Comment by Bratmon
2 months 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.
And 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.
This 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.
Software 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.
of those millions of residential proxies i would be surprised if you could find a dozen people who knew this was happening on their devices
I think they also have to operate in countries that don't mind shady things like this.
Residential proxies aren't illegal in any country, within reason.
They're shady though. Open to civil litigation, certainly. No big player would touch this operating in US.
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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
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?
By providing a way for independent hackers to extract data from closed commercial websites.
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.
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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
Money is real. DAU that don't pay subscriptions, or don't lead to paid conversions on hosted ads, are worthless.
"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.
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TIL:
> 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-re...
Mmm... 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.
by consent they mean a dialog/EULA with careful wording was display and the user clicked ok.
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Yeah so it turns out the illegal part of a virus-based botnet was the virus, not the botnet.