[BoorishBears]

Thank god for residential proxies.

Highly unethical but the way the internet is going they're the last anti-hero of a somewhat open internet

[Bratmon]

By providing a way for corporate AI scrapers to operate with impunity and force the last few independently-run websites to move to the cloud?

[inigyou]

By providing a way for independent hackers to extract data from closed commercial websites.

[BoorishBears]

No one's firing up a residential proxy to read your blog, and the corporate AI scrapers have all the resources in the world even without residential proxies

They're most useful for getting information from the cloud hosted sites that hoarde most of humanity's output today like Youtube and Reddit.

[Bratmon]

I actually read a really interesting article from a relatively small blog explaining that they're receiving a massive amount of scraper traffic from residential proxies.

The article was called "The one we're commenting on"

[BoorishBears]

> The LWN content-management system contains over 750,000 items (articles, comments, security alerts, etc) dating back to the adoption of the "new" site code in 2002. We still have, in our archives, everything we did in the over four years we operated prior to the change as well. In addition, the mailing-list archives contain many hundreds of thousands of emails.

Does that sound like your typical self-hosted blog?

[simoncion]

> Does that sound like your typical self-hosted blog?

When compared to

> They're most useful for getting information from the cloud hosted sites that hoarde most of humanity's output today like Youtube and Reddit.

yes, absolutely.

[gamesieve]

The Bright Data mentioned in the article, as well as other similarly malicious but even harder to identify parties, most certainly do fire up residential proxies, no matter what the site, no matter how useless or duplicate the data which they're trying to get. Not at first - they start by trying to get your content from cheap data center connections - but as soon as some kind of bot-mitigation appears, they move to residential proxies to try and evade that, with a first tier coming from "global south" residential proxies, and then scaling up to (presumably more expensive / less widely available) proxies from the USA (I've seen some from Europe, but very few in relative terms). Each tier also appears to have the option to run JavaScript.

[pocksuppet]

Residential proxies are cheapest in the USA, due to a large supply.

[zuzululu]

i know a few very large startups that used it to fake their way into an exit

unethical yes but really raises the question as to what we see is real or not

[morkalork]

Money is real. DAU that don't pay subscriptions, or don't lead to paid conversions on hosted ads, are worthless.

[BoorishBears]

"Raises the question of what we see is real"

No they really don't, dishonest founders do that.

You're one with the lower case shibboleth so I have no doubt you surround yourself with dishonest founders, but faking users is pretty damn low on the usecases for residential proxies.

I said they're unethical because they tend to be hidden in innocuous seeming apps or sprung on unwitting individuals via clickwraps on their smart devices.

[zuzululu]

ive seen unscrupulous founders fake traction during diligence, which is my day job

but ive never seen one raise $4.5m for an ai agent startup built around pulling fresh web data, then openly cheer the unethical proxy infrastructure used to evade consent and blocks

then inventing a fantasy about who i associate with instead of answering that conflict is an unusually loud form of projection