Scratch that: Cats film to be 'resupplied' with 'improved visuals' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/23/cats-film-resupplied-improved-visuals <comment><USER2> This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film (not in a way I like, personally). akersten writes farther down:

> _We 're going to wind up in some terrible place where if you pre-order your > movie ticket you can see the Target special edition of Avengers Endgame 8 > that is only available in theaters for two weeks before it switches to some > other version. Maybe we'll get to the point where movie theaters will just > perpetually have the same film on roll and update it every couple of months > with the latest patches like an MMO. Remember, your Avengers and Superman > subscriptions are different._

Not sure about the last one, but you could imagine lots of possibilities:

\- Regional versions of films with anything from chunks of dialog ("I'm from X") up through entire cityscape backgrounds changed depending on the theater location. With CG, even things like character appearance (e.g. race) could be regional.

\- Brand placement: Top sponsor's products appear in the first two weeks of showings, then second bidder for the next two weeks, etc.

\- A/B testing different versions of films with live audiences and tweaking.

\- The opposite of what akersten said: introduce new little easter eggs or features regularly over the course of the film's theater run to encourage repeat ticket buying from the hardcore fans.

What else?

<comment><USER3> > This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film

The problem is that this doesn't play out well at all and isn't sustainable for the production houses actually working on the film. VFX work on a film can finish months, and few weeks, of days before a release date. As soon as that deadline is hit, workers either: go on break, get reallocated to another show, or leave as their contract is up (non-contract artists are very few in this industry). Having to pull people that worked on a show back to fixes after being put on a new one, or they may be completely gone, will only damage the show they are currently working on.

It's not a practice that is sustainable, and with the pretty thin margins of VFX right now isn't something that is as simple to solve as keep people around or hire more. And most studios can't follow MPC/Technicolor's philosophy of throwing as many junior bodies at the task.

<comment><USER4> I think you're discounting the possibility that this can be (at least partially) automated. Specifically things like changing sponsor logos or animation models. I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically, or even replace that Audi car the hero is driving to a Mercedes.

Of course, not everything could be automated but I think a good portion of it could be. The original VFX team would just have to insert "markers" into the workflow which could then be replaced and re-rendered. Almost like changing build flags and recompiling a program.

<comment><USER5> The other day someone sent me this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLg5CZ- AG0g&feature=emb_titl...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLg5CZ- AG0g&feature=emb_title)

This shows a product that apparently can scan a video for good places to put ads, and then replace or insert advertisements into it. And by "insert" I mean "add branded cups on the table where none existed" or "add a billboard to the cityscape where none existed". Scary stuff, I absolutely hate that people are working on such things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that no one has mentioned Sonic the Hedgehog movie.

The first trailer came out and everyone thought it was terrible: [https://youtu.be/4mW9FE5ILJs](https://youtu.be/4mW9FE5ILJs)

It had to be taken back to the drawing boards, and they pushed back the release date. The new one is much better. This must be the first case of movie trailer A/B test

<comment><USER7> Think I heard the FX team behind Sonic went bankrupt. That's going to serve as a cautionary tale, if anything.

<comment><USER8> why speculate when it's so easy to google?

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry that you're being downvoted. It would be nice if people verified facts they aren't sure of before spreading them and furthering misinformation.

<comment><USER10> Funnily enough a search for "sonic fx team bankrupt" on Google now links to the original comment on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's silly of them to dump more money into this trainwreck. It's been savaged by every reviewer, and while some criticism has been directed at the "uncanny valley" CGI, most of the criticism has been about the story and characterizations.

<comment><USER12> The only reason they are trying to "fix" it, is because they had so many big name people attached to it. Which, to be honest, I'm really confused about. The only reason I can think of is that it was based on a stage musical.

<comment><USER7> I'm not even an actor and if someone said they wanted me to have a bit part "in a movie with Judy Dench" I'd be like yeah okay. Poor Idris. I want to love him but he's in so, so many bad movies.

You get a couple of names on board based on an early draft of the script, they took a chance on you or they had a moment of bad judgement. But your peers come on board because you did, and pretty soon you have an all star cast and... dreck.

Then it seems like everyone remembers that star power can't fix everything and it's a while before the same thing happens again. Cats just seems to be this cycle's cautionary tale.

<comment><USER13> This is exactly how the supposedly terrible film _Movie 43_ ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_43](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_43)) was made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When does this patch land? I was hoping to see the original in all its glory, but don't have time until later this week...

<comment><USER15> I'm sure it'll leak to torrents soon (if it hasn't already). It's too much of a meme-fest not to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Previously discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21861294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21861294) , where I also linked to an interesting analysis of a VFX supervisor, and the original Hollywood reporter article

</comment><comment><USER17> This actually happens quite a bit between the premiere and general release of a film, more so for VFX heavy features. Often the version screened at the premiere and crew screenings will omit shots or be cut with early versions of a shot that's still on the renderwall. Sometimes you also get alternate versions of the end crawl with eulogies for crew members who've died during production.

This wasn't possible up until relatively recently; you would have to lock everything down by reel for printing. But given the prevalence of digital projectors and distribution you can go right down to the minute.

</comment><comment><USER18> Since some people might pay again to see the "improved" version (after some of them likely saw the original version to see for themselves what all the screaming was about) - is this a film industry version of a DLC?

</comment><comment><USER19> Recall that Highlander 2 and Highlander 2: Director's Cut are practically different movies thanks to significant editing (H2 being so bad that H3 actually apologized and reset the plot line to the end of H1).

<comment><USER20> To be fair you have to pretty heavily retcon at least the implied ending of Highlander 1 to even have a sequel at all.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, H3 actually reset storyline to about 10 minutes before the end of H1. (I was trying to be concise.)

And by "H3 apologized for H2" I mean the main character literally sat in a chair, looked into the camera, broke the 4th Wall, and in flowery terms apologized for H2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me of the interesting metaphysical argument that happened when Kanye released The Life of Pablo to streaming services and then tweeted "Imma fix Wolves". To my knowledge, you have to really Google around to find the original version of the song Wolves today (it would probably be harder if Kanye had "fixed" it without announcing it first).

Basically, what is "Cats (2019)"? Is it the thing people saw last weekend? The thing people will see next weekend? The further edited thing that shows up on streaming services in a few months? Or does "Cats" just refer to the _idea_ of a motion-captured live adaptation of the book musical "Cats" that stars a certain group of people but takes many forms depending on when it was viewed?

<comment><USER22> Editing already-released media isn't that novel a concept. Books have been getting updated in reprints since forever. Video games are constantly patched. Movies have always put out "re-cut" or other editions in later releases and on home video. The big change now is really the frequency of it, as everything continues to go digital.

The way things are going, soon it'll be common to say "I'm going to watch the movie a few weeks after release once they have worked out all the bugs".

<comment><USER23> Are fiction books really that updated (in terms of the words, not formatting)? I'd argue that a movie's visuals are part of the experience, but something like the font or pagination doesn't change the experience of a book in a significant way. Movies have been changed, but it's usually due to where it's being watched (like different screen shapes) or in more minor ways.

And when movies get changed, people have problems with it. People want to see the original Star Wars, but can't. Did Han shoot first? Still, the changes in Star Wars seem minor by comparison. Yes, they updated the special effects and made some edits. This sounds like they're changing the whole visual effect of the movie because it's weirding people out. Like, imagine if they updated R2D2 and C3PO to be completely different; imagine if they changed Darth Vader to David Prowse's voice after initially being released as James Earl Jones.

I think we historically haven't seen this in theaters because of the cost involved. It's not like a streaming service where you just get Netflix to encode the new version you give them.

Yea, things have always been altered, but this feels like it's breaking the shared experience of seeing _Cats_. Whether Han shot first is subtle and I probably wouldn't have noticed the change and I think people can ultimately share in the common experience of seeing Star Wars even if they've seen different versions. I guess it's just a matter of how drastic the changes feel and whether it will break the shared experience we generally feel. We don't know what "improved visuals" really means yet and how that will change the experience.

<comment><USER24> > Are fiction books really that updated (in terms of the words, not > formatting)?

I read _American Gods_ and was amazed that such a bloated story could have won the Hugo and Nebula awards. And it turned out it didn't; despite advertising those awards on the cover, the text I had read was 12,000 words longer than the one that had been awarded.

<comment><USER25> Why would you be surprised for a Hugo? The Hugos are deliberately pure popularity contest, they're a fan award. There is nothing wrong with that, but it makes winning a Hugo more like having a gold YouTube plaque than say winning a conventional literary prize like the Booker. It doesn't have to be any "good" whatever that means so long as enough members of the fan community like it.

The Nebula has a smaller problem because its members are at least nominally actual authors, so you don't have fan contigents bloc voting like the Hugos and most SFWA members know something about what makes a good novel but it's still definitely there.

<comment><USER24> You seem to have posted a free-floating critique of the Hugo that has nothing to do with what I wrote. (If anything, I have more faith in the Hugo award to reject overwrought and overlong works than a more conventional literary award).

