You underestimate how different some people’s situations and priorities can be. For us, it’s forking 10-20 USD (not a big sum of money) once a year by credit card (which isn’t hard to obtain).

There are parts of the world with dire financial situations or simply outdated systrms that don’t offer easy access to electric or international payments. There will be devs wanting to experiment with web services, but for them it isn’t simply “forking over the bare minimum”.

I won’t reveal my location just for the sake of an internet discussion, but I lived in a country (It’s not exactly a “3rd world shithole”, but not a developed one either) where until around five to ten years ago or so getting a bank account with ‘credit card’ meant you ‘made it’.

Why? If you weren’t lucky and wanted to pay for something international, you needed a friend with the aforementioned credit card to do the transaction on our behalf. Buying on Amazon? Better make it worth before bothering our friend there. What if I wanted games on steam? The friend with credit card, or use an intermediary that charges an extra before they ‘gift’ the purchased game. And so on.

Now it has gotten much better, as fintech apps filled the gap offering virtual visa or mastercard payments, and the banks themselves started offering credit cards with lower quotas, but you have to remember that it wasn’t available until a couple of years ago, or even still out of reach for some.

So what if you’re a developer with no affordable access to international tx and want to experiment regardless? You find the ones that don’t require payment.

Free market at work!

So that setup effectively gives you an all-ports available connection (except 22) from your mobile device and anything that connects through it, like a laptop? The exit node would be the VPS.

Could I skip the home router and EoIP+VPN directly between mobile and VPS, for instance?

I am in a situation (restrictive firewall on ethernet/wifi, prefer personal mobile connection but it’s cgnat or something equally crap) this could be very useful for me.

FYI, two letter TLDs are country/region/jurisdiction specific. There’s an ISO standard for that.

• .tv Tuvalu
• .me Montenegro
• .fm (Federation of) Micronesia

Some countries append additional modifiers to classify their uses:

• .uk United Kingdom
• .co.uk Company
• …

Three or more are generic (traditional or new)

• .com, .net, .org, …

In some cases, Uncle Sam said “first!” and it stuck.

• .edu Education (MURICA)
• .mil Military (MURRICA)
• .gov Government (MURRRICA)

Just like what happens with Mali, what some silicon valley hipsters decide as a ‘fun’ acronym is just that, a fun thought. If the corresponding government decides to take away a specific domain, they probably can.

I’ve seen similar stuff multiple times, often with misquoted statistics. What many miss is that context is as important as stats.