
How misbehaving at school made one man a multimillionaire - inm
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32702501
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toyg
HMA was a triumph of marketing and usability over security concerns. They are
one of the most law-friendly VPN providers out there (and it couldn't be
otherwise, considering they hail from a certain GCHQ-ruled island), but they
were great at selling a simple way to avoid boring office-network blocks. I
remember using their web proxy to bypass some stupid block on the FreakAngels
webcomic (to this day, I still can't understand why anyone would block such
innocuous material).

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arvinjoar
Many filters aren't that sophisticated, it might just have been a single word
that tripped it up. I remember "hackaday" being blocked at my High School
because it was tagged as a "hacking website" by the filter.

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lmm
I remember not being able to look at cryptography websites because they
contained the word "hash".

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__z
I remember the classic example back in the day of Super Bowl XXX content being
blocked because it contained XXX. Heard this on the news.

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gmac
I had exactly the same problem with a site I made for a friend's wedding. It
included a short message from the bride and groom ending with 'xxx' — i.e.
kiss kiss kiss. Vodafone UK (at least) blocked it as porn.

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nly
Seems to be a well-deserved example of doing something unoriginal, boring and
well-trodden in a no-bullshit, user- friendly way and being rewarded for it.

I think Whatsapp is another great example - afaict the key innovations there
were using cell phone numbers as user IDs and running on every platform known
to man. Just works. Dropbox and Imgur are two others.

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skrebbel
Dropbox was unoriginal, boring and well-trodden?

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sanoli
I don't know what's the fuss about Dropbox being called boring. It's a backup
service, so it's not really an insult, it's just not supposed to be exciting,
or fun. It's supposed to work. It wasn't original either, but it worked
seamlessly and reliably to the point where you confidently forgot about it.
Would you trade that for some backup that didn't work so well, but was, yeay,
more exciting? (I don't even know how you add excitement to backups... do you
make it a video game? Add videos?)

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mgkimsal
gamification?

Dropbox was gamified, a bit, in my view, in that I had loads of people who'd
invite me to dropbox, because they'd get extra storage for getting me to sign
up. Maybe it's not real gasification because they didn't get badges?

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JonnieCache
I had one of those in school, as I'm sure many here did. I just gave my
friends access to it for free. What an idiot.

(I remember someone I knew in another school tried to sell logins for his
proxy to people for £5 each or something. They hated him for this perceived
pettiness and he became even more of a social outcast than before. Pricing
psychology is a funny thing.)

So many life lessons learned in the school IT suite!

~~~
DennisP
This guy gave it away for free too. He just added affiliate links.

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Rudism
The article mentions that HMA makes/made money via affiliate programs, but
also that there were no intrusive ads or popups. Does that mean it would
hijack users' normal shopping activity when signed on to HMA by injecting
their own affiliate codes to make commissions? I think that kind of behavior
would violate most of those commission programs' terms of use.

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WiseWeasel
I read it to mean they ran their own affiliate program where affiliates could
run links to sign up for HMA services, with commission payouts when traffic
converts through those links (signs up for a paid HMA account). Nothing
affecting the VPN traffic itself.

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downandout
_" Within a month HMA had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, and
revenues of £15,000 per annum._"

Which means that he would have been losing money like crazy on bandwidth, and
yet the article says he had no investors. Obviously the business survived and
was successful, but I have an extreme dislike for articles that leave out or
misrepresent crucial details either for the sake of simplicity or out of sheer
ignorance.

~~~
jotm
I used HMA ~2 years ago. The speeds were throttled, it's entirely possible
they saved a lot of money that way. Also, xxx,xxx of users and 15,000/annum?
The service was $10/month back then, I'd imagine the number should be way
higher for hundreds of thousands of users...

~~~
downandout
The service was free back then.

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tmikaeld
The name is quite genius, common people don't know or care what a "VPN" is,
but if it "hide my ass" on the internet - it sell itself.

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robmcm
Wouldn't it get blocked for having "ass" in the name? Slightly ironic choise
of name IMO.

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jotm
For what reason? They connect the client's PC to an exit node... they probably
also use a different domain name for authentication :-)

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robmcm
A URL in with "ass" in the domain will almost certainly be blacklisted on a
school network.

When I was at school there was an online amazon like site for electronics
called "egghead.co.uk" which was blocked for having "head" in the url!!

~~~
tmikaeld
That's kind of an extreme case right?

Must be hard to study medicine in that school....

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seahorse
What happened to "you'd better get a co-founder"?

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raverbashing
Yeah, it's like he's set up for failure!!! Oh wait

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Normangorman
It amused me to be reading this article at my school, using my own proxy
server because the bbc.co.uk website is blocked!

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bluedino
Very surprised by this, I had no idea VPN companies were so widely used.

~~~
giarc
Completely depends on your location/school/work place etc. In Canada, many
people use VPNs to access American Netflix, so here, the companies that
specialize in that are doing very well. I think the average cost is likely
about $5 per month, almost the same cost as Netflix itself.

~~~
slm_HN
I've found a lot of content on Canadian Netflix that wasn't available from the
USA so I do the same thing, but in the opposite direction.

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giarc
[http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.com/](http://netflixcanadavsusa.blogspot.com/)

The best source I have seen.

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masterminding
Its all in the name.

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drzaiusapelord
Do these school admins not have the basic filtering abilities to stop proxies?
Its trivial to do on several firewalls.

Education IT sounds like a nightmare in general. If students are outsmarting
the firewall trivially, then it says a lot about how IT is run there.

~~~
c0wb0yc0d3r
You have to remember, this guy's story started 10 years ago. Many schools just
contract this sort of thing to a 3rd party. My school used Websense, you could
easily bypass their solution by using https or simply having google translate
the site from english to english.

Additionally, you also assume that there is a formal IT staff. An old roommate
I had used to be in charge of selecting the hardware for the computerlab in
his small town school. He was a student, his school was too small to have a
real IT staff.

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aerovistae
How did a 16 year old know how to write something like this? Very, very
unusual. It certainly takes some know-how to put together an effective and
highly usable VPN service.

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aw3c2
You might enjoy this video of people that age working on one of the most
famous demos of all time:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU)

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brc
Hasn't HMA discontinued the free web proxy?

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eridal
nope, it's still there; it's just a couple more clicks so they can upsell to
support their living

[https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy](https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy)

