Many are "compensated" (in the way of software they didn't pay for), so the real question is that of disclosure (in which case many software vendors check the box in the most minimal way possible by including it as fine print during the install)
No, the question is not just disclosure. People have their bandwidth stolen, and sometimes internet access revoked due to this kind of fraud and misuse - disclosure wouldn’t solve that
Getting rid of malware is good. A private for-profit company exercising its power over the Internet, not so much. We should have appropriate organizations for this.
The proxies is the reason why you get spam in your Google search result, spam in your Play store (by means of fake good reviews), basically spam in anything user generated.
It directly affects Google and you, I don’t see why they should not do this.
> These efforts to help keep the broader digital ecosystem safe supplement the protections we have to safeguard Android users on certified devices. We ensured Google Play Protect, Android’s built-in security protection, automatically warns users and removes applications known to incorporate IPIDEA SDKs, and blocks any future install attempts.
Nice to see Google Play Protect actually serving a purpose for once.
If I'm not mistaken, the plaintiffs in the US v Google antitrust litigation in the DC Circuit tried to argue that website operators are biased toward allowing Google to crawl and against allowing other search engines to do the same
The Court rejected this argument because the plaintiffs did not present any evidence to support it
For someone who does not follow the web's history, how would one produce direct evidence that the bias exists
Yup exactly. Google must be the only one allowed to scrape the web. Google can't have any other competition. Calling it in "user's best interest" is just like their other marketing cons: "play integrity for user's security" etc
Have you got any proof of Google scraping from residential proxies users don't know about, rather than from their clearly labelled AS? Otherwise you're mixing entirely different things into one claim.
Play Protect blocks malicious apps, not network traffic, so no, it obviously doesn't interfere with Google's apps.
AFAIK it also left SmartTube (an alternative YouTube client) alone until the developer got pwned and the app trojanized with this kind of SDK, and the clean versions are AFAIK again being left alone. No guarantee that it won't change in the future, of course, but so far they seem to not be abusing it.
Residential proxies are the only way to crawl and scrape. It's ironic for this article to come from the biggest scraping company that ever existed!
If you crawl at 1Hz per crawled IP, no reasonable server would suffer from this. It's the few bad apples (impatient people who don't rate limit) who ruin the internet for both users and hosters alike. And then there's Google.
My understanding is that routing through residential IPs is a part of the business of some VPN providers. I don't know how above board they are on this (as in notifying customers that this may happen, however buried in the usage agreement, or even allowing them to opt out).
But, my main point, is that the whole business is "on the up and up" vs some dark botnet.
> While operators of residential proxies often extol the privacy and freedom of expression benefits of residential proxies, Google Threat Intelligence Group’s (GTIG) research shows that these proxies are overwhelmingly misused by bad actors
They have a robust KYC that appears to serve, at least in large part, as a way to stay off the shit list of companies with the resources to pursue recourse.
Source: went through that process, ended up going a different route. The rep was refreshingly transparent about where they get the data, why the have the kyc process (aside from regulatory compliance).
Ended up going with a different provider who has been cheaper and very reliable, so no complaints.
Yeah, they make you do a Skype interview (or probably Zoom interview nowadays). You could call this KYC or collateral, depending on your view of the company. It does limit the nefariousness of their clientele but I doubt they do much, or any, monitoring of actual traffic after onboarding (not for compliance reasons, anyway).
I've had enough of companies saying "you're connecting from an AWS IP address, therefore you aren't allowed in, or must buy enterprise licensing". Reddit is an example which totally blocks all data to non-residential IP's.
I want exactly the same content visible no matter who you are or where you are connecting from, and a robust network of residential proxies is a stepping stone to achieving that.
If you look at the article, the network they disrupted pays software vendors per-download to sneakily turn their users into residential proxy endpoints. I'm sure that at least some of the time the user is technically agreeing to some wording buried in the ToS saying they consent to this, but it's certainly unethical. I wouldn't want to proxy traffic from random people through my home network, that's how you get legal threats from media companies or the police called to your house.
> that's how you get legal threats from media companies or the police called to your house.
