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No, your paranoia-outage is the true "national security threat" - a threat to freedom. Stop fanning the flames and calling for more government intervention.
After decades of watching people use these three words, I've come to the conclusion that 'national security threat' is a right-wing dog-whistle for 'we have no actual proof, but we dislike it, so let's ban it'. They are basically 'won't someone please think of the children?', but with higher stakes.
If so many sites and services didn't go out of there way to block or flag VPN users as suspicious then I would have no need to use residential / mobile proxies.
Separately, would you let your home/personal connection be used as a residential proxy?
Personally, I would not, except if it was for a friend / family member, but I would still ask them, pointedly, why my internet connection is required rather than their own.
Besides, mobile proxies exist which work differently. All you need is a mobile data plan that you run a proxy server on. It allows for easy IP rotation and since it’s a pool shared with other customers you cannot easily block it. This is because of things like CGNAT.
IP rotation is easy because reconnecting to the network gives you a new IP address.
Static residential proxies also are a thing, even if they are less effective sometimes.
No, your paranoia-outage is the true "national security threat" - a threat to freedom. Stop fanning the flames and calling for more government intervention.
After decades of watching people use these three words, I've come to the conclusion that 'national security threat' is a right-wing dog-whistle for 'we have no actual proof, but we dislike it, so let's ban it'. They are basically 'won't someone please think of the children?', but with higher stakes.
If someone with informed consent wants to run a residential proxy, that's their right and unlikely to be a national-security problem. When it comes to involunary proxies, those are really just one of many possible symptoms stemming from a real problem: Shitty security. (Edit: And shitty contract/privacy laws.) Shitty security is tolerated by our markets, is is protected from fixes due to copyright law, and it is even…
> We will gain far more from fundamental quality-improvements than we will from whack-a-mole-ing on this symptom.
100%, but I feel like that's both true and rarely executed upon in most governments for most topics.
From a previous HN discussion, these are known DNS addresses to block in regards to Smart TVs being used a residential proxies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48422993 Specific Domains: proxyjs.brdtnet.com proxyjs.luminatinet.com proxyjs.bright-sdk.com clientsdk.bright-sdk.com clientsdk.brdtnet.com Wildcard domains: *.brdtnet.com *.luminatinet.com *.luminati.io Source: https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/t…
This is just the largest residential proxy provider BrightData(previously Luminati that used a free VPN to source residential bandwidth) The overall residential proxy market is too large and often undetected by intelligence tools. BrightData is actually much more compliant and malicious actors wouldn't be allowed access. They have an extensive KYC and use-case vetting process.
Can’t wait to have our very own Roskomnadzor MITMing everything and national security laws mandating Kazakhstan style TLS interception on every single device.
Just a small over the air update via your friendly neighbourhood corporations Microsoft, Apple and Google.
You know. To keep you safe.
Residential proxies are necessary to access services that try to ban VPNs without compromising anonymity. If they’re banned, it’s easier for websites to require information that can be used to track you (IP address), since most people don’t use VPNs they won’t care. More importantly, a residential proxy can be mutual. If a group of people agree to forward traffic to each others’ IP, how is it not their business? It o…
I think the fact that they're laymen means that there's still a pocket of non-consensuality. Taking advantage of someone's ignorance of potential consequences is as bad as malware in my opinion. If you're outlining all the potential bad outcomes before signing up a 'mark', then that's slightly more OK. Myself being "not a layman" would definitely not allow anonymous usage of Internet that's tied to my home/residence/…
Sure, the service should be upfront, although most laymen probably won't read. But if people had to really understand consequences before they accepted anything, most would miss out on most overall mutual offers. Importantly, the expected consequences are low (as long as the service isn't greedy), and the ratio of tech people agreeing would suggest that if most laymen did understand they would still.