Comment by miki123211
2 days ago
They're funding criminal organizations in the same way you're funding one if you get your hair cut at a hair salon which works as a front for money laundering.
That is, mostly unknowingly, perhaps suspecting what's going on, but politely trying to ignore it for their own convenience.
A hair salon is a legitimate business. "Residential proxies" have very little legitimate use, and are sourced by unethical means, so it's not a fair comparison.
>"Residential proxies" have very little legitimate use
You have to be joking. Having seen a list of biggest Luminati contracts, legitimate use makes up probably well over 90% of traffic via these services.
It’s companies like Expedia and OpenAI, not Nigerian princes.
Yeah sure, fraud happens. Those customers aren’t even lucrative because posting scam ads on Craigslist or wherever does not use much bandwidth. Criminals also use Google search.
And why is OpenAI using residential proxies instead of their own or some datacenter address space? Are they not using the proxies to steal data from unwilling website operators? I would count that as an illegitimate use. If they can't operate openly and have to bypass restrictions, they are doing something shady.
How would OpenAI routing requests through an Aisuru-compromised IoT botnet member be "legitimate"?
Besides the small matter of the victim in the arrangement, the entire reason OpenAI does it is ban evasion, which is not legitimate.
Watching netflix is plenty legitimate in my book.
Netflix execs trying to restrict account sharing and implementing region locks wouldn't agree with that ;)
I think it is a valid reason to use residential proxies as an individual (because I think that these region locks and other restrictions are bs), but if a company does that to bypass crawling restrictions - it is wrong.