https://lieu.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/what-can-we-...
> Residential proxy services sell access to everyday devices, letting customers send traffic through them so it appears to come from that device's network.
While they have grown a bit too much, they are a natural response to the absurd amount of effort every website is pouring into anti-scraping tech.
But getting around it sure is annoying, sometimes I get flagged IP's from Comcast and can't visit sites like costco.com despite not doing any questionable stuff on my network.
Maybe some people do not want to provide their entire website as free training material to [insert LLM lab here]?
Aren't they almost always run unknowingly, by people tricked into running them?
Help me understand. As far as I'm aware, these residential proxies are almost always malware.
I buy and use residential proxies, though.
This also puts some of the troubling reports that politicians were bringing phones into SCIFs into context…
I mean politicians are so addicted to twitter the nsa makes special phones…
Many questionable TV streaming boxes pretend to deliver you video, but in reality they are also piggy backing on your personal ISP to power those companies.
+ Sketchy Apps
+ Malware
+ Weird Android Variants
Such as ignoring web scraping countermeasures, and DDoS.
Person buys a product, or downloads some software - that unknowing to them, was reaching out to a central server elsewhere to establish a network tunnel. And over that tunnel, the other server routes traffic onto that person's home network. Which can then of course go onto the internet, and it appears like the traffic originated from their home internet connection.
Other people rent access to this network. The goal being, you have surreptitious access to appear as any one of tens of thousands of home network IP addresses on the public internet. Bad guys can use this to rotate through many different IP addresses when their access gets blocked because of malicious (or benign but unwanted) behavior on the internet. Residential IP addresses are more 'valuable' because they don't have the negative connotation that datacentre and commercial IPs can have, and they can be spread geographically or across many ISPs.
A very common way for people being a part of these residential proxy networks is by buying dodgy streaming boxes, and also installing shady apps on TV app marketplaces.
bronco21016•37m ago
thehodge•35m ago
JTbane•14m ago