Monday, May 30, 2022

Keean Bexte and "The Counter Signal": Grifty, grifty, grifty.

Recall how ex-Rebeler Keean "Beaker" Bexte was shrieking hysterically about how he needed $13,000 right now or he would be forced to, well, get a real job:



 

Hey, I know ... let's do the math.

It appears that Bexte is a customer of provider "Fastly," which has a readily available pricing table:



Note the different pricing in various global regions so, just to give Bexte the benefit of the doubt, we'll do some calculations based on the most expensive region of all: Africa, which charges $0.28 per GB for the first 10 TB. According to Bexte's own panhandling, his site is using a whopping 1.65TB per month, which at $0.28 per GB represents a monthly cost of ...

$462.00

That's it ... a monthly expense of $462.00, and that's using the most expensive region possible. If one restricted oneself to just North America, the monthly total would be a whopping ...

$198.00

No one need take my word for it, do the math for yourself. And even if Bexte is using a different provider, the charges are typically pretty standard. So if we say that Bexte was racking up a couple hundred dollars in bandwidth charges every month, if his current outstanding bill is some $13,000, that would have taken him ...

Almost five and a half years.

Does anyone think any Internet provider would have allowed a client to run a growing tab to the point where they owe $13,000 if that took over five years? I don't fucking think so.

Like they say, a Counter Signal reader and his money are soon parted.

P.S. Hilariously, Bexte writes:

"We have been so successful at sharing our research, news and commentary that we about to break the servers of our web service provider."

Um, no. As you can see above, Bexte thinks 1.65TB a month is some sort of staggering, provider-crippling amount of bandwidth, whereas even a total idiot can see that the first tier of pricing from Fastly covers everything up to 10TB per month, so Bexte and his racist rubbish are not even close to maxing out the first column.

Jesus, what a tool.

P.P.S. It occurs to me that if I was an Internet service provider, and one of my clients was blatantly misrepresenting our business relationship and accusing me of acting in bad faith or trying to extort money under threat of cancellation of service, I'd consider that potentially defamatory. I wonder if Bexte's provider knows he's bad-mouthing them online?

AFTERSNARK: As I suggested earlier, the most hilarious aspect of this scam is the idea that, after bragging about a readership of a cool million, Bexte is still reduced to begging for what is a fairly paltry sum of $13,000 to stay on the air.

5 comments:

RogueNerdOne said...

I went one step further and calculated CDN potential costs if he's self hosting all his own videos, which he is not.

I got a MAXIMUM of $730/month at his current growth rate.

Honestly, I can't see where he'd need $13,000 for hosting fees. His breakdown doesn't add up. His explanation of 5000 visitors a month doesn't jive with Fastly's bandwidth model of CDN costs which are $0.01 higher than Amazon's S3, which is exactly what they're using.

Sorry, I don't buy Keean's story for a second. As someone who's hosted websites for over a decade using my own servers spread all over the world building my own CDN network.

I've never charged someone more than $2000 and that was for spamming emails.

Anonymous said...

Given Keean's somewhat tenuous grasp on reality (of all the Rebel and ex-Rebel crew, he's the only who actually seems to really believe some of the wilder fantasies he spins), the risibly poor quality of his site (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-counter-signal-bias/), and the fact that his site, like the Rebel, has NO apparent sponsors or advertisers, it seems Keean has adopted his mentors approach to fundraising - ask for money for everything, and pour the undifferentiated revenues into a vault like Scrooge McDuck. Since he's not accountable to anyone for tracking or spending, it's not illegal - just deeply unethical.

Anonymous said...

It had been a while since I visited the Countersignal (my appetite for near-psychotic delusion is not huge), but in light of this thread, I thought I'd spin by and see what the albino brownshirt was obsessing about now. He did not disappoint.
His headline: "Scientists blame space chemicals for rise in heart attacks!"
The actual story; scientists have identified a new class of compounds that form in the atmosphere, have been around for as long as the planet has had an atmosphere, and which may or may not at some point have some undetermined impact on terrestrial organisms.
No "space". No "rise in heart attacks" (this kind of molecule has existed in the atmosphere for millions of years.) In fact, no story beyond a minor chemical discovery.
What must it be like to live inside that terrified, uncomprehending brain of his??

CC said...

I've heard from a number of sources that Bexte was given the boot from Rebel News because he was (hard to believe as it may be) too batshit crazy and legally dangerous even for Ezra.

RogueNerdOne said...

@CC Keean isn't the only one's let go from Rebel News because of how "radical" his thinking was. Gavin, and Lauren were also let go because of how batshit crazy they were.

Ezra defended Gavin's 7 zillion things I hate about Jews piece, but the writing was on the wall afterwards. Gavin was toast because of it. Lauren has proven the World over Ezra was keen(an) to get rid of her.

Ezra brings them in moldable, and when he fires them, they're fully radicalized and dangerous. Gavin started a fucking terrorist organization in the Proud Boys, and Lauren's Mom would have won a Nobel had she crossed her legs at birth.

He also teaches them the grift of getting others to pay their bills.