4 ms·

Wonder what fraction of that traffic is from p0wned IoT refrigerators, smoke detectors or WiFi enabled light bulbs… probably more than anybody cares to admit…

walrus01 5y ago
Also a lot of people who've been tricked into installing malware on their windows PCs, from shady "VPN" operators and other
- RNCTX 5y ago
  They've not been tricked, really. The majority of them want to do something completely benign like see a BBC show in the US, or watch an American football show in the UK, and the one defining feature of capitalism is its many contradictory faces. One corporation wants to arbitrarily limit its customer base, and the other corporation wants to arbitrarily limit what data its customer base can see. In between the two is a space big enough to drive a Mack truck or a lorry through, depending on where you're from... One might justify this until the one corporation merges with the other and then you have a situation where the same corporation wants to do two different things to the same pool of users.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    When I say tricked, I mean they have no idea that unknown 3rd parties' grey market traffic is being run through their personal home internet connection. They believe they are just using a VPN to watch BBC.
    - RNCTX 5y ago
      Yes, but my point is they've not been duped as much by the "free VPN" provider as much as they've been duped by the people who created the market for the "free VPN" provider. I found out while sorting through business contributors to a non-profit once that a pretty big market for mobile relays is the "free VPN" offered on the app stores to high school kids looking to circumvent the outgoing blocks on the school's wifi. In that case the school's administration could easily purge the "free VPN" of local users by removing the wifi restrictions. Instead, they serve more traffic to more nefarious places to maintain an illusion of control not for the kids in the school, but for themselves. All of this is basically Dr. Strangelove but with spyware rather than nuclear bombs.
preinheimer 5y ago
Lots of them, the vast majority of the players in that space are absolutely terrible: https://medium.com/@xianghangmi/resident-evil-understanding-residential-ip-proxy-as-a-dark-service-dea9010a0e29 https://medium.com/@xianghangmi/resident-evil-understanding-...
jrockway 5y ago
Some amount, probably, but some of these "residential IP" providers just buy IP blocks from small residential or business ISPs. (Or even less shadily, buy IP transit from them and get assigned a block of IPs that the databases think are normal residential/business users.)

walrus01 5y ago

Also a lot of people who've been tricked into installing malware on their windows PCs, from shady "VPN" operators and other

RNCTX 5y ago
They've not been tricked, really. The majority of them want to do something completely benign like see a BBC show in the US, or watch an American football show in the UK, and the one defining feature of capitalism is its many contradictory faces. One corporation wants to arbitrarily limit its customer base, and the other corporation wants to arbitrarily limit what data its customer base can see. In between the two is a space big enough to drive a Mack truck or a lorry through, depending on where you're from... One might justify this until the one corporation merges with the other and then you have a situation where the same corporation wants to do two different things to the same pool of users.
- walrus01 5y ago
  When I say tricked, I mean they have no idea that unknown 3rd parties' grey market traffic is being run through their personal home internet connection. They believe they are just using a VPN to watch BBC.
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    Yes, but my point is they've not been duped as much by the "free VPN" provider as much as they've been duped by the people who created the market for the "free VPN" provider. I found out while sorting through business contributors to a non-profit once that a pretty big market for mobile relays is the "free VPN" offered on the app stores to high school kids looking to circumvent the outgoing blocks on the school's wifi. In that case the school's administration could easily purge the "free VPN" of local users by removing the wifi restrictions. Instead, they serve more traffic to more nefarious places to maintain an illusion of control not for the kids in the school, but for themselves. All of this is basically Dr. Strangelove but with spyware rather than nuclear bombs.

preinheimer 5y ago

Lots of them, the vast majority of the players in that space are absolutely terrible: https://medium.com/@xianghangmi/resident-evil-understanding-residential-ip-proxy-as-a-dark-service-dea9010a0e29 https://medium.com/@xianghangmi/resident-evil-understanding-...

jrockway 5y ago

Some amount, probably, but some of these "residential IP" providers just buy IP blocks from small residential or business ISPs. (Or even less shadily, buy IP transit from them and get assigned a block of IPs that the databases think are normal residential/business users.)