Or residential proxies get so widespread that almost every house has a proxy in, and it becomes the new way the internet works - "for privacy, your data has been routed through someone else's connection at random".
I live in the UK and can't view a large portion of the internet without having to submit my ID to _every_ site serving anything deemed "not safe the for the children". I had a question about a new piercing and couldn't get info on it from Reddit because of that. I try using a VPN and they're blocked too. Luckily, I work at a copmany selling proxies so I've got free proxies whenever I want, but I shouldn't _need_ to use them.
I find it funny that companies like Reddit, who make their money entirely from content produced by users for free (which is also often sourced from other parts of the internet without permission), are so against their site being scraped that they have to objectively ruin the site for everyone using it. See the API changes and killing off of third party apps.
Obviously, it's mostly for advertising purposes, but they love to talk about the load scraping puts on their site, even suing AI companies and SerpApi for it. If it's truly that bad, just offer a free API for the scrapers to use - or even an API that works out just slightly cheaper than using proxies...
My ideal internet would look something like that, all content free and accessible to everyone.
> that they have to objectively ruin the site for everyone using it. See the API changes and killing off of third party apps.
Third party app users were a very small but vocal minority. The API changes didn't drop their traffic at all. In fact, it's only gone up since then.
The datacenter IP address blocks aren't just for scrapers, it's an anti-bot measure across the board. I don't spend much time on Reddit but even the few subreddits I visited were starting to become infiltrated by obvious bot accounts doing weird karma farming operations.
Even HN routinely gets AI posting bots. It's a common technique to generate upvote rings - Make the accounts post comments so they look real enough, have the bots randomly upvote things to hide activity, and then when someone buys upvotes you have a selection of the puppet accounts upvote the targeted story. Having a lot of IP addresses and generating fake activity is key to making this work, so there's a lot of incentive to do it.
Have you considered that it’s because a new industry popped up that decided it was okay to slurp up the entire internet, repackage it, and resell it? Surely that couldn’t be why sites are trying to keep non humans out.
> I want exactly the same content visible no matter who you are or where you are connecting from
The reason those IP addresses get blocked is not because of "who" is connecting, but "what"
Traffic from datacenter address ranges to sites like Reddit is almost entirely bots and scrapers. They can put a tremendous load on your site because many will try to run their queries as fast as they can with as many IPs as they can get.
Blocking these IP addresses catches a few false positives, but it's an easy step to make botting and scraping a little more expensive. Residential proxies aren't all that expensive, but now there's a little line item bill that comes with their request volume that makes them think twice.
> We need more residential proxies, not less
Great, you can always volunteer your home IP address as a start. There are services that will pay you a nominal amount for it, even.
There's a company that pays you to keep their box connected to your residential router. I assume it sells residential proxy services, maybe also DDoS services, I don't know. It's aptly named Absurd Computing.
That's already the case (irrespective of residential proxies) because content only serves as bait for someone to hand over personal information (during signup/login) and then engage with ads.
Proxies actually help with that by facilitating mass account registration and scraping of the content without wasting a human's time "engaging" with ads.
Amazon.com now only shows you a few reviews. To see the rest you must login. Social media websites have long gated the carrots behind a login. Anandtech just took their ball and went home by going offline.
Agreed. With things people paid for and using our wifi data to build their "positioning dbs" that you can't block or turn off on your phone, without "rooting" your own device.
Have you tried it? Every new account will be shadowbanned and if it's shared you often get blank page 429. None of this was true before the API shutdown.
Private VPS for personal VPN in Netherlands (digital ocean), then Hungary (some small local DC) — both are blocked from day one.
> You've been blocked by network security. To continue, log in to your Reddit account or use your developer token. If you think you've been blocked by mistake, file a ticket below and we'll look into it.
I have never interacted with a reddit employee who wasn't actively gaslighting me about the platform. Do you even use the site? I talked to a PM recently who genuinely thought the phone app was something people liked.
everything on Reddit is so locked down it’s useless. even if you do get to post something useful some basement dwelling mod will block it for an arcane interpretation of one of the subreddits 14 rules.
