5 ms·

Thank 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 ago
i 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 ago
  Money 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 ago
    ive 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 ago
        https://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 ago
        I'm...not old enough to read a Business Insider article about being annoyed by lowercase letters.
        BoorishBears 3mo ago
        I think most young people (with friends to text) have already encountered this.
        llbbdd 3mo ago
        Most young people are familiar with lowercase sentences and have been for a while, yes
        Chu4eeno 3mo ago
        aseigo was the OG, «aseigo: the triumphs and travails of a shift-key-challenged KDE hacker» was his blog byline a couple of decades ago.
      - deleted 3mo ago
Bratmon 3mo ago
By 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 ago
  No 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    The 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.

zuzululu 3mo ago

i 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 ago
Money 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 ago
  ive 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 ago
        https://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 ago
        I'm...not old enough to read a Business Insider article about being annoyed by lowercase letters.
        BoorishBears 3mo ago
        I think most young people (with friends to text) have already encountered this.
        llbbdd 3mo ago
        Most young people are familiar with lowercase sentences and have been for a while, yes
        Chu4eeno 3mo ago
        aseigo was the OG, «aseigo: the triumphs and travails of a shift-key-challenged KDE hacker» was his blog byline a couple of decades ago.
    - deleted 3mo ago

Bratmon 3mo ago

By 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 ago
No 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  The 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.