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Strange the HolaVPN e.g. Brightdata is not mentioned. They've been using user hosts for those purposes for decades, and also selling proxies en masse. Fun fact they don't have any servers for the VPN. All the VPN traffic is routed through ... other users!
> I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner. I imagine that e.g. Youtube would be happy to agree with this. Not that it would turn them against AI generally.
Why jump to that conclusion?
If a scraper clearly advertises itself, follows robots.txt, and has reasonable backoff, it's not abusive. You can easily block such a scraper, but then you're encouraging stealth scrapers because they're still getting your data.
I'd block the scrapers that try to hide and waste compute, but deliberately allow those that don't. And maybe provide a sitemap and API (which besides being easier to scrape, can be faster to handle).
Strange the HolaVPN e.g. Brightdata is not mentioned. They've been using user hosts for those purposes for decades, and also selling proxies en masse. Fun fact they don't have any servers for the VPN. All the VPN traffic is routed through ... other users!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, as far as patterns go, dependency injection is also quite bad.
Elaborate on this please. It seems a great boon in having pushed the OO world towards more functional principles, but I'm willing to hear dissent.
My personal beef is that most of the time it acts like hidden global dependencies, and the configuration of those dependencies, along with their lifetimes, becomes harder to understand by not being traceable in the source code.
> So if you as an app developer include such a 3rd party SDK in your app to make some money — you are part of the problem and I think you should be held responsible for delivering malware to your users, making them botnet members. I suspect that this goes for many different SDKs. Personally, I am really, really sick of hearing "That's a solved problem!", whenever I mention that I tend to "roll my own," as opposed to…
But nobody seems to do this diligence. It’s just “we are in a rush. we need X. dependency does X. let’s use X.” and that’s it!
This is nasty in other ways too. What happens when someone uses these B2P residential proxies to commit crimes that get traced back to you? Anything incorporating anything like this is malware.
In most cases they are used for conducting real financial crimes, but the police investigators are also aware that there is a very low chance that sophisticated fraud is committed directly from a residential IP address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elaborate on this please. It seems a great boon in having pushed the OO world towards more functional principles, but I'm willing to hear dissent.
How is dependency injection more functional? My personal beef is that most of the time it acts like hidden global dependencies, and the configuration of those dependencies, along with their lifetimes, becomes harder to understand by not being traceable in the source code.
Residential IP proxies have some weaknesses. One is that they ofter change IP addresses during a single web session. Second, if IP come from the same proxies provider, they are often concentrated within a sing ASN, making them easier to detect. We are working on an open‑source fraud prevention platform [1], and detecting fake users coming from residential proxies is one of its use cases. [1] https://www.github.com/ti…
Trying to understand your product, where is it intended to sit in a network? Is it a standalone tool that you use to identify these IPs and feed into something else for blockage or is it intended to be integrated into your existing site or is it supposed to proxy all your web traffic? The reason I ask is it has fairly heavyweight install requirements and Apache and PHP are kind of old school at this point, especially for new projects and companies. It's not what they would commonly be using for their site.