This blog post from the company that used promise "don't be evil", one that steals water for data centers from vilages and towns via shady deals, whose whole premise it stealing other people's stuff and claiming it as their own and locking them out and selling their data.. Who made them the arbiter of the internet? No one!!!
They just stole this and get on their high horse to tell people how to use internet? You can eff right off Google.
I still "run" a small ISP with a few thousand residential ips from my scraping days. The requirements are laughable and costs were negligible in the early 2000s.
I haven't looked at any court documents, but the WSJ article from Wednesday reported that "Last year, Google sued the anonymous operators of a network of more than 10 million internet-connected televisions, tablets and projectors, saying they had secretly pre-installed residential proxy software on them... an Ipidea spokeswoman acknowledged in an email that the company and its partners had engaged in “relatively aggressive market expansion strategies” and “conducted promotional activities in inappropriate venues (e.g., hacker forums)...”"
There was also a botnet, Kimwolf, that apparently leveraged an exploit to use the residential proxy service, so it may be related to Ipidea not shutting them down.
I'm actually a little shocked seeing that there was a WebOS variant of the residential proxying SDK endpoint. Does that mean there might be a bit more unchecked malware lurking behind the scenes in the LG ecosystem?
Personally I'm surprised they didn't have a Samsung option.
I keep my brand new LG C5 totally disconnected from the internet and use my Apple TV for movie watching. I’m not going to trust a company like LG to secure their devices.
The need for proxies in any legitimate context became obsolete with starlink being so widespread. Throw up a few terminals and you have about 500-2k cgnat IP addresses to do whatever you like.
The actual secret is to use IPv6 with varied source IPs in the same subnet, you get an insane number of IPs and 90% of anti-scraping software is not specialized enough to realize that any IP in a /64 is the same as a single IP in a /32 in IPv4.
I'm surprised by the negative takes...
Yes, proxies are good. Ones which you pay for and which are running legitimately, with the knowledge (and compensation) of those who run them.
Malware in random apps running on your device without your knowledge is bad.
> Malware in random apps running on your device without your knowledge is bad.
And ones that have all the indicators of compromise of Russia, Iran, DPRK, PRC, etc
Many are "compensated" (in the way of software they didn't pay for), so the real question is that of disclosure (in which case many software vendors check the box in the most minimal way possible by including it as fine print during the install)
No, the question is not just disclosure. People have their bandwidth stolen, and sometimes internet access revoked due to this kind of fraud and misuse - disclosure wouldn’t solve that
2 replies →
Getting rid of malware is good. A private for-profit company exercising its power over the Internet, not so much. We should have appropriate organizations for this.
The proxies is the reason why you get spam in your Google search result, spam in your Play store (by means of fake good reviews), basically spam in anything user generated.
It directly affects Google and you, I don’t see why they should not do this.
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Okay. You get right on that. In the meantime, would you rather they did nothing? What do you actually want, in concrete terms?
> These efforts to help keep the broader digital ecosystem safe supplement the protections we have to safeguard Android users on certified devices. We ensured Google Play Protect, Android’s built-in security protection, automatically warns users and removes applications known to incorporate IPIDEA SDKs, and blocks any future install attempts.
Nice to see Google Play Protect actually serving a purpose for once.
Yeah, it serves the purpose of blocking this kind of proxy traffic that isn't in Google's personal best interests.
Only Google is allowed to scrape the web.
"Only Google is allowed to scrape the web."
If I'm not mistaken, the plaintiffs in the US v Google antitrust litigation in the DC Circuit tried to argue that website operators are biased toward allowing Google to crawl and against allowing other search engines to do the same
The Court rejected this argument because the plaintiffs did not present any evidence to support it
For someone who does not follow the web's history, how would one produce direct evidence that the bias exists
This is demonstrably false by the success of many scrapers from AI companies.
1 reply →
Yup exactly. Google must be the only one allowed to scrape the web. Google can't have any other competition. Calling it in "user's best interest" is just like their other marketing cons: "play integrity for user's security" etc
Have you got any proof of Google scraping from residential proxies users don't know about, rather than from their clearly labelled AS? Otherwise you're mixing entirely different things into one claim.