<comment><USER25> So, your theory is that fans aren't the ones who uncritically support overlong works? Presumably in your mind the Transformers and Pirates movies kept being made because although fans noticed they were long slogs with nothing left to say and stayed away, the critical acclaim ensured the studios reinvested?

Wait, no, those franchises got horrible reviews and they were made because fans kept turning out to buy tickets for each iteration. Exactly the opposite of what you seem to believe.

It's not a critique of the Hugos, they aren't pretending to be anything else except a popularity contest. A whole bunch of the voters (including some people I know) voted for that novel having read the version you feel is bloated. They liked it. That's fans for you.

<comment><USER24> > Presumably in your mind the Transformers and Pirates movies kept being made > because although fans noticed they were long slogs with nothing left to say > and stayed away, the critical acclaim ensured the studios reinvested?

The critical attack on those movies is just the opposite: that they're overly flighty, hyperactive even. A large part of their popular success is that they keep their pacing up even at the expense of things that the critical establishment might consider more important.

> A whole bunch of the voters (including some people I know) voted for that > novel having read the version you feel is bloated.

No, they didn't. That version wasn't published until a year after the Hugo. That was my whole point.

<comment><USER25> > The critical attack on those movies is just the opposite: that they're > overly flighty, hyperactive even

That's not the opposite. "What you end up with is something that spends an awfully long time, although not as long as its predecessors, doing a load of things that don't ever actually get anywhere". That's a quote from Mark Kermode reviewing "On Stranger Tides" the fourth of the Pirates movies. The main thrust of his criticism is that this movie is faithful to its origins specifically in the sense that it's an amusement park ride, a bunch of superficially exciting things happen in a pre-determined order that doesn't mean anything, nobody is changed by the experience and the operators of the ride don't care because now they have your money.

Frenetic action is NOT the opposite of "long slogs with nothing left to say" any more than a carousel ride is the opposite of going nowhere.

> That version wasn't published until a year after the Hugo.

That's correct. But my understanding is that Neil's "preferred text" largely existed before the initial publication and a version of that was seen by fan readers. His editor, like you, thought it needed substantial trimming. His fans don't agree. The text you have also includes some bug fixes, but they're not why it's so long.

<comment><USER24> > That's not the opposite. "What you end up with is something that spends an > awfully long time, although not as long as its predecessors, doing a load of > things that don't ever actually get anywhere". That's a quote from Mark > Kermode reviewing "On Stranger Tides" the fourth of the Pirates movies. The > main thrust of his criticism is that this movie is faithful to its origins > specifically in the sense that it's an amusement park ride, a bunch of > superficially exciting things happen in a pre-determined order that doesn't > mean anything, nobody is changed by the experience and the operators of the > ride don't care because now they have your money.

The attack here is that it has nothing to say, not that it's overlong/bloated. If you think a movie is saying nothing then even 10 minutes would be "too long", but the movie's length isn't the salient problem.

> my understanding is that Neil's "preferred text" largely existed before the > initial publication and a version of that was seen by fan readers

A handful of fan readers may have seen that text, but surely not a significant fraction of Hugo voters. Again this is a case where a popular vote has an advantage: voting will necessarily be based on what was widely published, whereas when an award is given by insiders it's more common for them to have access to a different edit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if Cats really deserved the fait it wrought. You have to wonder if it was universally seen to be terrible, or if a couple of early opinions led a wave of negative opinions. Tough to really know.

<comment><USER27> The peak weirdness is probably this part:

[https://twitter.com/data_bayes/status/1209340322767081472](https://twitter.com/data_bayes/status/1209340322767081472)

<comment><USER28> Why is this so weird? Maybe I watch too many weird films...

<comment><USER27> It is not specifically weird, but it seems like public someway started to associate anthropomorphic animals with sexual fetishes, so when they see cat eating cockroach in that scene for example they think about vore fetish and so on.

<comment><USER29> I'm aware of the vore associations.

However, were the original characters in the Cats play actually humanoid cats? Or were they just humans dressing up as cats and the audience was meant to suspend disbelief that what they were looking at were just regular cats?

I ask because obviously a play can't get "live talking cats" without human actors but a movie can easily do so with CG.

Why did they decide to go with humanoid cats instead of regular cats with voice actors? Was it just to match the aesthetic of the play? Or does the plot actually involve the cats being canonicaly humanoid?

<comment><USER25> The musical is performed in costume. Yes audiences suspend disbelief, just as they do when, say, Romeo clearly isn't really dead in a typical performance of Shakespeare's play.

The musical is based on an existing work, a correction of amusing poems about actual cats by T S Eliot.

Probably the movie just shouldn't exist. An animated movie of the poems using some famous songs from the musical could have worked for example, but that's not what this is.

<comment><USER30> > The musical is performed in costume. Yes audiences suspend disbelief, just > as they do when, say, Romeo clearly isn't really dead in a typical > performance of Shakespeare's play.

They were asking what specifically the costumes represent. They weren't confused about the concept of costumes in a play.

The cats are anthropomorphized somewhat, or they wouldn't be having proper conversations with each other. This already requires suspension of disbelief, accepting that it's a fantasy world. The question is how far that anthropomorphization goes, in the internal logic/canon of the play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ironically this may actually reduce its long term appeal. The original cut has the making of a cult favourite.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's interesting that producers still send physical copies to theaters.

<comment><USER33> Not all, I believe. There are theaters that get movies thru digital transmission as well. How much it is widespread, however, I don't know.

EDIT: [https://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2017/03/23/75-of...](https://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2017/03/23/75-of- u-s-theaters-get-their-movies-delivered-by.html) 75% of cinemas in the US get their movies digitally distributed.

<comment><USER34> Incidentally, I tried to see the new Star Wars movie today. But the projector stopped working and the employees blamed it on a computer failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> You don't remember that scene? Oh wait, my copy is _Cats v2.0.36_ , you've still got 2.0.22, just git pull the latest.

I can't friggin wait...

</comment><comment><USER36> Kanye West - The Life of Pablo was changed like 10+ times after release.

<comment><USER37> Also, George Lucas or somebody is _still_ messing with the OT. For the Disney+ release of A New Hope, the scene between Greedo and Han Solo now has Greedo say "Maclunkey[0]" before shooting.

This is apparently a Huttese insult that means something like "I will end you," and it's supposed to provide moral justification for Han percieving Greedo as an imminent threat and shooting him. This is also apparently in the Dug's dialogue in The Phantom Menace. I forget the thing's name.

Also I think the timing of their shots are tweaked so they happen almost simultaneously.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH19gKo7W7w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH19gKo7W7w)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This will, maybe, drive some people into the theatres to see the original.</comment>


Sublime is given away licenses of its editor - <AUTHOR> http://sublimetexttips.com/giveaways/sublime-text-giveaway/?lucky=160972

<comment><USER2> It's not really Sublime Text giving away the licenses. At the bottom of the page "Sublime Text is not affiliated with the giveaway."

Seems like just a way to harvest email addresses.

<comment><USER3> It's AppSumo harvesting emails :s

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The timing tells me they're trying to get some attention while Atom for windows is in the news. Still, good way to do it :)

</comment><comment><USER5> _Really_ nice PR!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it is a great editor for Javascript at least.</comment></comment>


Nuclear Waste Dumpsters in Massachusettes Are Costing Taxpayers a Fortune - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/01/31/these-dumpsters-old-nuclear-waste-are-costing-you-billions/lw7aIpcWOhmn3ThjeqEnVP/story.html <comment><USER2> Lack of reprocessing plants, lack of real storage facilities, these are political failures that have more to due with our government being a shit storm more than anything. Most every problem with nuclear power and nuclear waste has a known solution, but nobody is willing to fund it, nobody is willing to host the facilities, no politician even wants to say the word nuclear.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are so many layers this article has missed. That "waste" is also viewed by some as a resource, a repository of potential material for weapons. So it cannot be put somewhere out of reach. There has also been progress in deep- drill disposal options. It could be placed a few miles down from where it is now, in bedrock that will one day melt back into the earth. Drill a really deep hole (many miles) cement it over and forget about it. But that means we wouldnt be able to get at it later.

<comment><USER4> I think they're pretty clear in the article that the problem is that there is no centralized place to ship the waste. Having it sit out in the open where it needs constant security, next to a plant that close decades ago, is the sign of a political failure.

They keep trying to put it in Nevada, but Nevadans aren't having it. They don't trust the federal government after being lied to about the dangers of the open-air atomic bomb testing that they carried out in the 1940s and 50s.

I understand storage and bomb testing are not equivalent, but I don't blame Nevadans for being skeptical. The government should look someplace else at this point.

<comment><USER5> > I think they're pretty clear in the article that the problem is that there > is no centralized place to ship the waste.

