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Residential Proxies are the most emblematic technology of our era- a group of people looked at something that used to be considered a crime (botnets) and realiz
by Bratmon 3mo ago
Residential Proxies are the most emblematic technology of our era- a group of people looked at something that used to be considered a crime (botnets) and realized that if they just did it openly, no one would ever punish them.
- BoorishBears 3mo agoThank god for residential proxies. Highly unethical but the way the internet is going they're the last anti-hero of a somewhat open internet
- zuzululu 3mo agoi know a few very large startups that used it to fake their way into an exit unethical yes but really raises the question as to what we see is real or not
- morkalork 3mo agoMoney is real. DAU that don't pay subscriptions, or don't lead to paid conversions on hosted ads, are worthless.
- BoorishBears 3mo ago"Raises the question of what we see is real" No they really don't, dishonest founders do that. You're one with the lower case shibboleth so I have no doubt you surround yourself with dishonest founders, but faking users is pretty damn low on the usecases for residential proxies. I said they're unethical because they tend to be hidden in innocuous seeming apps or sprung on unwitting individuals via clickwraps on their smart devices.
- zuzululu 3mo agoive seen unscrupulous founders fake traction during diligence, which is my day job but ive never seen one raise $4.5m for an ai agent startup built around pulling fresh web data, then openly cheer the unethical proxy infrastructure used to evade consent and blocks then inventing a fantasy about who i associate with instead of answering that conflict is an unusually loud form of projection
- BoorishBears 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- llbbdd 3mo ago> forced lowercase ??? shift is an extra key to press
- BoorishBears 3mo agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/lowercase-typing-altman-dorsey-block-openai-gen-z-2026-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/lowercase-typing-altman-dors... most shibboleths are subtle like that
- llbbdd 3mo agoI'm...not old enough to read a Business Insider article about being annoyed by lowercase letters.
- BoorishBears 3mo agoI think most young people (with friends to text) have already encountered this.
- llbbdd 3mo agoMost young people are familiar with lowercase sentences and have been for a while, yes
- Chu4eeno 3mo agoaseigo was the OG, «aseigo: the triumphs and travails of a shift-key-challenged KDE hacker» was his blog byline a couple of decades ago.
- Bratmon 3mo agoBy providing a way for corporate AI scrapers to operate with impunity and force the last few independently-run websites to move to the cloud?
- BoorishBears 3mo agoNo one's firing up a residential proxy to read your blog, and the corporate AI scrapers have all the resources in the world even without residential proxies They're most useful for getting information from the cloud hosted sites that hoarde most of humanity's output today like Youtube and Reddit.
- Bratmon 3mo agoI actually read a really interesting article from a relatively small blog explaining that they're receiving a massive amount of scraper traffic from residential proxies. The article was called "The one we're commenting on"
- BoorishBears 3mo ago> The LWN content-management system contains over 750,000 items (articles, comments, security alerts, etc) dating back to the adoption of the "new" site code in 2002. We still have, in our archives, everything we did in the over four years we operated prior to the change as well. In addition, the mailing-list archives contain many hundreds of thousands of emails. Does that sound like your typical self-hosted blog?
- simoncion 3mo ago> Does that sound like your typical self-hosted blog? When compared to > They're most useful for getting information from the cloud hosted sites that hoarde most of humanity's output today like Youtube and Reddit. yes, absolutely.
- gamesieve 3mo agoThe Bright Data mentioned in the article, as well as other similarly malicious but even harder to identify parties, most certainly do fire up residential proxies, no matter what the site, no matter how useless or duplicate the data which they're trying to get. Not at first - they start by trying to get your content from cheap data center connections - but as soon as some kind of bot-mitigation appears, they move to residential proxies to try and evade that, with a first tier coming from "global south" residential proxies, and then scaling up to (presumably more expensive / less widely available) proxies from the USA (I've seen some from Europe, but very few in relative terms). Each tier also appears to have the option to run JavaScript.
- thomasahle 3mo agoTIL: > Many providers build their proxy pools by partnering with device owners who agree to share their bandwidth, while others use embedded SDKs in free apps or VPNs. WTF. That's just botnets. Source: https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2026/evading-residential-proxy-networks-protecting-your-devices-from-becoming-a-tool-for-criminals https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2026/evading-re...
- jolmg 3mo agoMmm... your quote (IDK where it's from) mentions them having consent from device owners, but your FBI link cautions on how to avoid getting infected by malware. If they have consent, they're not really botnets. Botnets involve infecting devices without the owners knowing. With consent, it wouldn't be much different from e.g. open WiFis at restaurants and hotels, companies using a single ISP and single public IPv4 address for all their employees, and most VPN services.
- not-a-llm 3mo agoby consent they mean a dialog/EULA with careful wording was display and the user clicked ok.
- Barbing 3mo agoAnd even if you spent a minute explaining the proposition to a user off the street, it still wouldn't be fair unless you laid out the drawbacks. Which leads me to a question. There must be countless individuals all over the world who suddenly can't log into their Gmail or create any new accounts because a fraudster sent spam from their IP. I wonder: has anyone has tried to quantify that problem?
- jolmg 3mo ago> There must be countless individuals all over the world who suddenly can't log into their Gmail or create any new accounts because a fraudster sent spam from their IP. Places with open WiFi like hotels and restaurants would be having the same problem. People on CGNATs would be having the same problem. An IP doesn't correspond with a single user.
- TurdF3rguson 3mo agoI think they also have to operate in countries that don't mind shady things like this.
- inigyou 3mo agoResidential proxies aren't illegal in any country, within reason.
- TurdF3rguson 3mo agoThey're shady though. Open to civil litigation, certainly. No big player would touch this operating in US.
- inigyou 3mo agoGood thing we have small players who are still willing to innovate.
- solidasparagus 3mo agoThis is a super dishonest characterization. Running software on a bunch of machines, even machines in other peoples' homes has never been a crime. Folding@home isn't a crime (obviously). It's controlling those machines without consent via malware that is criminal. And if it is open and consensual in exchange for something a person wants, it is unreasonable to compare it to botnets.
- Hackbraten 3mo agoSoftware that implements residential proxy networks is always covert and never consensual. It doesn't matter if page 42 of the Terms and Condition "clearly states it." This does not constitute informed consent.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- zeratax 3mo agoof those millions of residential proxies i would be surprised if you could find a dozen people who knew this was happening on their devices
- inigyou 3mo agoAnd it's made necessary because another group of people thought that selling IP blocking services would be a good idea. One party sells walls, another party sells ladders. Well, one party gives away free walls if you agree to fill your castle with surveillance cameras you don't control.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]