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Does it also block unwanted traffic from Google apps or does it have a particular hatred for companies that interfere with Google's business model?
Play Protect blocks malicious apps, not network traffic, so no, it obviously doesn't interfere with Google's apps.
AFAIK it also left SmartTube (an alternative YouTube client) alone until the developer got pwned and the app trojanized with this kind of SDK, and the clean versions are AFAIK again being left alone. No guarantee that it won't change in the future, of course, but so far they seem to not be abusing it.
1 reply →
Residential proxies are the only way to crawl and scrape. It's ironic for this article to come from the biggest scraping company that ever existed!
If you crawl at 1Hz per crawled IP, no reasonable server would suffer from this. It's the few bad apples (impatient people who don't rate limit) who ruin the internet for both users and hosters alike. And then there's Google.
I'll betcha Google uses a lot of residential proxies themselves to scrape data and don't want competitors doing it.
My understanding is that routing through residential IPs is a part of the business of some VPN providers. I don't know how above board they are on this (as in notifying customers that this may happen, however buried in the usage agreement, or even allowing them to opt out).
But, my main point, is that the whole business is "on the up and up" vs some dark botnet.
Oxylabs sells proxies for scrapers, I suppose you can use the socks-proxy as a VPN, and they claim to use Honeygain.
Honeygain is a platform where people sell their residential internet connection and bandwidth to these companies for money.
For comparison Honeygain pays someone 10 cents per GB, and Oxylabs sells it for $8/GB.
That takes buying low and selling high to a whole new level
FTA
> While operators of residential proxies often extol the privacy and freedom of expression benefits of residential proxies, Google Threat Intelligence Group’s (GTIG) research shows that these proxies are overwhelmingly misused by bad actors
Google's definition of a "bad actor" is someone who wants to use Google without seeing the ads. Or Kagi. Or an AI other than Gemini.
so that only google and anthropic are allowed to scrape the web. No one else may have workarounds
Exactly. This is just google building a "moat" around their shady business.
100%
It’s interesting that when Luminati, an Israeli company, does this, it’s fine.
When the Chinese do this? Very bad.
They are both bad. You are showing your own bias.
Why are they leaving Bright Data (aka Illuminati aka Hola VPN) untouched? They are doing this exact scheme on an industrial scale.
They have a robust KYC that appears to serve, at least in large part, as a way to stay off the shit list of companies with the resources to pursue recourse.
Source: went through that process, ended up going a different route. The rep was refreshingly transparent about where they get the data, why the have the kyc process (aside from regulatory compliance).
Ended up going with a different provider who has been cheaper and very reliable, so no complaints.
I’ve certainly never been asked to do KYC with Luminati after using them for hundreds of terabytes over the years.
It’s not like I’m using some bigco email address or given them any other reason to skip KYC either.
Yeah, they make you do a Skype interview (or probably Zoom interview nowadays). You could call this KYC or collateral, depending on your view of the company. It does limit the nefariousness of their clientele but I doubt they do much, or any, monitoring of actual traffic after onboarding (not for compliance reasons, anyway).
Bright Data is based in Tel Aviv, so it’d be inherently antisemitic to not leave them untouched.
We need more residential proxies, not less.
I've had enough of companies saying "you're connecting from an AWS IP address, therefore you aren't allowed in, or must buy enterprise licensing". Reddit is an example which totally blocks all data to non-residential IP's.
I want exactly the same content visible no matter who you are or where you are connecting from, and a robust network of residential proxies is a stepping stone to achieving that.
If you look at the article, the network they disrupted pays software vendors per-download to sneakily turn their users into residential proxy endpoints. I'm sure that at least some of the time the user is technically agreeing to some wording buried in the ToS saying they consent to this, but it's certainly unethical. I wouldn't want to proxy traffic from random people through my home network, that's how you get legal threats from media companies or the police called to your house.
> that's how you get legal threats from media companies or the police called to your house.
Or residential proxies get so widespread that almost every house has a proxy in, and it becomes the new way the internet works - "for privacy, your data has been routed through someone else's connection at random".
