There was a recent DND episode about Android boxes sold on Amazon that came with access to pirates streaming services out of the box. Not surprisingly they were loaded with aggressive local network scanners for exfiltration among other things like being a botnet node. Despite this being proven and shown to people a lot of them just didn't care, many of the reviews just suggested turning it off when you wanted to do online banking or something!

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?

The industry is dirty but people would ABSOLUTELY host a residential proxy in exchange for free tv/movies.

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

Since when is data collection uniformly bad? In an age where variable pricing is the norm for services and products all over the place, and Google is no longer an effective search engine even if one turns on the "verbatim" option and turns off the AI features, and most people are in a position where it's wise to be frugal thanks to the runaway debt and nonsensical application of tariffs have made everything from ground beef to sporting event tickets sometimes double in price compared to just a few years ago, but exactly how much more is entirely opaque. Also, no service is even particularly good at detecting proxies unless they are actually part of some large oversold ip pool, which isn't even close to the actual case in the wild.

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.