconds for bonus in-game currency" things in many, many awful mobile games and using those as a "opt-in" signal to use the user's device for those 30 seconds (or however long) as an exit node for whatever scanning/botting processes they resell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Data

All the ones you don't construct for yourself out of an inexpensive VPS.

your preferences don't sound like facts. Are you claiming that paid VPNs "all" do this as well?

How do you think they make money?

...through the subscription fee.

And from selling your data to whoever shows up with enough cash.

What, you think they're leaving that money sitting on the table?

It's one thing to operate with an assumption that any VPN other than your own should not be fully trusted.

It's another thing to claim all of them are obviously corrupt.

If you had a company whose core business proposition was Quite Obviously Shady, would you expect them to be scrupulously legit in other areas?

Quick question for you - rhino poaching is a huge problem in Africa, with poachers getting a surprisingly small amount of money per rhino they shoot, because the buyers only want the horns. Do you think paying the poachers more to not shoot the rhinos would solve that problem?

Suspicions, inferences and reasonable concerns are perfectly fine. Answering questions with questions is less fine.

Statements of categorical fact about a whole class of things (in this case VPNs) demand more than that.

Well, it's not my bank account and it's not my IP address.

You do you.

It looks like a kit car version of a Porsche 356 crossed with a Nissan Figaro.

It actually looks rather more expensive than it is - it's about 44,000EUR putting it at the same sort of money as a Focus ST. Expensive toy, but not horribly so.

Unsure what it's based on, probably (like the Figaro) some fairly inexpensive existing car's subframes.

This is dangerously disruptive content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com