3 replies →
They provide an SDK for mobile developers. Here is a video of how it works. [0] They don't even hide it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a9HLrwvUO4&t=15s
2 replies →
I live in the UK and can't view a large portion of the internet without having to submit my ID to _every_ site serving anything deemed "not safe the for the children". I had a question about a new piercing and couldn't get info on it from Reddit because of that. I try using a VPN and they're blocked too. Luckily, I work at a copmany selling proxies so I've got free proxies whenever I want, but I shouldn't _need_ to use them.
I find it funny that companies like Reddit, who make their money entirely from content produced by users for free (which is also often sourced from other parts of the internet without permission), are so against their site being scraped that they have to objectively ruin the site for everyone using it. See the API changes and killing off of third party apps.
Obviously, it's mostly for advertising purposes, but they love to talk about the load scraping puts on their site, even suing AI companies and SerpApi for it. If it's truly that bad, just offer a free API for the scrapers to use - or even an API that works out just slightly cheaper than using proxies...
My ideal internet would look something like that, all content free and accessible to everyone.
> that they have to objectively ruin the site for everyone using it. See the API changes and killing off of third party apps.
Third party app users were a very small but vocal minority. The API changes didn't drop their traffic at all. In fact, it's only gone up since then.
The datacenter IP address blocks aren't just for scrapers, it's an anti-bot measure across the board. I don't spend much time on Reddit but even the few subreddits I visited were starting to become infiltrated by obvious bot accounts doing weird karma farming operations.
Even HN routinely gets AI posting bots. It's a common technique to generate upvote rings - Make the accounts post comments so they look real enough, have the bots randomly upvote things to hide activity, and then when someone buys upvotes you have a selection of the puppet accounts upvote the targeted story. Having a lot of IP addresses and generating fake activity is key to making this work, so there's a lot of incentive to do it.
2 replies →
Have you considered that it’s because a new industry popped up that decided it was okay to slurp up the entire internet, repackage it, and resell it? Surely that couldn’t be why sites are trying to keep non humans out.
Fix your government.
1 reply →
> I want exactly the same content visible no matter who you are or where you are connecting from
The reason those IP addresses get blocked is not because of "who" is connecting, but "what"
Traffic from datacenter address ranges to sites like Reddit is almost entirely bots and scrapers. They can put a tremendous load on your site because many will try to run their queries as fast as they can with as many IPs as they can get.
Blocking these IP addresses catches a few false positives, but it's an easy step to make botting and scraping a little more expensive. Residential proxies aren't all that expensive, but now there's a little line item bill that comes with their request volume that makes them think twice.
> We need more residential proxies, not less
Great, you can always volunteer your home IP address as a start. There are services that will pay you a nominal amount for it, even.
You can run one, something like ByteLixir, Traffmonetizer, Honeygain, Pawns, there are lots more, just google "share my internet for money"
What will you be proxying? Nobody knows! I haven't had the police at my house yet.
Seems a great way to say "fuck you" to companies that block IP addresses.
You may see a few more CAPTCHAs. If you have a dynamic IP address, not many.
How much can you make if you run all of them at the same time?
Doesn't the ISP detect them?
1 reply →
> I've had enough of companies saying "you're connecting from an AWS IP address
I run a honeypot and the amount of bot traffic coming from AWS is insane. It's like 80% before filtering, and it's 100% illegitimate.
There's a company that pays you to keep their box connected to your residential router. I assume it sells residential proxy services, maybe also DDoS services, I don't know. It's aptly named Absurd Computing.
The end game of that is no useful content being accessible without login, or needing some sort of other proof-of-legitimacy.
That's already the case (irrespective of residential proxies) because content only serves as bait for someone to hand over personal information (during signup/login) and then engage with ads.
Proxies actually help with that by facilitating mass account registration and scraping of the content without wasting a human's time "engaging" with ads.
Amazon.com now only shows you a few reviews. To see the rest you must login. Social media websites have long gated the carrots behind a login. Anandtech just took their ball and went home by going offline.
I'm reading reddit.com from a Tor node, they also have a .onion domain you could use.
