A compromised device inside the White House network could presumably be doing something _much_ worse than participating in a DDOS against random websites.

Indeed. I recently set up a bot on my local machine that I can interact with via Telegram. I gave it the ability to retrieve the contents of a URL via Playwright (with modifications). Basic things like getting the Readability view and getting the site as Markdown with links.

I was essentially mimicking the feature OpenAI etc offer where it can do a web search for you and get you the answer you seek. I just didn't want to pay a company for that feature.

It's not autonomous. It only acts when I tell it to. The actual search is via the Kagi API, but the URL contents is via Playwright. I also ensured it can't do lots of requests at a time. There's a mandatory (random) sleep of between 1 and 5 seconds between two requests.

In less than a week, I've been flagged. When I do a Google search (as a human), I have to prove I'm human. Many sites have simply blocked me - I can't buy stuff from various vendors[1], I cannot access several news sites, etc.

The thing is, I didn't really access that many sites with the bot! At most it's the equivalent of someone mildly addicted to the web. Yet they caught me quickly.

Obviously, I disabled the bot's capability to get site content. I wonder how long my IP will be in the blacklist.

I know some people will say "Good riddance" to the outcome and to what I did. I'd love to have a real, serious discussion on whether what I did was immoral. But whatever your thoughts on the matter, do ponder over the fact that the system has made it hard for average Joes like you and me to have this "feature", but if you pay a giant tech company a monthly fee, you can have it.

[1] Thankfully, Amazon didn't block me. In the past I'd avoid them, but now I'm in the dilemma where I don't want to buy stuff from sites that make it difficult for me to buy stuff from them!

2) They're clearly talking from the perspective of the user and network admin. A residential proxy virus is in fact quite benign for both.

3) No matter what, DoS is quite a low priority in terms of security. And it's not even really DDoS, you'll know a real DDoS when you're on the receiving end.

What are you doing to make this true?

I'm a screen reader user (which is as "weird and unusual" as it gets when fingerprinting mechanisms are concerned), and I am not really noticing much difference versus 2022 or so. Sure, there's little bits of anubis here or there, and a few sites (which I know for a fact are experiencing targeted DDoS attacks unrelated to AI scraping) having annoying Cloudflare verification screens, but that's about it.

My setup (other than the screen reader) is as vanilla as it gets. Safari, AdGuard for Ad blocking, no VPN except work VPN when necessary, no PiHole, no settings changed. If you're using something more esoteric, maybe try going mainstream and see if that improves your experience.

While your server handles that, what does your CPU do with the other 99% of available cycles?

I run https://bunnystomp.com on an Always Free VM from a major cloud provider. It handles 1,930 req/s at 33 ms latency with no tuning/optimization. It's literally just python behind cloudflare.

It should be a balancing act though, somewhere between what you said and my first sentence.

Rate limiting, or additional layers of input sanitisation for IP addresses known to have been malicious in the past.

It's unfortunate that good users will have to endure some difficulties because of bad users on the same network, but if security is the priority, then measures must be taken, you shouldn't just leave to door open to potentially known bad users / traffic.

IPv4 is a shared resource, but some ranges have worse reputations than others, and all are owned by organisations that have the ability to monitor and filter for malicious traffic. It gets into a fraught discussion about censorship, but it is possible for network owners to monitor for, and block / restrict traffic detected as 'bad'. It's just a matter of cost and scale, and those that put the effort in should have their users rewarded with fewer 'trust-issues' roadblocks.

https://support.frameo.com/hc/en-us/articles/23433637149842-...

Multiple times I caught unexpected traffic and was able to block it piecewise including a lightbulb(!) that was sending mb packets of god knows what home.

If they were ethernet based I reckon some smart VLAN capable switches would be nice even at home to keep them out of each others business.

I moved home a few years ago and now I'm back with the ISP router and do often feel a little in the dark about what my network is doing!

https://openwrt.org/

I had to recently inform my sister and didn't realize just how unaware the general public was of how utterly terrible things have gotten, like with LG TVs or the Meta Quest's access to your family.

When someone tells you "I have nothing to hide, I don't care", let them know that companies like LG make 5x as much money selling your data as selling $1000 TVs, so clearly your data is valuable and you shouldn't be giving it away for free. That's a message normal people can understand.

