Really gives some insight to why VPN companies have been fighting for mindshare the past few years. Just waiting for a case like this to pop up and be the first service people think of.
It worked for https://greenhealthdocs.com/ in Maryland. They advertised heavily before legalization framework was in place.
People didn't know they just needed to fill out a state form that's approved automatically pay $50 to the state, and pay a small fee $75-$80 to a certified doctor, dentist, nurse, or midwife for a cannabis recommendation.
Instead, they greenhealth charges 200 bucks to people.
Can that dedicated server magically be in completely different locations in seconds at the press of a button?
It's not like vpn providers are renting out one shared server. Being able to pick between countries is a key feature. Shared servers might actually be an advantage too. If your vpn is on a unique IP, it's probably easier to deanonymise you from bulk data.
And what is the average user supposed to do with it? I doubt that most people are even aware that you can ssh into a server and configure it for tunnelling your internet traffic, let alone knowing how to do that.
NordVPN actually inspired me to work on my current personal project: a "human" ad blocker for sponsored content on Youtube: https://github.com/paprikka/butter
I'll push a more stable version later this week. Feel free to spam me via the email in my profile desc if you have any feedback or ideas.
I extract text from video captions and use GPT to detect the sponsored time stamp candidates.
The upside is that it can work for any video without the initial user interaction. Manual/user corrections can be applied afterwards ofc.
I’m trying to figure out if it can be good enough to be considered useful at this stage. Sponsorblock looks great. The reputation score/leaderboard is a superior approach imho.
He's Yegor Sak, founder and CEO of Windscribe which is a VPN, however the prices don't even compare to the bigger guys, it's more expensive than even Mullvad.