How many VPNs do you think we need?
for every USB charger one VPN?
I’m holding out for the USB charger / VPN bundle. 96% markdown or GTFO.
ALL OF THEM.
It’s VPNs all the way down!
You’ve heard the news: cyber security is
the new and very scary frontier. Hackers are out there just waiting for
you to relax for a second and let them in
Ahahahahaha! Ohh, that made my day.
The best thing about these ads are they serve to remind you that if BB is willing to sell excrement like this in the BB store then anything else in the store you don’t immediately recognize as junk is probably also junk.
To be fair, BB has no management of the store. The store is run by StackCommerce and fed site demographics from StackSocial, so really it’s the store that selling this crap and has nothing to do with BB. BB is just shilling it, I’m guessing as a contractual obligation.
Good to know. It did seem a little out of character. And is a constant source of amusement.
Those two things don’t actually go together.
Boing Boing chose to brand the store as the Boing Boing store, as opposed to just hosting ads or labeled “sponsored” posts posted as “StackSocial”. So, yes, all of these cheesy deals are on Boing Boing because Boing Boing decided to lend the value and good will of its brand to StackSocial.
This is an issue similar to celebrity endorsements. Celebrity endorsements bring up the status of a product, at the expense of the status of the celebrity. Same goes for Boing Boing assigning its brand to StackSocial offers.
“Highly rated” by whom?
Hmm…not sure if this lone “rating” from the BB store page really counts:
Europas Award for Best Security/Privacy Startup of 2014
Not sure how good a start up it could be if it is already having to discount its product by 94% (and that doesn’t include the extra cut for affiliate marketing Boing Boing and StackSocial will take out of the remaining 6%…leaving, maybe, 3%).
I’d say that pretty much any product that has to be discounted by 94% to move it would be considered a failure, unless it was grossly overpriced to begin with. Even so, 94% off makes those 3 for 1 suit deals, 50% off mattress sales and perpetually “Going Out of Business” rug stores seem positively upstanding by comparison.
I have used the premium zenmate product…
Seems marginally useful since the firefox extension causes major CPU usage and even on the premium tier, Google and various forums seemed to think that I was some sort of bot – had to fill out captchas for google search about half of the time (and of course I fail those captchas about half the time).
At that time the product only existed as a browser extension designed to let you browse anonymously. Reports at the security-obsessed Wilders forums were that the extension leaked the user’s real IP. (The only VPN at the BB store which they seem to like/trust on that forum is NordVPN.)
It seems that with any of the VPS there are multiple levels to consider.
- Does it work easily and well on all of my devices?
- Will it continue to do so and is there good support?
- Is it actually secure, or does it leak like a sieve?
The last one is the hardest to know. For all we know, all VPNs are NSA honey pots…
Regardless, steep discounts make #2 a significant issue, since steep discounts are not usually a good sign for a company’s ongoing financial health, nor for the support of the product or service that earns them almost no money, and it is harder to get a steeper discount than 94% - well, except on the StackSocial/Boing Boing store 
Did you guys see that movie Hackers? It’s just like that. Angelina Jolie is trying to hack your mainframe. There’s only one solution. VPNs. Lots and lots of VPNs.
I feel as though I ought to be offended by my own demographics.
Remember, being a top hacker is about being the faster keyboarder than the guys who sit in the corporate/military server room 24/7 with keyboards to defend against hackers. Also, be sure to narrate what you are doing when you are hacker typing…
Honestly, just yesterday I thought how nice it was that they seemed to have reduced the sleazy shit and were apparently, even if they would never admit it, capable of learning from their mistakes.
