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points by stcg 3 days ago | 0 comments

"Residential proxies" are just botnets: it's mass-spread software under direct central control without the knowledge of the owners of the machines.

[–] port11 3 days ago

Thanks for clarifying the language. I don’t understand why we softened ‘botnet’, it’s much clearer and powerful.

[–] cryptonym 3 days ago

You resell a game, bundling a botnet proxy inside, and make it freemium: free if you accept T&C with a service allowing using your device connection for research purposes (or whatever wording could be even more confusing), or pay $20.

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

[–] port11 3 days ago

I didn’t know this was a thing. Yikes. I’m gonna freak out now and find a way to prevent that in our home network.

And I’d argue that’s not clean business, the user doesn’t know what their connection is being used for :)

[–] anon7000 2 days ago

More than half of LG smart Tv apps seem to have residential proxies: https://spur.us/blog/smart-tv-apps-residential-proxy-sdks

Definitely pretty crazy. This is probably have they’re in the White House, all it takes is a random smart device to install a seemingly benign wallpaper app

[–] cryptonym 3 days ago

"User accepted T&C" is enough to get away with almost anything. It works very well for top IT companies. Upholding new business to higher standards would be unfair.

[–] BLKNSLVR 3 days ago

In my head this is Joe Pesci saying "the money is now laundered" in Lethal Weapon 2.

[–] weberer 3 days ago

Its to distinguish them from traffic that originates from someone spinning up a thousand VPS instances in a datacenter. Its very easy to block data center addresses, but hard to block residential addresses without impacting real customers.

[–] port11 2 days ago

Then it’s a residential botnet.

[–] oefrha 3 days ago

Trillion dollar AI companies use/used these to scrape the Internet. You don’t want to smear their good names do you?

[–] krunck 3 days ago

Maybe. Make sure you aren't attacking valid uses of proxies like Tor.

[–] Refreeze5224 2 days ago

No one is talking about the issue being proxies. The issue is that they are surreptitiously-created proxies, with the full extent of consent consisting of one sentence buried in a massive EULA that no can be expected to read, by design.

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.