Comment by walrus01
8 hours ago
This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg.
You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes. its to get at tgeir IP, it has nothing to do with space, cooling, etc.
Which hyperscalers are doing that? I've heard of one startup trying this, XFRA, currently in early pilot phases. But I'd be pretty surprised to hear that AWS or Google are paying people to host GPU clusters in their home.
No that makes no sense. They only need a tiny device to act as a proxy. It makes no sense to colocate the expensive GPUs
Yeah, the usual approach here is to offer a free VPN service, and then piggyback traffic over the user’s internet provider. Much, much more scalable and cheaper than offering to put GPUs at a user’s home.
It makes sense when someone else is paying for the power. The AI capabilities of mobile cpus is for pushing cloud based AI to your device. You pay the power bill while retaining the same lack of privacy as cloud hosted AI.
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>also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes
Source? There's definitely shady people paying people to host proxies, but hyperscalers doing it would be surprising.
My understanding of it so far is that it is at most, 50 or 100 houses as a test... It's a startup that wants to make it wide scale but hasn't got there yet.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=span+resi...
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Yep.
And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"
Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.
And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
Residential proxies are achieved in many, many ways. The most common is simply people installing software and leaving some checkbox checked, or agreeing to it unknowingly. In the same way that smart TV downloadable apps and games tend to include them.
Wait, so I can have free movies and subvert the adtech business model at the same time? What's the catch?
Anyone can buy traffic on the proxy, not just click fraud, but cc fraud et al as well. Caveat emptor, it’s really not worth it compared to setting up a 3 USD per month Hetzner proxy box yourself, if you’re looking to pirate movies.
For some more context: We run a business based on data scraping and metered residential proxies have never been cheaper. Countries that used to be 10 USD/GB just ten years ago are down to 1 USD.
Exactly my thought. For, say, $50/month I can get a second ISP to my house, host the proxy (and only that) on that link, and enjoy free movies. It is cheaper than having 2-3 streaming service subscriptions.
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ehh, subvert is a stretch. But yes, you too can be a minor accessory to scams run by thieves to rob advertisers, with enriching the world's largest ad company as a side-effect. Not exactly a Robin Hood situation given that tons of the advertisers being robbed are just normal small developers trying to get their apps out there.
These residential proxies are also used by scrapers. From scraping stores to scalp merchandise, to scrapers of data for AI training.
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Grey? There's multiple conferences that "ethically sourced" proxy providers feature at now (ex: extractsummit.io)
Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.