We've been trying to solve this problem for years, but they're being contested and underfunded.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository)

<comment><USER6> Senators are moral imbeciles, and so it goes. Without a strong move in the senate to make this happen and damn the backlash, America is stuck with the rolling disaster that is their NRC, and decentralized ad hoc storage of spent fuel. It's crazy, but it part of a long list of crazy and self destructive things that form the American status quo with "Senators are moral imbeciles" throbbing at their core.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Massachussetts is misspelt in the title.

<comment><USER8> Are you sure? I think it's right...

      MASSOCHEICHI! - Doesn't sound right to me!
      MAKKAKOKO - That's way too many K's
      It should mass-achoose,
      like the "mass" in "mass produce"
      but without "produce"

[https://youtu.be/JvUMV1N7eGM?t=160](https://youtu.be/JvUMV1N7eGM?t=160)</comment></comment>


GitHub's allowance of project names to be recycled is a security issue - <AUTHOR> https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/09/15/2121214/warning-metalkettle-repository-for-kodi-becomes-vulnerable-after-github-takeover <comment><USER2> I've seen some craziness due to reusable usernames on GitHub as well. Like someone being tagged into a discussion several months later for it to, in fact, be a completely different person, since the original user changed names.

I really can't fathom any particularly _good_ justification for allowing usernames, org names, etc. to be recreated. They should be treated how many platforms treat email addresses in that regard.</comment>


How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@derek./how-is-nordvpn-unblocking-disney-6c51045dbc30 <comment><USER2> Seriously creepy stuff. I hate how VPNs are being shilled by e-celebs these days as a privacy improvement.

It's just using a different middleman. One middleman might be better than another, but if you have a good ISP already, there's no privacy/security benefits to be had by using a VPN when surfing from home.

It might be worth getting a VPN if you use sketchy WiFi often, or want to bypass geo-blocking or restrictive firewalls. But remember that you're trusting the VPN provider with all your traffic. DNS is still not encrypted in most browsers, so this traffic is still a goldmine of marketable info. Sure, they can't see what you post on snapstagram.com or what pages you visit on news.ycombinator.com, but they can infer a lot about your browsing habits from DNS queries.

<comment><USER3> "It might be worth getting a VPN if you use sketchy WiFi often, or want to bypass geo-blocking or restrictive firewalls. But remember that you're trusting the VPN provider with all your traffic."

I never understand this false dichotomy - especially in a forum which is named ... let me check ... "hacker news".

 _Just set up your own_.

It costs almost nothing to run a EC2 instance in the region of your choice (or at some other provider like GCS or whatever). There are keystroke-by-keystroke instructions everywhere on setting this up.

Extra points for _adding the extremely trivial and also very low cost_ steps of signing up under a corporate name and removing your personal identity from the account altogether.

Some more extra points for multiplying the almost-zero-cost by 3 or 4 or 5 and spinning up extra copies of your endpoint in multiple regions (or even providers) and manually (or automatically) switching between them.

You don't need to trust anyone - adjust your threat model all the way up to "near nation state" (in the case of Amazon or GCS) and assume these actors could already discern all of your Internet traffic even if you weren't doing business with them.

Christ.

<comment><USER4> Could you provide a good reference for the process you describe, or maybe just a good set of search terms?

I'd like to pursue this, but have just little enough experience with ec2 to not be composing effective search terms.

<comment><USER5> I think one of the interesting option out there is: [https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand](https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand)

Waiting for [https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1668](https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1668) to be fixed though.

<comment><USER6> Hey, I wrote the PR you just linked (#1668). Was there an issue with the code changes you ran into? Just asking since you said you were waiting for it to be fixed. If so, I'd love to know what the error was so I can test/fix it. Or did you just mean the underlying issue (ACMEv1 protocol being deprecated)?

<comment><USER5> Hey, thanks for the fix. I was indeed able to spin off a Streisand server using it without any error <3!

<comment><USER6> Hey there, I found an issue in the PR recently that affects the auto-renewal process. Nginx will still serve the old certificate after renewal succeeds since it's never restarted or reloaded. I have another PR open to fix this, but there's a manual way to apply the fix if you're so inclined (and you still have that Streisand server up and running).

Obviously this only applies if you don't plan on destroying/recreating your Streisand server after the newer PR gets merged (EDIT--just got merged). But just in case, the steps are pretty easy (it's in the PR here too: [https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1688](https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1688)):

      [root@streisand]# cat > /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/01-reload-nginx.sh << EOF
      #!/bin/sh
      systemctl reload nginx
      EOF
      [root@streisand]# chmod u+x /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/01-reload-nginx.sh

If your cert was already auto-renewed (unlikely given the timeline), you'll also need to run systemctl reload nginx to serve the new cert, since the deploy script wasn't present when certbot ran the renewal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No one's said this clearly so I will. oxylabs.io as described in this article is an awful unethical company and should be investigated for criminal activity. If NordVPN is using them to bypass DRM controls, that's pretty ugly.

The central concern is how they get their 32M "residential proxies". I spent a few minutes trying to get an answer and could not find one. The article straight up assumes it's coming from malware, which certainly seems possible. I could also imagine them buying legitimate access from ISPs but given the various legal and technical issues involved it seems less likely.

Is there anything directly connecting Oxylabs to malware? Again I looked for a few minutes and didn't find anything clear. I did find a couple of troubling posts on Reddit from Android Devs saying Oxylabs approached them offering to "monetize your users with our SDK", which sounds like the slippery slope to malware. Or at least bundleware without meaningful consent.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ajfc7w/question...](https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ajfc7w/question_about_oxylabs/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ao27tu/my_app_w...](https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ao27tu/my_app_with_1million_installs_and_100k_monthly/)

BTW, Oxynet has a list of the ASNs they have proxies on: [https://intro.oxylabs.io/hc/en- us/articles/360003444780-Supp...](https://intro.oxylabs.io/hc/en- us/articles/360003444780-Supported-ASN-List)

<comment><USER8> From the patent infringement document:

 _"... Upon information and belief, the above OxyLabs embedded code has been integrated in at least the following software applications that may be downloaded by any user located anywhere having Internet access: AppAspect Technologies' "EMI Calculator" and "Automatic Call Recorder"; Birrastorming Ideas, S.L's "IPTV Manager for VL;" CC Soft's "Followers Tool for Instagram;" Glidesoft Technologies' "Route Finder;" ImaTechInnovations' "3D Wallpaper Parallax 2018;" and Softmate a/k/a Toolbarstudio Inc.'s "AppGeyser" and "Toolbarstudio.""_

[https://cdn-resprivacy.pressidium.com/wp-content/uploads/201...](https://cdn- resprivacy.pressidium.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Luminati-Networks-LTD-vs- UAB-Tesonet.pdf)

Looking at few of these app's descriptions and privacy policy, doesn't mention anything about oxylabs or proxies, so I'm not sure it's true, but somebody should check the apps with decompiler or monitoring the connections it makes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Does [Oxylabs.io's distribution] mean your device can be used by a third > party to access child porn or hack into a bank? Absolutely!

I mean, isn't the existence of Oxylabs a boon for _everyone's_ privacy—in the sense of making everyone's actions deniable/repudiable? Oxylabs introduces reasonable doubt for every possible allegation of cybercrime! "It wasn't me; it was this botnet malware routing through my computer without my knowledge!" It's like having a Tor exit node on your computer, without the associated _mens rea_ that would come from the explicit choice to install one!

<comment><USER10> In theory sure. In practice (especially if you don't know your connection is being used like this, as the article suggests), if law enforcement turn up at your door to take all your kit as evidence in a crime, they'll likely take all your kit for an extended period of time (and possibly charge you) until/unless you can prove that it wasn't you that sent the traffic.

There have been cases of this happening to ToR exit nodes and that was ones the operators could point to...

<comment> o-__-o No you can easily prove it wasn't you that sent the traffic, simply look at case law for all of the torrenters absolved from having open wifi access points. The problem is your hardware is locked up in a criminal trial, which realistically means you ain't getting it back. And they're not just going for that device you used with a VPN, they're taking any possible device that connected to the VPN including routers, laptops, iphones, tablets, connected hard drives, etc.

THAT is the reason why a rational actor won't use such a service.

<comment><USER11> > they're taking any possible device that connected to the VPN including > routers, laptops, iphones, tablets, connected hard drives, etc.

Mind you, that's just sensible evidence-gathering. If law enforcement thinks that the homeowner did in fact act illegally and is using the VPN for deniability, then there would be ample cause to search attached or potentially-attached devices for direct evidence of illegal behaviour. If some is found, that's compelling circumstantial evidence that other identified VPN activity was also instigated by the connection-owner.