+ Sketchy Apps

+ Malware

+ Weird Android Variants

It's no longer a botnet, it's a "residential proxy" and you are doing clean business.

There is another word for a C2 channel being created within a device you own without your knowledge, and that word is malware. And it's most often used for botnets, which is the least malicious thing they are used for.

This didn't particularly surprise me (unfortunately). Your average phone is loaded with spyware from "legit" American companies but plenty of them come with carrier spyware, adware or shady apps that auto install. Most people seem to be apathetic about this or have given up so the Chinese botnet device (that reliably delivers lots of illegal media) is just making the same kind of trade they're already making. Look at all the shit about smart TVs in the news recently that people have hardly stopped buying, those don't even come with free pirate NFL games. They've been told they were being spied on for years already and their response was that you're a tin foil hatter for bringing it up, they have nothing to hide or they don't care.

You almost can't blame them though. Even you put a lot of effort into protecting yourself from this stuff you're exposed anyway. Why should they do without their free streaming services when government agencies and companies that they don't even have a direct relationship with lose all their PII a dozen times a year and the DMV legally sells a dossier on them for 1.5cents?

It'd be an instant "yes" from everyone making under 80k a year and for many making more.

Spur.us on purchasable IPs from a site that sells microtargeted IPs and not large IP pool packages:

https://cleanshot.com/share/0Dn5Bh9B

https://cleanshot.com/share/jRGrjxK8

Unlimited traffic, under a dollar a pop, what good is a service when it returns the same info as my own ip? It's just hucksters all the way down. The result is that whoever takes some time or already has the skills to appear inconspicuous to the arbitrary standards set by a few almost-literal gatekeepers will have fewer problems running automations compared to the average user who are liable to run into what's turning into a general enshittification of the internet writ large. It's not, after all, illegal to use a residential, or any, proxy service on its own. Although my guess is that the anti-bot measures are going to exacerbate the already flagging economy if it haven't already, it's always going to be the boogeyman du jour who gets the blame, and not the overzealous and mindless policing and gatekeeping who of course would never admit to being part of the problem, even though they are absolutely part of the problem.

In my experience, out of the two, iphunter.info has the more comprehensive database, I think the owner/operator frequents HN.

I recommend folks just check our website: https://ipinfo.io/my and if they have questions, ask me, I will try to get to the bottom of this.

What we do is connect to residential proxy IP address and verify them before putting them in our database.

But DNS and traffic monitoring is a good practice. If you see gigabytes of traffic without explanation, you have more serious concerns than resproxy.

is that actually a thing that was caught before?

Your CTO or CEO was saying they always trust geofeed and an ISP with wrong info just needs to update their geofeed, then he said you actually never trust geofeeds, but don't worry just update the geofeed and it'll be trusted, then when pointed out the correct information was already in the geofeed but not on IPinfo, he said IPinfo uses data from the geofeed so it's correct... Something like that, it made no sense but it made it clear you guys don't know what your product does.

I'm no expert but even I've read that "Works at the White House" is bigger than the executive residence and oval office, including the West Wing and the big office building that's directly connected to it by basement walkways. The National Security Council maintains 24-hour watch operations in the Situation Room (which is more a 'complex' than 'room'), while regional desk officers routinely work late evenings to overlap with morning business hours in Europe and Asia.

I asked Gemini if my recollection was correct and got: "The EOP network (managed by the EOP Office of Administration in coordination with Presidential Information Technology Community entities like the White House Communications Agency) operates as a single campus enterprise network. Its high-speed backbone links the West Wing, the EEOB, the East Wing, and nearby administrative facilities such as the New Executive Office Building (NEOB) on 17th Street."

So, definitely an issue that there's a device with some rogue malware installed but the total workforce across all shifts at the White House Complex is roughly between 2,500 and 4,000.

If it's someone who lives there, it would be different than a shift worker.

Despite the constant negative press covfefe

Such things are threats to humanity imho. They can get us back to the times we couldn't exploit the internet to run a society.

Firewall it from your local network if you want to - it'll still work - they're not after that.

Ethically, if someone just wants to play a free game and doesn't care about it, is it okay? How knowledgable does a user have to be in order to have informed consent?

Technically correct statement though