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> VNPT and Bunny Communications are home/mobile ISPs. i cannot ascertain for sure that their IPs are from domestic users, but it seems worrisome that these are
by dspillett 11mo ago
> VNPT and Bunny Communications are home/mobile ISPs. i cannot ascertain for sure that their IPs are from domestic users, but it seems worrisome that these are among the top scraping sources once you remove the most obviously malicious actors.
This will be in part people on home connections tinkering with LLMs at home, blindly running some scraper instead of (or as well as) using the common pre-scraped data-sets and their own data. A chunk of it will be from people who have been compromised (perhaps by installing/updating a browser add-in or “free” VPN client that has become (or always was) nefarious) and their home connection is being farmed out by VPN providers selling “domestic IP” services that people running scrapers are buying.
- ArcHound 11mo agoDisagree on the method: I recall that bot farms use pre-paid SIM cards for their data connections so that their traffic comes from a good residential ASN. No client compromise required, it's a networking abuse that gives you good reputation of you use mobile data. But yes, selling botnets made of compromised devices is also a thing.
- Nextgrid 11mo agoSIM cards is (one) of the ways the big boys do it. It gives you a nice CGNAT to hide behind and essentially can’t be blocked without blocking a nontrivial chunk of the country. Although more and more fixed-line ISPs are moving to CGNAT too so you can get that advantage there as well.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- simonw 11mo agoI have trouble imagining any home LLM tinkerer who tries to run a naive scraper against the rest of the internet as part of their experiments. Much more likely are those companies that pay people (or trick people) into running proxies on their home networks to help with giant scrapping projects what want to rotate through thousands of "real" IPs.
- st3fan 11mo agoCorrect. These are called "residential proxies".