<comment><USER12> And inefficiency which results in delays in getting this equipment back to the owners is obviously just an unfortunate side effect. /s

<comment> o-__-o Yes, the police and courts are here to serve us, the people, but that means we have to wait for them to clear their backlog from other people to get to our case. It will always be resolved within a reasonable time, like <4 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They may be "residential IPs" but you can do an nmap scan on the IPs to see if there are any open ports. If there are no open ports then it's likely a residential IP because stateful firewalls on home routers. If there are open ports it's likely not a residential IP since some kind of port forwarding would have to be enabled, which most people don't do, or a DMZ would have to be set up (even less likely). I scanned a few of the IPs returned from the curl test. Granted a small sample size, but they all have open ports. Beyond the scan I didn't try to connect to any of them via browser or otherwise. Here is what I found for the "Delcom" IP he's so worked up about:

``` $ sudo nmap 220.127.116.11 Starting Nmap 7.70 ( [https://nmap.org](https://nmap.org) ) at 2019-11-29 19:21 EST Nmap scan report for static-76-77-25-75.networklubbock.net (188.8.131.52) Host is up (0.097s latency). Not shown: 992 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp filtered ssh 23/tcp filtered telnet 25/tcp filtered smtp 53/tcp filtered domain 80/tcp open http 443/tcp open https 5060/tcp open sip 8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 331.02 seconds ```

Maybe I'm missing something here. Of course it could still be malware, but that's far from the first conclusion I'd jump to. This article is just speculation to me and the methodology seems ... bad

edit: sorry if the markdown is broken. Noob here. ;)

<comment><USER14> Won't services like this take advantage of UPnP to open ports?

I know FluidStack which is a similar service uses UPnP to open ports that it requires. FluidStack is a service you earn money through by willingly selling your internet bandwidth though, not like Oxylabs but same idea.

<comment><USER13> First, sorry for the late reply. I don't log in often. I didn't consider malware using UPnP. But it seems to me that the probability of malware using it to make a residential IP look like a business IP (e.g. opening up ports for VoIP) is pretty low. But always possible.

I didn't know about FluidStack. Looks interesting. If you have numbers on how many people actually use such a service I would be really interested to know :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Did they consider that maybe all the clients are NordVPN customers, i.e your data will come from a different users internet connection but another users data comes from you.

With that there world be no reason to have any hidden malware practice or similar, it _could_ even be in the terms of service if some of their products...

I mean it's true that there is a lot of bs going one but before claiming them for having hidden malware you should make sure they do, instead of just saying "that's the only way it's possible' even if it isn't the only way.

<comment><USER16> I thought the same thing. They could be using their legitimate user's connections.

But even if they're rerouting traffic through their users, and if they wrote that in the terms of service, I doubt any of their users know they signed up for this.

Which is not illegal, but still kind of sketchy.

If it's hidden in their terms of service, but not explicitly written on the content the user actually reads while subscribing, I consider this very unethical.

<comment><USER17> It would probably violate your ISP's terms of service as well. Not that I have any love or respect for ISP's but still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having used one of these shady proxy pool services once in the past for some (pretty harmless) scraping (not especially proud of it), I seriously doubt a service like that is good enough for video streaming. Usually half of the proxies in the pool are high ping or unreachable, and the other half are only valid for at most a few minutes. Maybe I just didn't pay enough for the gold tier or something.

Edit: Another comment pointed out that maybe only the front domain is geoblocked, but not the video CDN domains. That would make sense. Now that I think about it, youtube-dl also has a --geo-verification-proxy option that works in the same way.

<comment><USER19> It works perfectly for me.

[https://i.imgur.com/PFITtZT.png](https://i.imgur.com/PFITtZT.png)

<comment><USER14> He wasn't talking about NordVPN speeds. He was talking about the sort of services offered by Oxylabs, Honeygain, PacketStream and other similar proxy services.

<comment><USER19> Well isn't the whole article asserting that NordVPN is routing traffic through residential endpoints to confuse would-be VPN blockers? I thought that the allegation is that there's no distinction between the Oxylabs network and the NordVPN service.

<comment><USER18> The allegation is that they use a Oxylabs-like service for disneyplus.com specifically. Your speed test result using a Total Servers Solutions LLC connection to a non-disneyplus.com destination is irrelevant to that allegation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Think of "residential proxies" this way: 1.) Oxylabs installs some malware > on to a user's device, unknown to the user, by bundling it with other > software that the user downloads. 2.)This malware enables Oxylabs to sell > off your bandwidth, your computing power, and your IP address to third > parties, who will route their internet traffic through your device.

There's so many providers doing something similar, it really isn't a Oxylabs / NordVPN exclusive issue.

\- [https://luminati.io/residential_ips](https://luminati.io/residential_ips)

\- [https://www.geosurf.com/blog/what-are-residential- proxies/](https://www.geosurf.com/blog/what-are-residential-proxies/)

\- [http://stormproxies.com/residential_proxy.html](http://stormproxies.com/residential_proxy.html)

\- [https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/residential- proxies/](https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/residential-proxies/)

\- [https://multilogin.com/proxy/](https://multilogin.com/proxy/)

\- [https://smartproxy.com/blog/what-is-a-residential-proxies- ne...](https://smartproxy.com/blog/what-is-a-residential-proxies-network)

Based on my understanding it's people having free apps they want to monetize. They then implement a proxy company's SDK which enables this traffic sharing and get paid by them.

</comment><comment><USER21> > It's often the case that VPN users will find that services like Disney+ are > blocked on many servers, presumably because the content provider is able to > discover the VPN's IP addresses and restrict access to those IPs.

Something that keeps bothering me about the title and content is that the VPN isn't blocking or unblocking Disney+. It's Disney+ that's doing the blocking. It's blocking the VPN's IP addresses.

If I block you from entering the building but you find a secret entrance through the air vents, you didn't unblock me, you evaded my block.

Their title and usage of blocking should be something more like: "How is NordVPN evading Disney+'s VPN-blocking?"

Great article though. This kind of stuff really needs to be more well known.

That it's possible to unknowingly be part of a botnet is a major flaw in the internet and ISP billing model. I think the only solution that has a shot is for unexpected bandwidth to lead to an unexpectedly high bill.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm on the lookout for a black friday VPS deal.

Between this a PIA's shady stuff I'm just gonna have to host my own. The commercial VPN scene is a cesspool.

<comment><USER23> What happened with PIA? I haven't heard anything.

<comment><USER22> New corporate overloads with a ahem checkered past

<comment><USER24> That's the most polite way of saying "botnet delivery mechanism" I've ever heard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm somewhat shocked that residential connections have enough bandwidth to upload a streaming video as a proxy. But maybe people using a VPN for Disney+ are just glad it works at all.

I have Comcast and my upload on a good day is 500KB/s and that cripples everything else on the network.

<comment><USER26> Why is your uplink so bad? Do you have a low tier plan? If not, why haven't you had Comcast fix it?

<comment><USER25> I have Comcast Business. I pay them 100 dollars a month. Even if I paid them way more they just don't offer much more upload where I live. They will give me tons of download but all their plans have anemic upload. My only other option is Centurylink and they will give me a symmetric line. But that tops out at 12Mbp/s. At least with Comcast I get a reasonable download. I live in a major metropolitan area. Five miles from where a NBA team plays home games.

<comment><USER27> I was going to say more or less this. The maximum anyone can get in my major US city for any money (other than a few areas that are trialing fiber) is 20 Mbits/sec. You literally can't pay for more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> streb-lo > All the most common US ISPs are there… AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, CenturyLink. > IPs from Charter Communications in their Midwest, Texas, Pacwest and > Northeast regions. ISPs I've never heard of before… who the heck is Delcom? > Turns out they are serving some rural communities in Texas. Did NordVPN buy > servers or connectivity from them?

I've been seeing a ton of these guys' advertising lately. If it turns out they're also reselling your bandwidth?

Still, I'd like to see someone take a peek at their local client traffic for any suspicious activity before coming to any conclusion.

Edit: I guess allegedly the 'botnet' aspect is provided not by other NordVPN users but by malware provided by companies associated with NordVPN.

<comment><USER20> > If it turns out they're also reselling your bandwidth?

Monetizing your free app through selling traffic is nothing new and there's a bunch of companies doing just that. You drop their SDK into your mobile app, they give you money and in return they get their very own "botnet".

<comment><USER28> Users should be upset that such trash is allowed on whatever stores they're hosted on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> >They promised they had nothing to do with Oxylabs, but now that assertion seems to be false.

Only if you deliberately misread the post, which is clearly saying that NordVPN doesn't use its users' devices to route traffic, unlike HolaVPN. It doesn't say they don't use Tesonet services to route traffic. They're denying being a supplier to Tesonet, they're not denying being on the demand side.

</comment><comment><USER30> Hadn't heard of akamai pragma headers before. Used the ones from [https://support.globaldots.com/hc/en- us/articles/11500399670...](https://support.globaldots.com/hc/en- us/articles/115003996705-Akamai-Pragma-Headers-overview) and it dumped a bunch of other debug info [https://pastebin.com/hteaGG6N](https://pastebin.com/hteaGG6N)

wtf?

