from Hacker News

Honeygain–Sell your residential bandwidth

by benpiper on 1/13/22, 8:05 PM with 7 comments

• by therealcamino on 1/13/22, 9:22 PM

  It sounds less like you're selling bandwidth, than letting your devices participate in scraping the web in a non-centralized way that's harder for site owners to detect.

• by londons_explore on 1/13/22, 10:38 PM

  I'd be interested for anyone to run wireshark on this and see what it's up to...

  I can imagine it's going to be doing lots of false ad clicks on things, scraping news sites, brute forcing captchas, spamming forums, and lots of other shady stuff.

  Really wouldn't be surprised if future versions don't 'borrow' your browser cookie jar so they can pretend to be browsing the web with a highly trusted non-spam login to Google/Facebook/etc.

• by verdverm on 1/13/22, 8:14 PM

  This is likely a contract violation with your service provider

• by ksaj on 1/15/22, 2:41 AM

  It looks like they are trying to emulate onion routing, but on the regular Internet. At the very least, it turns your computer(s) into exit nodes for VPN use. They recommend 3 devices, but also of course you have to keep your router available.

  I can imagine this getting your IP blocked from some sites. Chances of you noticing might be slim, but it would be quite a pain if it did affect a site that you do visit.

  Also, the unspoken part: They are using your electricity as well. So hopefully whatever you get out of this pays enough for that as well.

• by r0xsh on 1/13/22, 10:18 PM

  If you plain to signup, we both get $5 if you use my referral code :) https://r.honeygain.me/SHYNI43656