For the first few days there is an extra bonus we are offering to all Purism customers and supporters, take advantage of this bonus now!
If you would like to learn more about equity crowdfunding and how you can become a shareholder in Purism via the StartEngine platform you can read their FAQ: https://www.startengine.com/investor-faq
The StartEngine working group at Purism knows about this issue, but the onus lies solely on StartEngine to resolve this. (The decision might be of a legal/regulatory nature - I don’t know without digging deep into it.) Purism can reach out to them for clarification/resolution but doesn’t control this situation, unfortunately.
Todd Weaver is the Purism POC for StartEngine correspondence; I notified him that the community is requesting clarification or resolution from StartEngine.
I think this is a good guess. At some point StartEngine will need to have the country of residency of the investor. Here is a note from StartEngine in general (not just for the Purism offering):
While we do not market in UK or Canada, or solicit investments from UK or Canada, we are aware that regulators from certain UK countries or Canadian provinces have raised questions with respect to sales to UK or Canadian investors, and are taking the view that merely accepting money from UK or Canadian investors is a transaction that they have jurisdiction over, and that such offerings have to comply with the UK or Canadian equivalent of registration of the offering, or find an available exemption. In light of this position, and in order to protect the companies who post their offering with us, we are not currently accepting investments from unaccredited UK or Canadian investors.
From Aaron Dalton, Director of Campaign Management, StartEngine:
Traffic originating from services that obfuscate ID or location (such as most VPNs) as well as traffic originating from hosting providers are blocked. If the investor disables his VPN, this should resolve this issue. This safeguard was implemented by our engineering leadership to protect our entire issuer and investor community. I hope you can appreciate this decision. Please let me know if you have any questions here.
This screenshot is with the Librem 5 USA using Firefox ESR. This also occurs on the Librem 14 with Qubes-Debian using Firefox ESR as well as Qubes-Whonix using Tor Browser.
FWIW, I was able to get past the VPN restriction by first searching for https://www.startengine.com/offering/purism with Startpage search engine, and then using their anonymizing link to proceed to the site. On the page, I was able to click on “Invest Now,” which brought up a box to enter an email address and a password to register.
Good pick up but you don’t get HTTP error 403 unless you do have some kind of network connection (although admittedly you could be running your own web server on localhost).
One possibility is that he: switched the network on, accessed the web site to get error 403, switched the network off again immediately, did the screenshot. Then by some further process was able to upload the screenshot to the forum.
).