<comment><USER31> (This part of) Akamaiks value prop rests on two things: they have servers all over the world, and they can figure out which of those are both functioning well and (network-wise) close to you. The former comes from infrastructure investment and management. The latter comes from collecting and processing data from all over the (network-wise) world, quickly. That last part involves building and updating a map of actual and potential internet traffic — not quite all of it, but for everywhere that your (prospective Akamai customer 'you') customers might be. Doing _that_ without owning ~all of the BGP routers in the world plus ~all of the local ISPs in the world involves a fair bit of probing, data gathering, and a bunch of math.

It's likely that those headers don't all get added all the time, for all the Akamai traffic, but instead are added selectively for key parts of the mapping process.

(Disclosure: I worked for Akamai Way Back When, but left the company many years ago.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not defending PIA, as they've been purchase by satan.net, but remember the HN posts where NordVPN was asked some very unfriendly questions by Private Internet Access? Remember everyone dismissing it as a astroturf marketing ploy?

I've been a PIA customer, and am canceling to switch to Mullvad, but PIA selling out seems not to prove they weren't right before.

<comment><USER32> Can you tell me more about Mullvad, does it have a good reputation with HN/elsewhere? Does it have common VPN problems like leaking etc? I'm looking to switch away from Nord now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> What am I missing here? Surely if this were true, Nord would be able to unblock basically every service. Netflix, prime video, etc. Would all work. That's not the case though?

<comment><USER34> I live in Mexico and use Nord VPN (or I did at least, seems like maybe I can't anymore unless I want my computer to be a proxy for arbitrary and potentially nefarious traffic). I have Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Now, Hulu, and Netflix. All work with Nord VPN running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ah, I think Oxydata is behind the recently defunct Oxyleads.com which seemed to publish historical scraped LinkedIn data.

They had a browser extension, maybe somebody can get a copy and see what's in common with other extensions?

[https://support.oxyleads.com/hc/en- us/articles/360015036112-...](https://support.oxyleads.com/hc/en- us/articles/360015036112-Download-Browser-Extension)

</comment><comment><USER36> This article doesn't really make a lot of sense as there's no hard proof, just speculations of the author

<comment><USER37> Well, I just verified this article's claims with this curl request: curl --head -H "Pragma: akamai-x-get-client-ip" "[https://www.disneyplus.com"](https://www.disneyplus.com")

It returns different IPs for every request, and these IPs do look like residential ones.

<comment><USER13> Do an nmap scan on the IP and check for open ports. If there are open ports it's very likely not actually a residence but a business.

<comment><USER14> Not necessarily. Oxylabs could use UPnP to open ports like other similar services as FluidStack, Honeygain, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hey, this is an ~old thread. But I'd like to contact the author, Derek Johnson. And, having no Facebook or Google account, I can't even create a Medium account to post a comment.

So do any y'all perchance know his address? If so, please email me at the address in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER39> All of these commercial VPN providers seem a bit sketchy to me. Roll your own on a VPS with Algo.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't know what this guy is doing with all this pragma stuff... Once you hook up to a NordVPN server the IP doesn't change... NordVPN has thousands of servers, I assumed that is why the content providers don't block them, because they can't keep up. Except amazon, which seems to be better at blocking than the others.

Is this guy saying that these thousands of servers are not in some data center somewhere, but actually residential malware?I'm doing some tracepath'ing (not a network guy...) and I don't see what this guy is claiming. I'm calling bs.

<comment><USER38> I think that he's saying that the connection from the NordVPN server to Disney+ is getting proxied through residential IPs.

But hey, I'm testing that now.

Edit: Using IVPN's Germany exit ...

        $ curl -LIX GET https://www.disneyplus.com -H 'Pragma: akamai-x-get-client-ip'
        ...
        X-Akamai-Pragma-Client-IP: 188.8.131.52, 184.108.40.206

... and ...

        $ w3m -dump https://ipchicken.com
        ...
        188.8.131.52

<comment><USER41> I was testing this earlier with a NordVPN US server. Akamai sees a changing IP (different from the public IP of the server) that seems to be in residential ISP IP blocks when retrieving www.disneyplus.com. For other sites on the Akamai CDN this was not true. On other sites header and public IP matched like in your example.

<comment><USER38> Did you use the NordVPN client, or stock OpenVPN?

And if the NordVPN client, what OS?

<comment><USER41> I used the NordVPN CLI client version 3.4.0-1 from a Debian bullseye PC

EDIT: package from [https://repo.nordvpn.com/deb/nordvpn/debian/pool/main/](https://repo.nordvpn.com/deb/nordvpn/debian/pool/main/)

<comment><USER38> Thanks.

So far, using the stock openvpn package in Debian, it doesn't look like the Disney+ circumvention is happening for NordVPN's US servers.

I'm guessing that the NordVPN client must do it.

And if that's the case, it may merely route traffic directly through the residential proxy, and not first through a NordVPN server. Which wouldn't be good, because someone investigating the residential proxy would see the users IP address, rather than the exit IP address of the VPN server.

<comment><USER41> Well, I had only little time to dig further but I can confirm your findings that OpenVPN alone behaves as it should while the NordVPN client acts differently. However, wireshark says I am only communicating with the NordVPN server when connected through their client. I would love to know where the difference in configuration is. I always assumed NordVPN would just call OpenVPN with the public ovpn configs. They call the OpenVPN client with a config that is shortly deleted after OpenVPN starts but can be extracted when swapping the openvpn binary. It looks unsuspicious. A management unix socket is opened to control the OpenVPN client. I would like to know how the communication is configured.

<comment><USER38> I'm also testing now with NordVPN CLI v3.4.0-1 in a Debian 10.1.0 x64 VM with standard Gnome desktop.

I used the default settings. In particular, I didn't enable "obfuscate", which I gather uses two hops.

I'm using a crude infinite while script.[0]

And so far, I haven't come across any servers with unexpected "akamai-x-get- client-ip" for Disney.

But then, there are well over 1000 US server IPs.

So did you enable "obfuscate"? Or "CyberSec"? Or other options?

It would also help if you could share which servers showed unexpected "akamai- x-get-client-ip" for Disney.

0) [https://pastebin.com/hz5due96](https://pastebin.com/hz5due96)

<comment><USER38> Damn, I can be such a dumbass.

I was testing "www.disney.com", not "www.disneyplus.com".

Now I always see residential proxies for US servers. Or SSL certificate failures, occasionally.

Edit: That's using either the Windows GUI client, or the Linux terminal client in Debian. Not using "Obfuscate", "CyberSec", or other non-default options. But residential proxies aren't used for "www.disney.com" or "paypal.com".

Also, with the stock openvpn in Debian, I don't see residential proxies being used for "www.disneyplus.com".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have to say, the use of residential IPs as proxy for your traffic is essentially digital money laundering for data, or Data Laundering if you will. (IP laundering?)

It's one thing to use a VPN, another to use some unaware person's computer for your mischief (think about someone doing illegal stuff using this method).

Knowing how the law works in some places, and how ill-informed some law people are, I can totally see an innocent man getting locked up for illegal stuff, like hacking or other stuff that I dare not say.

</comment><comment><USER43> If anyone here knows enough about ASNs and the RIRs to set up a company whose sole purpose was for individuals to buy/lease IPs, I would gladly help set up and run such a company. The RIRs generally don't allow individuals to have ASNs, so I assume an intermediary like this would be necessary.

But between uses like setting up a personal VPN with a clean IP or just the cool idea of having a personal IPv4 address or IPv6 block... I think it would be a viable, if rather small and niche, business.

<comment><USER44> You don't need a company to get an ASN, but you do need to show that you intend to get network connections from at least two providers and generally that mean planning which plans are generally required as proof.

There are effectively no more clean IPv4 addresses, you'd have to buy addresses that had previously been used.

Anyone can get IPv6 addresses even those whose ISP sucks via tunnelbroker.net (aka Hurricane Electric) which will provide a single address, also a /64 and/or a /48\. Of course they are generally blocked by streaming services since they are a form of VPN and thus the endpoint might be anywhere.

<comment><USER43> If I didn't plan on having a physical location (i.e., AWS or Colo as opposed to trying to get Comcast or any other connection to my house), what would constitute a network connection?

What are the terms of assignment via Hurricane Electric? Can they take it away? Do they only allow BGP advertisement to their sites or can I still bring the IP elsewhere?

I still think there is an opportunity for niche needs here.

<comment><USER44> At a colo or location of you own you might hire two upstreams like CenturyLink and GTT, and since your (purchased) addresses would be reachable via either you would need to announce via BGP which requires an ASN. At AWS the only provider is AWS and are typically single addresses (even if you special requested 256 you might not receive a /24), further I don't know that AWS will issue an LOA to allow to you to announce their space via other providers.

An HE IPv6 tunnel is as permanent as you like, but they reserve the right to phase out the terminal you are using which sometimes means your prefix would change, and they expire unused tunnels periodically. IPv6 has builtin handling of prefix changes though it does not deal with related DNS updates, which you'd have to arrange.

An HE IPv6 assignment is from their allocation so you'd call that PA not PI, i.e., you can't take them elsewhere. To get addresses of your own you would need to apply to an LIR or RIR for an allocation -- generally easy to get a /48 without any/much documentation with a /40 generally requiring documentation but that's not free (250/yr for an ARIN allocation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Any open-source OpenVPN client works just fine with NordVPN

</comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone know if they've provided any response on this?

</comment><comment><USER47> Wouldn't this be pretty easy to confirm by monitoring bandwidth consumption on a dormant computer running NordVPN? If bandwidth consumption is exponentially higher when their VPN client is enabled, then clearly they are passing traffic through your machine...

<comment><USER48> That is not how this supposedly works. The Oxylabs people (according to the author) put software out there (like Apps, or Installers whatever) and those are infected. That's why it's hard to proof this, first link those gnarly apps to oxylabs, next link oxylabs to NordVPN.

