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Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

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Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#21

Post by cowboylowrez »

clintonb wrote: post #10
rsync wrote: post #5

KYC is already required at banks and they have the most complete - and global - view of all transaction flows . Therefore we should insist that KYC be solely performed by banks - no other firms should be required to perform it. Given the extraordinary privileges that banks enjoy, this would be a reasonable contribution to society - especially given that they are doing it anyway .

Is this sarcasm? Most banks don't write software, and the third-party software isn't that great. I don't want my bank involved in this at all.

I pay for a vps with a credit card, isn't this essentially the banking system doing the same thing?

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#26

Post by gpm »

Yes.

Ultimately the internet is a lawless extremely low trust place, because it isn't limited by borders, so there is no effective law enforcement over a significant fraction of the people on it. Hosting providers bear a fair bit of the brunt of this because they're a staging ground for doing actually evil things.

I want to work with high trust places. I don't want an IP address that was just being used to hack people. I don't want to have to jump through hoops that verify I'm not doing evil things before doing things. I want to be offered things that can't be offered to people who are abusing trust, like generous free trials.

Verifying I'm an actual person in a place where they can pursue me through a functional legal system and functional law enforcement agencies is a step that allows the trust level to be stepped up slightly from "literally none". That's a good thing IMHO.

And I already have no privacy when I'm paying with a credit card under my real name. There's no actual cost here to me.

That said, I'd be very careful I was actually sending that information to a reputable hosting company, because the internet is a lawless place and there are definitely people who would try and pretend to be your hosting company.

Re: Ask HN: Would you send a photo holding your drivers license to rent a VPS?

#30

Post by fragmede »

lolinder wrote: post #15
fragmede wrote: post #11

the reason they're doing this is because of credit card fraud. the attacker takes a stolen credit card, signs up for their service, and then runs up a huge bill. when the credit card owner discovers this, they do a chargeback, which means the hosting provider is out the money. do this enough times and the hosting provider gets kicked off their credit card processor and can't take payments anymore. so yeah, it sucks,…

The issue OP has here isn't that they want anonymity, it's that the demands that this particular hosting provider is making are bizarre. This is not the norm yet for hosting providers, and you don't have to pay with Monero to avoid having to send a photo of the credit card you used to pay for a service. Just pick almost any other hosting provider and they'll happily accept your credit card via an online checkout flow…

it's not bizarre and totally makes sense from the perspective of the hosting company being used for nefarious purposes and not wanting to get shut down. tragedy of the commons and all.
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