There are flats and there are books. Flats are a sheet of 20 Forever stamps that you would get at a drug store. A book is 20 stamps, used or not used.

Generally there are different values associated with flats because you can get cash for them on the streets. You can get them to the streets via an officer if you're ballsy. Or you can just find discreet ways to mail them.

The value of a flat where I was at was about $13-$14 depending on your vendor. A book was generally worth $10. If you were buying bulk (and depending on who exactly you were buying from), that number could go down to $12 and $7 respectively.

If you were buying from someone that was running a ticket (sports gambling) they had more incentive to get rid of their stamps. Some people had tens of thousands of dollars of stamps in their property and they wanted to convert them.

If you were buying from someone running a store (think "buy and resell commissary"), their business model was dependent on flipping books of stamps in exchange for more commissary. They could sell a ramen for 3 stamps ($1.50) when it was worth just 50 cents.

Flats were easier to hide because they are, well, flat.

We've all been reduced to a passphrase.

When I've lobbed this scenario to the security managers/employees at these companies, they all give me a really great answer:

Q: What happens if a sitting senator gets mugged and they have their printed 2fa codes sitting in their wallet?

A: They have a special number they can call.

Edit: oh wow, diffui looks nice!

I'm waiting for legislation around this, but I'm not sure we'll ever get it. I was on the phone with a senior Apple support specialist person and I even proffered this idea of "what if a sitting senator just got mugged." And they said there was a special lane for them.

It's worth separating the two populations:

My users had money and had considered legal subscriptions. They paid me because the legal product was worse—in my case, sports blackouts, a bunch of different apps, etc. They knew what they were buying into and they had weighed the risk. I can tell you right now some of my former users have bought into this market.

Then there's the unwitting: a person buying one of these devices at a too-good-to-be-true price is treating it as a hardware purchase from Amazon, where the actual monetization isn't inferable from the listing. Calling it too good to be true assumes the buyer can see what shit they're standing in. They can't. There's no visible market here. It's just a product page with reviews.

To add to this: the proxy exit is exactly why these cost so little. Demand for residential IPs is booming (check some of the proxy subreddits to see what I mean).

The ironic part is that there's a chance the person who bought one of these boxes to watch pirated sports was the exit node I was using to acquire the feeds in the first place.

That's a new one.

And so I'll comment asking them why it's okay to use a tool that was built on the backs of content it wasn't properly licensed to use to generate a post promoting an anti-piracy product. I'm yet to get a good response, if any. (Sorry for the word salad.)

I've started collecting some of these: https://josh.mn/anti-piracy

(Note: I went to federal prison for internet piracy)

Android is to Unraid as iPhone is to Synology.

After a few runs it picked things up appropriately. I always got dinged on formal education though.

This stuff is gross.