This is how it could be done:

Rent Oxylabs Residential IP's (600$ minimum commitment, according to [0]). Check out IPs, stop using them, hope they get rotated to NordVPN, where you'd have to monitor the ips used. At Oxylabs pricing the only possible conclusion if a match was found would be that the services are intertwined.

[0]: [https://oxylabs.io/pricing/residential-proxy- pool](https://oxylabs.io/pricing/residential-proxy-pool)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ok, well fuck NordVPN. Can someone recommend something good that doesn't log, without setting up my own entire VPN (yes I get its the only way to be sure blah blah blah. I definitely care, but not enough to waste a week doing all that)

<comment><USER49> Mullvad, ProtonVPN, and iVPN tends to get recommended often.

If geoblocking isn't a concern, you could use Cloudflare's Warp, which is free. Not sure abt no-logs policy.

You could consider using Orbot, too, a tor as a porxy service for Android, if annoying captchas and broken P2P apps is acceptable.

<comment><USER50> ProtonVPN seems to be involved with Tesonet as well. I'd do some more research on them.

<comment><USER51> No, we have never used IPs or servers from them (this is publicly verifiable as our VPN IPs are public), and have no business connection with them today. Verified by Mozilla and the European Commission as well when they audited ProtonVPN, details here: [https://protonvpn.com/blog/is-protonvpn- trustworthy/](https://protonvpn.com/blog/is-protonvpn-trustworthy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Interesting, I'm assuming that this wouldn't be possible on iOS devices? E.g. would installing a calculator app on iOS allow someone to route traffic through my phone? (obviously without me granting vpn access to said app).

<comment><USER31> Technically possible, practically unlikely (you iOS phone would be a terrible router, giving the people who made the calculator app a slow, unreliable output node that would identify to the desired source as a lower-quality (mobile) client. In other words, it would be a bunch of extra work and risk for a worse result.

The theoretical model here is using people's fast, stable (-ish) broadband connections to relay the connection. Even then, it's only for the initial setup steps; once you get to the actual streaming data, nobody in this model wants to ferry those packets around.

<comment><USER28> Getting around geoblocking probably doesn't require the main video streaming connection to be through one of these IPs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It seems that the author is getting a different IP from NordVPN each time they make a request. Does that mean Disney could block this by preventing the request from coming from another IP each time a request is made?

<comment><USER32> That would block all "first requests" which wouldn't work

<comment><USER53> After a logged in session, you could count the number of times an IP address changes, and if it changes more than 3 or something in the last 10 minutes, it's a good sign that they're using some sort of malware VPN.

<comment><USER54> Or that they could be walk around the city and connecting to different wifis or maybe the person's connection is poor and keeps dropping and reconnecting. I'm sure there are plenty other legitimate use cases where the IP changes frequently.

Also, bear in mind that blocking people from using it is not in disney+ interest. They do it just so they can prove in court they are following the copyright agreements they have. But if someone "hacks" the system, they are not incentivised to put in resources to fix the hacks so they can have less paying costumers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> > Then I decided to give NordVPN a try, and poof, it worked like a charm. How > was this possible? Residential IPs was my guess.

"Guess"? Do they route packets differently depending on the destination, i.e. if you go to one of the whatsmyip websites you'll see a nordvpn-owned IP but to a Disney server the use someone's home connection? Is that what the author says is happening here? I don't know if this is common but, while technically possible, it seems a little weird. I assume the author could just have checked what IP they were exiting from.

Edit: someone else verified it, yes indeed they use residential IP addresses: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21665084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21665084)

<comment><USER56> The author also verified it, if you had the decency of actually reading the article rather than exiting as soon as you found some way to state that you know better.

<comment><USER55> I suppose that's fair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> As much as I love VPN services, this is indeed creepy.

I mean, why stop at using whatever app installs as exits?

Why not route a VPN service through an _actual_ botnet?

</comment><comment><USER57> i let my kids download apps on ios and chromeos (no android). is it technically possible for these apps to be proxying data for someone like nord?

if so, would it only be while the apps are in the foreground or can they do it in the background?

<comment><USER28> Yes. As stated elsewhere this is Oxylabs' business model and it's how a decent number of free apps monetize. I don't know how relevant background/foreground are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Ring ding ding ding. Jackpot.

I had on my backlog to do something similar, I guess I do not have to. NordVPN is just a front for Tesonet to gather data and sell your bandwith for bots, scrapers etc. through OxyLabs and other companies.

</comment><comment><USER59> We block vpns/open proxies. 99% of the time a user is complaining, their main argument is so they can have "a secure Internet connection" to our site.

<comment><USER60> I don't know what your business is, but I run my own VPN (closed). I will complain if you block it for no apparent reason, because you are forcing me to interrupt a dozen connections and ongoing workflows if I want to use your service (usually I just won't).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Knowing what we know about Facebook, why do you still have an account? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Groups is the _only_ reason I signed up for FB three years ago. These groups are very important for my open-source projects and professional life. FB is the only platform that offers a common place where these diverse communities exist. Formerly, mailing lists and discussion forums like phpBB filled this need, but unfortunately FB has _become_ the internet for many non-tech people. I have tried my best to lure members of these groups to free spaces that I have set up using software like Discourse. (And briefly, Flarum.) I've put hundreds of hours into building content within Discourse and providing support, but to no avail. It's simply too convenient for people to use Facebook, instead.

I'm really saddened by this development. The rich archives of mailing lists and forums from these communities from the 90's and 00's are still searchable online via a few old sites and archive.org. But all of our discussions and knowledge shared within FB seems to fall into a "black hole". Search functionality within groups is horrible. Not to mention that it's impossible to search if you're not logged into Facebook.

FB is a horrible place to build and share knowledge. But I haven't found a way to convince people to go elsewhere, nor have I found software that's convincing enough an alternative.

<comment><USER3> > _unfortunately FB has become the internet for many non-tech people_

I'm wondering if this is slightly changing? I'm in a non-profit and we have a FB group for us volunteers. However, messages posted there, are seen sometimes by only 10, sometimes by only 2, members. Out of maybe 40 in total. The FB group doesn't work, because FB doesn't show things posted there, in people's news feed. Instead, FB shows one's friends kittens, and vacation pics? And we're looking for other solutions. (see below)

Agree about the benefits with forums. Closer to 100% certain delivery (instead of 5% or 50% in the Facebook group), and searchable discussion topics, categorizable, taggable, nice formatting and nice full screen editor, various types of topics (question-answers, or HackerNews open-ended, or Slack like chat), weekly summary emails and announcements ... if using sth. better than Facebook.

> _But all of our discussions and knowledge shared within FB seems to fall > into a "black hole"._

Exactly

> _Search functionality within groups is horrible_

Yes

Plus, Facebook is rather buggy I think. I start typing a chat message — Facebook doesn't save any draft, and the chat message text gets lost because of the-lost-update-bug which FB hasn't fixed. Plus, the chat message window is sometimes like 1x1 cm, on a 30'' screen. Crazy. Network lockin —> UX disaster :-/

> _I haven 't found a way to convince people to go elsewhere_

It'd be interesting to maybe talk a bit about good ways to do that? :- )

> _nor have I found software that 's convincing enough an alternative._

I'd like us to try Talkyard (see my profile), which I'm developing, and it's like Flarum and Discourse (which you mentioned). However there's also built-in chat, and Question-Answers topics for quickly finding a solution, if one gets stuck e.g. at work, so one can find a solution and get back to work. ... Whilst FB instead does its best to distract everyone with ads and new things in the news feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have family and friends all across the US and across the world. I like them all, and I like hearing about their lives, even in the silly little details. Social networks are the easy way to do that, and Facebook is the network everyone seems to use.

For people who are more misanthropic or introverted, or who don't value their connections as much (I mean that in a non-judgmental way), the utility of Facebook is probably a lot less. I think that's one of the big things I see on HN: a lot of people who hate Facebook partly because one of the main services it provides (maintaining long-distance social connections) isn't useful to them.

(And of course I could call/email/text/etc. many of these people one-on-one, and of course I do that, too, but Facebook is a useful supplement for major life announcements from more distant friends/acquaintances, as well as trivial little details from closer friends.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Facebook is not only a sketchy company, but the FB product itself has also gotten continually worse. It's now a bloated mess absolutely plastered in ads and viral/scammy/politics-as-sports trash. Even the annoying autoplay "facebook trash" videos in the feed have interstitial ads now - i.e. ads inside of ads. The whole site has become a down-market cesspool that I have very little desire to use. That's ironic because I feel like FB got it's start because MySpace became a cesspool of trash and FB felt like the upscale alternative.

But all that being said, I still have a FB account so I can check in on family members who don't (yet) use something else. But even among that unhip group of older people, they are quickly drifting away to instagram and I barely ever check in on Facebook anymore.

