[em-bee]

why is running a proxy a bad thing? someone profiting off it could be bad maybe, but even that is good if it pays for my subscription.

but compare running tor nodes, and especially exit nodes. that surely would be a good thing, so at least if you think tor is good then running a proxy should be the same and it should be normalized.

doing it in secret without the user knowing is what's bad

[glitchc]

Indeed without my permission is implied. Without it, you have no idea what traffic is being routed and could be on the hook for something nasty like CSAM.

[Dylan16807]

Those are different issues. Permission doesn't mean you know what the content is, and lack of permission doesn't mean they're going to load anything weird or bad. Lack of permission implies worse ethics overall, but an operation focused on clicking ads will be loading relatively normal sites.

[inigyou]

Has that ever actually happened? Has anyone gone to court for downloading child porn that was actually through a residential proxy?

[iamnothere]

No. You would not be “on the hook” for this as they implied. They are fearmongering. Even if a statute could somehow be stretched to cover it, it would be a nightmare to prosecute something like this. The media would jump all over it.

[inigyou]

That's what I thought but I want to see their evidence that it happens.

[corbet]

https://lwn.net/Articles/1080822/ Do you really want to be a part of the scraper problem?

[MrDrMcCoy]

From the outside, I don't see the problem. The sites I visit, including LWN, never seem slow or have downtime as a result of this increase in traffic. I hear complaints from people hosting small sites, but they never seem to include concrete examples of downtime or measurably bad user experience. Why does it matter if the server load is high if everything stays functioning? Going from 5-20% to 60-80% load hardly seems like a catastrophe to me when the remaining headroom was not going to be used for anything else. Having your data that's public-enough to be scraped/cited/parodied/ridiculed included in a training set also doesn't seem like a problem. Are they struggling to pay bandwidth usage bills? Is there some actually-necessary intervention required to keep things running smooth, as opposed to panicking and taking unnecessary preventative action?

[40four]

Because your home IP address is going to be associated with criminal activity. So if that’s acceptable “payment” then I guess there’s no issue

[em-bee]

if proxies are legal, then i am not associated with what goes through my proxy. ISPs ate not associated with the activity that goes through them either.

and what about tor? should that be shut down too? or is there a legitimate reason for it to use residential proxies?

[inigyou]

What concrete harm does this cause?