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by jimmydorry 18 days ago
PoW barely affects the "residential proxies" aka. malware botfarms. The IPs are free for them and siphoning additional system resources for PoW doesn't matter at all for them. PoW only affects the large centralised scraping by the AI providers, which are not operating behind "residential proxies".
3 comments
anonym29 18 days ago
Most users of residential proxies just get a SOCKS5 address and routing, they don't actually get computational resources of the infected systems beyond that. The user of the proxies, the operator of what the article describes as a control node, would be the device responsible for the PoW.

Do you have any evidence that AI providers aren't using residential proxies?

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jimmydorry 10 days ago
Yes, the status quo right now is merely bandwidth... but if there was money to be made in providing a small amount of compute for the sake of solving the next gen captcha's, you can bet offerings will expand to meet it.

It's impossible to prove a negative. They could all be running secondary scrapers using malware proxies... but what we do have is plenty of evidence of them using fixed IP pools with appropriate user agents. I don't see any Chinese user agents... so two guesses who may be driving the bulk of these AI scraper requests via residential proxies.

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inigyou 18 days ago
Residential proxy bandwidth is extremely expensive, comparatively speaking. It can be up to $1 per GB but is more typically about $0.20 per GB.
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jimmydorry 10 days ago
Right, this is orthagonal to the discussion though. While the IPs and bandwidth might be free, managing the malware botnet and trying to keep a low profile so as to not attract attention of authorities, makes it a risky market to cater to.

Those rates are still cheaper than some datacentres charge in parts of the world.

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tgsovlerkhgsel 18 days ago
If you pop my machine and use it to route 100 MBit/s, I might not notice for months.

If I hear the fan spinning at night, you're probably getting caught immediately.

If you pop my mom's TV box and use it to route data within the connection's capabilities, you're getting away with it. If you consume a little bit of resources, still. If you consume enough to be useful for these kind of challenges, chances are her TV playback will start to stutter, which will be resolved by taking the compromised TV box, and removing the malware using advanced mechanical means called "a trash compactor".

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jimmydorry 10 days ago
If you're tech savvy enough to monitor your equipment, you're probably smart enough not to install "free VPNs" or "free stream pirate apps" to get pwned in the first place. You probably changed your router's default password and kept its firmware up to date, and don't give your TV internet access, right? That's more than Mom has done.
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gruez 17 days ago
>chances are her TV playback will start to stutter

video decoding is hardware accelerated, and there's probably enough excess compute to be able to do some sort of PoW challenge. Besides, unlike humans, bots aren't in a hurry, so they can spread out the work across a long time to minimize disruption.

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ambigious7777 17 days ago
the device acts as a proxy. i don't think any browser is running on the device, it is just forwarding packets.
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