Anyone know how to create a usable reddit account from the .onion domain?
2 replies →
Also, nevermind the tech companies building their own proxy networks, such as Find My or Amazon Sidewalk.
Agreed. With things people paid for and using our wifi data to build their "positioning dbs" that you can't block or turn off on your phone, without "rooting" your own device.
How is Find My a proxy network?
7 replies →
> Reddit is an example which totally blocks all data to non-residential IP's.
No, we don't.
Have you tried it? Every new account will be shadowbanned and if it's shared you often get blank page 429. None of this was true before the API shutdown.
3 replies →
Yes you do.
Private VPS for personal VPN in Netherlands (digital ocean), then Hungary (some small local DC) — both are blocked from day one.
> You've been blocked by network security. To continue, log in to your Reddit account or use your developer token. If you think you've been blocked by mistake, file a ticket below and we'll look into it.
2 replies →
Try browsing from any Mullvad vpn. You will be "blocked by network security"
3 replies →
I have never interacted with a reddit employee who wasn't actively gaslighting me about the platform. Do you even use the site? I talked to a PM recently who genuinely thought the phone app was something people liked.
2 replies →
everything on Reddit is so locked down it’s useless. even if you do get to post something useful some basement dwelling mod will block it for an arcane interpretation of one of the subreddits 14 rules.
Have you tried using it logged out on a vpn? It is impossible.
there are several times where I've had to disable PIA to access reddit's login page
[flagged]
This blog post from the company that used promise "don't be evil", one that steals water for data centers from vilages and towns via shady deals, whose whole premise it stealing other people's stuff and claiming it as their own and locking them out and selling their data.. Who made them the arbiter of the internet? No one!!!
They just stole this and get on their high horse to tell people how to use internet? You can eff right off Google.
I still "run" a small ISP with a few thousand residential ips from my scraping days. The requirements are laughable and costs were negligible in the early 2000s.
How do you stop mobile proxies operating through similar nefarious business models... CGNAT prevents you from easily identifying the exit nodes.
Working with network operators.
Network operators have zero reason to care, they get paid per the GB for the bandwidth.
Of course brightdata doesn't get touched.
All of this sounds legal, so on what basis did they get them shut down?
I haven't looked at any court documents, but the WSJ article from Wednesday reported that "Last year, Google sued the anonymous operators of a network of more than 10 million internet-connected televisions, tablets and projectors, saying they had secretly pre-installed residential proxy software on them... an Ipidea spokeswoman acknowledged in an email that the company and its partners had engaged in “relatively aggressive market expansion strategies” and “conducted promotional activities in inappropriate venues (e.g., hacker forums)...”"
There was also a botnet, Kimwolf, that apparently leveraged an exploit to use the residential proxy service, so it may be related to Ipidea not shutting them down.
Google does much worse in Google–branded devices and apps, like the wifi location data harvesting.
I'm actually a little shocked seeing that there was a WebOS variant of the residential proxying SDK endpoint. Does that mean there might be a bit more unchecked malware lurking behind the scenes in the LG ecosystem?
Personally I'm surprised they didn't have a Samsung option.
I keep my brand new LG C5 totally disconnected from the internet and use my Apple TV for movie watching. I’m not going to trust a company like LG to secure their devices.
> trust a company like LG to secure their devices.
They have an interest in securing their devices so they can sell proxy service themselves.
[dead]
nice to see in the comments how many people didnt even do a 30 second scan of the article before clicking `add comment`
The need for proxies in any legitimate context became obsolete with starlink being so widespread. Throw up a few terminals and you have about 500-2k cgnat IP addresses to do whatever you like.
2k IPs is not enough to do most enterprise scale scraping. Starlink's entire ASN doesn't seem to have enough V4 addresses to handle it even.
If they're CGNAT then unless Starlink actively provides assistance to block them it won't matter.
The actual secret is to use IPv6 with varied source IPs in the same subnet, you get an insane number of IPs and 90% of anti-scraping software is not specialized enough to realize that any IP in a /64 is the same as a single IP in a /32 in IPv4.