Colo scams are pretty common. Some percentage of people will offer to send expensive laptops, and the scammers can discard the rest of "interested customers".
It is inviable to colo old laptops, a regulatory nightmare - Hetzner would NEVER accept those in their datacenters. It is also absurd to think they are partnering with Hetzner to begin with.
It makes no sense to believe they will even EXPORT laptops from Europe to the US if you choose the US location. It just makes no sense, so I don't get why I am getting downvoted.
There is no way they are partnering with Hetzner, or charging just 7€/month flat rate... they specifically want to know the model of the laptop, and offer to send send a courrier to your door...
Internet mostly works in Spain when there is a match: one can see traffic figures from the mayor exchange points: they are unaffected.
Big businesses are unaffected, since LaLiga will quickly reverse any block that impacts popular websites and risks triggering significant public outcry.
Most people in Spain don’t care — and many aren’t even aware of the overly broad blocks.
Cloudflare and RootedCON are challenging this in court, but it may take many years before a final outcome is reached.
I have no doubt that other providers use latency from probes as a data point. But IPinfo allows way more weight from this in their calculations, probably because they have developed their own reliable network, unlike most competitors.
Your service, like many others, accepts as valid most intentionally fake geolocation data provided by networks. I am sure you know this anyway, so no need to mislead saying "we do the same".
Governments do not even need any of the providers to comply, they can access global NetFlow data. This is conveniently not discussed by any commercial VPN provider.
This was the conclusion I reached after reading how it all developed back in the day. There was no independent monitoring/verification during the time this woman was supposedly in the cave, and it was confirmed afterwards by her own team that she went outside for for eight days "so technicians could repair a router". She also had a computer "without a clock", and was in great shape, did not even need sunglasses after all those days in a cave.
It is inviable to colo old laptops, a regulatory nightmare - Hetzner would NEVER accept those in their datacenters. It is also absurd to think they are partnering with Hetzner to begin with.
It makes no sense to believe they will even EXPORT laptops from Europe to the US if you choose the US location. It just makes no sense, so I don't get why I am getting downvoted.