</comment><comment><USER6> Honestly, public & private FB groups. Groups dedicated around specific subjects (mostly related to my career) have been some of the most influential places for learning, networking, building relationships that I've been able to call on later.

FB groups are king because:

1\. Everyone is already there. 2\. It's tied to your real identity (for the most part).

Other areas to learn/network and ask dumb/advanced questions exist, but to "community" vibe in FB groups is unrivaled.

My FB feed is almost nothing but groups posts. I've hidden/unfriended most people I don't care about and no one I've kept really posts to their actual pages much these days anyway.

I really wish Groups was a separate app. I'd keep that and messenger.

I realize my privacy on fb, and likely around the whole web is the tradeoff for this but unfortunately that's what's required to stay on. The advancements I've made in my career and personal life directly & indirectly due to the FB groups I'm in are definitely worth it, and likely would not have happened without the existence of FB groups.

<comment><USER7> > _2\. It 's tied to your real identity (for the most part)._

Why would you prefer this, versus anonymity-by-default on somewhere like Reddit?

<comment><USER8> Networking and being anonymous don't go together very well.

<comment><USER9> Counterpoint — this depends on the area of interest and the people. That networking and being "anonymous" don't go well is not necessarily true always, and need not be true always. One can have a handle/username/name without revealing one's real name to _everyone on Facebook,_ and yet reveal one's real name through other means (out of band communication) to specific people at specific times for specific needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't.

But it isn't because I disagree with FB's politics. It's because all my friends (Europeans around 35 yo) just stopped using it.

They all moved to Instagram.

Facebook (the product) will be a desert by 3-5 years. However, Facebook Inc. had a lot of hindsight and bough Whatsapp and Instagram.

I commute via train every day. 99% of the phone screens are either Insta or Whatsapp.

Facebook Inc. wins.

PS: I miss Facebook (the product). I hate Insta. I loathe the fact that it's all pics and no text. I have no good way to share ideas or jokes with my friends. But if I want to know what my friends are up to, that is the app I have to use.

<comment><USER11> Excuse this old geezer, but.... how do you have discussions on instagram? how is instagram replacing groups and forums for people who share specific interests?

this "we don't use facebook anymore, we use instagram" seems for a narrow usecase.

<comment><USER12> You can direct message and do group chats. To set up events you can just message a bunch of people time and place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think it's important to take a more active stand. My child joined a school sport this fall and the coach told us information will be provided on a private Facebook group. I told him I don't use Facebook and demanded he also put the information elsewhere, which he did end up doing. I hope over time, as more people demand this, more people will float away from FB.

</comment><comment><USER14> Because nothing on my account is actually private.

I use fb mostly for groups (buy/sell groups, some technical knowledge sharing groups) and being up to date with band/companies news.

I accept only people I really know and like, but I rarely invite anyone first.

I don't "share my life" nor I look at other people posts about their lives (most of them haven't written a wall post in months anyway). I share "life stuff" with people in person and looks like most people are doing the same.

Oh, and while a lot of people use Messenger I completely don't. Not at all.

<comment><USER14> To not lie about Messenger: I use it on webpage directly as a private contact initiation when buying/selling stuff. We exchange telephone numbers and that's usually all.

And when somebody starts a random conversation (hadn't happen in a while) I just redirect them somewhere else.

I also keep away from FB/Messenger apps and I avoid visiting FB on phone.

On my pc I block trackers and stuff.

I think all of above is sane way of using Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would like to request my data and delete, but severing the only mechanism I have for finding some people I know from previous academic programs is anxiety-inducing, so I avoid making a final decision.

I've been bearish on it for a while now. I think I've been pondering deleting my account since around 2011 or 2012.

I'm not sure when I last logged in.

To a lesser degree, it's also probably the only way I'll find out if a few former professors/mentors die. I am slowly discounting the value of this one because I visit so infrequently that I already only find these out if my spouse notices, or someone I stay in regular contact texts/emails about it. I should probably look into configuring search/news alerts for this, or something.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have two groups of friends who mostly communicate via private Facebook groups, and because I decided to travel for a few years, I don't see either group enough to know what they're doing without Facebook. The social penalty for deleting my account would be the potential loss of a lot of my relationship with a large chunk of my friends.

This also means that I don't use the feed, which is the primary source of Facebook's problems. I get an unfiltered list of posts my friends make, which is really all I ever wanted anyway.

<comment><USER17> What I find interesting with this description is how anyone can be worried about losing "friends" when just changing the contact medium would result in losing them. There's email, SMS, Signal, and yes: actual phones. Letters even.

A friendship is not endangered by a switch of context, while casual acquaintances may be lost. Friends are people who are mainly interested in you, not ones who choose theirs ranking by convenience of communication method. Any social media has a broadcast mentality to it, like it would be too cumbersome to stay in touch otherwise. This is not a new occurrence. It has always been easier to "stay in touch" with the people immediately surrounding you. However, following that definition, the people who are your best friends would be the people you spend the most time with, which are probably you co- workers.

Just imagine anyone taking the time to actually formulate a piece of personal writing, process thoughts before writing them down and in the end having to weigh what information to share or to write that letter at all, to have finite resources to write and to have to choose who is important and who is not. Instead of just flooding everyone with the same, probably curated and edited, information.

Then again, I'm probably not the intended target group of Facebook and similar networks. People also smoke, drink, take drugs, have unprotected sex with strangers, risk their lives in stupid endeavors and generally do highly illogical things on a constant basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Facebook is just another website. Sure it has problems, but it's super handy for keeping up with a 'distributed' family across the globe.

What are you fishing for?

<comment><USER19> > Facebook is just another website.

Strangely this website comes pre-installed on every phone I buy, and I can't uninstall it; the best I can do is deactivate. How do I get rid of this "website"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I haven't looked at the newsfeed or added new posts in over a couple of years. It's only used to access Pages, but I see activity stalling as quality declines. US growth is stalled and I hear nothing but negative sentiment against the Facebook brand from regular users. It's the equivalent of MySpace now, but will always have its diehard users—those who don't like change, or those who just don't get the anti-privacy and adtech poison it's built on.

We should be asking why those who left Facebook still use Instagram which is feeding the same machine.

</comment><comment><USER21> Because for keeping in touch with people and being aware of events, there isn't a better alternative.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's an easy way to see what people are up to. Especially once you have kids it's not often you get to catch up with friends. And they aren't going to another service en masse.

It's also a way to see some random content, much like my LinkedIn. Just a bunch of articles and memes. I do find that it's low quality, often very political on the articles side. But the memes and jokes are okay.

It's gotten a lot less addictive over the years. Maybe I'll end up using it less and less naturally.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't have an account now and never had an account either.

Their purpose seemed somehow shady from the get-go. All that for free, what's the catch? What do they sell? And later the catch became obvious.

For some people Facebook is certainly useful to keep in touch with folk. But for my part, I am happy I never joined.

A corporation in a position to collect all kinds of information about you, to build graphs of who you know, when you communicate with them within the service, to learn even the people you know but who are not in the service yet appear in your pictures (shadow profiles), and so on... That is too much power for a single entity. Who watches and regulates them? Who looks after how that data is used? Who makes sure they behave? How can you ask them to go away if you don't like them? What if the political situation goes bad as in post-1920s bad and someone repeats the IBM/Hollerith tabulation machine use-case using data from Facebook?

Some might say the tinfoil is strong in this one but come one, after everything with Snowden, after the Cambridge Analytica and everything else, I am happier and happier about my initial decision. The only way to win is to not play the game and all that.

</comment><comment><USER24> Facebook does have utility for making new friends. Just last night I was out at a bar, chatting to some people, and at the end we added eachother on Facebook. We need some kind of service like Facebook, just one which is fully encrypted and where the data is in the users hands.

<comment><USER25> I just use directly telegram, the cool thing is I have not even to give them my real number

<comment><USER9> How did you create a Telegram account without your real number or a number you control? You can create a username and avoid giving out your phone number to other people, if that's what you're referring to. This is not available with WhatsApp or Signal.

Telegram requires a phone number to create an account and to activate the account on additional devices. As an aside, Signal is also tied to a phone number. Wire is the only one that allows people to use email addresses to create accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They require use of real names and are popular. That means that there is a decent chance people who encounter me offline might try to look me up there, because all they need is my name.

If my name was something like Lorenzo Von Matterhorn, then I could go without having an account on such sites and people looking for me would find nothing.

But my name is not Lorenzo Von Matterhorn. I have a very common last name, and a reasonably common first name. Such sites have many people with my name. People looking for me will find people with my name.

