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Serious question — is “residential proxies” a euphemism for “botnet?”
by sonofhans 4y ago
Serious question — is “residential proxies” a euphemism for “botnet?”
- lobsterthief 4y agoI’m curious about this too.
- jamesfinlayson 4y agoLast week someone here said that some of the big VPN players use botnets to residential IP addresses. I assumed they got residential IP addresses from ISPs but maybe not all ISPs in all parts of the world offer that.
- bikingbismuth 4y agoEssentially yes. Sometimes it also includes people who have installed “free” VPNs.
- aeyes 4y agoNo because they are only HTTP proxies. But you don’t actually know how these companies get them, rumor is that they are part of browser extensions or free VPNs which users might install on their devices. The most “reputable” company in this space is Bright Data (formerly Luminati).
- sleepybrett 4y agoYes and also people who install certain shady "VPN" software.
- celestialcheese 4y agoYes - but legal and explicitly allowed by the user. BrightData is the biggest of them, they run the free VPN Hola, and have an SDK app owners can install in their apps that allow selling bandwidth from installs. For someone who is price sensitive, trading some free residential bandwidth for whatever service is pretty compelling. I'm sure there are scummy ones, but Bright seems to require pretty explicit consent. Not affiliated, just looked into it for some apps I have, but the payouts weren't good and I didn't think it'd be a good fit for our users.
- stingraycharles 4y agoThis is exactly the one I was using. Basically you’re piggy-backing on mobile phones and other devices using their free VPN software, and it’s incredibly hard to block for large websites. Combine this with some other clever tricks, and you’re basically able to do huge scrapes for not-that-much money with incredible convenience.
- candiddevmike 4y agoThere are also a lot of rural/metro ISPs that offer this as a service (residential IPs) if you find the right person