By having an account at such sites, I can make sure I show up when people look for me, reducing the chance that they will mistake someone else for me which could lead to misunderstandings.

</comment><comment><USER27> Beer.

Im part of a bunch of private beer raffle groups. It goes like this

1\. Someone buys a rare and sought after beer (say, at a release they waited hours in line for) 2\. They come up with a valuation 3\. They post the beer for N spots in one of these groups (almost always 10 spots, 0-9) 4\. Folks buy spots by claiming number 5\. Everyone pays up 6\. Once full, the next Illinois fireball pick 3 "fireball number" (0-9) that gets drawn decides winner 7 winner gets shipped their beer

These communities _only_ exist on Facebook. And in that sense, fb works very well as a way to keep people honest (must use real accounts, must be vouched for to become a member)

Yeah its a niche, but it's my niche.

<comment><USER28> Great. But, Facebook is surely collecting a shitton of data from you and the other beer group members and, possibly, selling it to data brokers, who, in turn, sell it to beer advertisement companies.

You are the product.

<comment><USER29> But he gets beer, so what if some beer companies know that he likes beer and decide to pay someone to know what kind of beer he's more willing to pay for?

I mean, what's the problem with some companies knowing what you like, if you're intending to pay for it anyway?

<comment><USER28> Because the beer companies can trade the data with another company. And that company will trade the data to another company. And the cycle continues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a need to connect with people on a couple of specific topics that I believe are very important, and unfortunately, Facebook is where most people are. So I use (only) Facebook groups. All the forums and message boards of the past are not where many people are. I stay away from my timeline and the news feed. I believe that the timeline is a useless stream of junk with people always arguing and fighting one another. Recently I noticed that Facebook has prioritized video content, and now the news feed is an endless stream of useless videos that auto play. This is not the result of personalization, because I do not react to people's posts or comments (and give hints to Facebook). _It 's as if Facebook intends to create its own version of a future based on Idiocracy (the movie)._ [1]

Facebook groups has some good features and has improved a lot for administrators over the last couple of years. But as dpau says in another comment here [2], search on Facebook and Facebook groups is terrible — it's worse than any bad web search engine one can think of. Most people end up posting the same posts and the same comments over and over again (this is not a Facebook-only issue, but the lack of good search makes enforcing "searching first as the norm" next to impossible). All the etiquette built around newsgroups and online forums over decades is nowhere to be seen on Facebook groups. Everybody seems to want to be spoonfed with answers, instantly.

As dpau says [2], Facebook as a place to store useful information for posterity is a lost cause. If, either intentionally or unintentionally, Facebook were to delete all content older than a week from groups and timelines right now, nothing will be missed! _Facebook _is the place_ where content goes to die!_ I tell people to put their content elsewhere on the web and share the link on Facebook, but many people are loathe to do it, not understanding that their effort, knowledge and time are wasted so pitifully by an incompetent and arrogant corporation that doesn't care much about anything on the human side (except showing more videos to show more video ads to make more money).

I'm of the opinion that the sooner Facebook dies, the better off we'll be, even if there's no single alternative that fulfills all the features it offers.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18481458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18481458)

</comment><comment><USER25> I honestly have not an account since an year but just for two reasons:

\- all of my contacts stopped using it well before, basically their whole profiles were empty of any news, photo or share. They just used it to read some news from some groups

\- I was still there because a group of my college was still active and I needed the contacts with some of those people. As soon as I didn't need them anymore I left

SW-eu seems a totally empty space for facebook for what I could see. New generations are directly ignoring it, old generations are not even using it, and my generation has just stopped to find it useful at all

</comment><comment><USER29> I use Facebook's login on some websites, its groups... and I like the ads.

It may sound weird, but I adblock the hell out of ads everywhere when I'm doing something "serious", so the only ads I ever see are the ones in Facebook's app... and they're over 50% relevant and interesting to me.

So I pretty much know that Facebook on mobile is a time waster, and I only use it to check out fun/cool stuff, which includes looking at curious things I'll never buy.

Also, I have Facebook's notifications disabled, so I only use it on my terms.

</comment><comment><USER30> As someone else said, Groups.

Would I prefer them to be hosted somewhere else like a forum? Yes, Groups on Facebook are quite terrible to use with the non-chronological ordering, the comment system that encourages everythign but in depth comments, ... but the reality is that for a few subjects that I'm interested like development projects in the city where I live, .. they're the place where I can find the most up to date info and discussion

</comment><comment><USER31> I haven't bothered to delete it because I'm not very exposed to privacy issue there (I don't given them much of anything to sell) I don't actively post much of anything at all, but within my family it is considered a social norm. I'm expected to occasionally check in and give a like to some posted photos, and send the obligatory "Happy <something> | <congratulations>" here and there.

<comment><USER28> > I'm not very exposed to privacy issue there (I don't given them much of > anything to sell)

Facebook still likely has a lot of usage data about you. For example, they could make a profile of you based on the people you visit and interact with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ultimately explainable by the fact that extremely few, possibly zero people actually live their life according to principles.

Everyone has their pet topic, everyone has their set of vices.

I don't have a Facebook account, but I do own a (non-electric) car. I'm very much aware of how bad it is. Giving it up would restrict my life dramatically, so I don't. (I'd love a Model 3 when they finally hit the UK).

</comment><comment><USER33> I deleted my account over a year ago, and I periodically consider rejoining for a few reasons:

a) My social life has suffered considerably. I've heard that if your friendships are so shallow that they vanish when you're not on facebook they weren't worth much anyhow. That may be so, but at least when I was on facebook I would know when my "friends" (read: casual acquaintances that I met once) were throwing a party or going out somewhere that I could join. I'm single and I moved to my current city a few years ago and don't have old friendships. If I want any hope of meeting new people, making friends, dating, etc I need to be present enough to get opportunities. Leaving facebook cut off the most valuable tool I had to expand my social circle, and I now rarely go out or meet new people. I'm lonely, but I'm really uncomfortable creating a facebook account so I haven't done much about it.

b) Meetup was a nice idea, but other than tech talks, nobody seems to use it where I am. If you like $hobby and want to find other local ${hobby}ists to share your activity with, you need to be on facebook. Do you like riding dirt bikes, but know that going to the desert with a bike without a buddy is dangerous...well, if you don't have facebook how are you going to find a buddy? You won't, instead you'll ride alone and hope you won't break a leg somewhere there isn't cell reception.

b) Groups have replaced Craigslist. Where I live, not being on facebook costs money. Want to buy used furniture? Facebook. Interested in a cordless drill that costs $$$? Buy second-hand on facebook. Or just pay retail and buy new. Looking for an apartment? You can find a roommate on...wait for it...Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER34> Don't give them any information you don't want them to have.

I only keep the account to log in into various services.

<comment><USER35> _Don 't give them any information you don't want them to have._

They buy data direct from airlines and credit cards now.

<comment><USER34> So whether you use FB anymore or not, doesn't affect this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> To share updates with my friends and family, buy used stuff on the marketplace, get info and be helpful to townspeople on town happenings from my town group (where I've also met some nice people that I now buy beef and eggs from), etc.

Nothing in recent history has changed any of it's utility for me.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm somewhat of an introvert and have frequent bouts of depression that keep me in the house for anything other than work. FB is how I follow up on my friends lives and maintain some contact with the outside world. I don't personally know anyone on any other forum.

</comment><comment><USER38> Too many of the social event/party/gathering things that I go to use Facebook events as the primary means of letting everyone know about the details (when, where, last minute changes, door code, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER39> Simple: I like looking at my friends' posts and don't value my privacy.

</comment><comment><USER40> Not long ago I closed my Linkedin account because where I live, far eastern India, recruiters hardly use linkedin for anything & the rest did not find me employable either. I had been using Facebook in the hope of staying in touch with friends but of late I feel that my friends posting their lives not to connect, but to gather likes & comments. I shall close it too! Instagram, I use to follow interesting people, but is connected to my Facebook. I don't need that addiction too & hope to close all cyber social nuisance in near future!

</comment><comment><USER41> For chat, I haven't posted anything for 4 years but i still use it regularly to get in touch with people.

</comment><comment><USER42> It would be great if you could clarify and be more specific about "what we know"...because so far I haven't come across a single reason me and my friends should stop using Facebook.

Broad generalizations and statements don't help the conversation

Sure, there is a lot of headlines with reasons...but I can't remember a single one that wasn't hugely out of context or debunked.

</comment><comment><USER43> Troll groups and meme groups

</comment><comment><USER44> You could ask the same question about every company: Google and China censorship, killer drones, IBM role in the Holocaust, Ford's Nazi creator, majority of German corporations 'employing' slave labor, NASA importing Nazis, concentration camps sciencists.

And I don't use it. I just find the recent outage hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER45> events. and addiction.</comment>