It’s interesting that when Luminati, an Israeli company, does this, it’s fine.
When the Chinese do this? Very bad.
Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
111–120 of 230 posts
Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
#112Why are they leaving Bright Data (aka Illuminati aka Hola VPN) untouched? They are doing this exact scheme on an industrial scale.
[flagged]
Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
#113Why are they leaving Bright Data (aka Illuminati aka Hola VPN) untouched? They are doing this exact scheme on an industrial scale.
They have a robust KYC that appears to serve, at least in large part, as a way to stay off the shit list of companies with the resources to pursue recourse. Source: went through that process, ended up going a different route. The rep was refreshingly transparent about where they get the data, why the have the kyc process (aside from regulatory compliance). Ended up going with a different provider who has been cheaper…
I’ve certainly never been asked to do KYC with Luminati after using them for hundreds of terabytes over the years.
It’s not like I’m using some bigco email address or given them any other reason to skip KYC either.
Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
#114It’s interesting that when Luminati, an Israeli company, does this, it’s fine. When the Chinese do this? Very bad.
They are both bad. You are showing your own bias.
Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought of myself as proxying other people’s traffic by carrying my iPhone around. (For one thing, it’s my own phone that initiates all the activity- it monitors for Apple devices, the devices don’t reach out to my phone.) I can see how you could frame it that way, though. I just thought they might be referring to something else that I didn’t know about.
I remain skeptical. I can understand how one would might see it that way, but I think it’s stretching the word proxy too far. Devices on Apple’s Find My aren’t broadcasting anything like packets that get forwarded to a destination of their choosing. I would think that would be a necessity to call it “proxying”. They’re just broadcasting basic information about themselves into the void. The phones report back what the…
> aren’t broadcasting anything like packets that get forwarded to a destination of their choosing
Protocol insists the data only goes back to owner device or Apple server.
Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
#116I'll betcha Google uses a lot of residential proxies themselves to scrape data and don't want competitors doing it.
Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
#117Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
#118Residential proxies are the only way to crawl and scrape. It's ironic for this article to come from the biggest scraping company that ever existed!
If you crawl at 1Hz per crawled IP, no reasonable server would suffer from this. It's the few bad apples (impatient people who don't rate limit) who ruin the internet for both users and hosters alike. And then there's Google.
Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
#119The need for proxies in any legitimate context became obsolete with starlink being so widespread. Throw up a few terminals and you have about 500-2k cgnat IP addresses to do whatever you like.
2k IPs is not enough to do most enterprise scale scraping. Starlink's entire ASN doesn't seem to have enough V4 addresses to handle it even.
If they're CGNAT then unless Starlink actively provides assistance to block them it won't matter.
As someone who wants the internet to maintain as much anarchy as possible I think it would be nice to see a large ISP that actively rotated its customer IPv6 assignments on a tight schedule.
Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network
#120I'm surprised by the negative takes... Yes, proxies are good. Ones which you pay for and which are running legitimately, with the knowledge (and compensation) of those who run them. Malware in random apps running on your device without your knowledge is bad.
> Some users may knowingly install this software on their devices, lured by the promise of “monetizing” their spare bandwidth.
Sounds like they’re targeting networks even if the users are ok participating in, precisely what you’re saying is ok.
As for malware enrolling people into the network, it depends if the operator is doing it or if the malware is 3rd parties trying to get a portion of the cash flow. In the latter case the network would be the victim that’s double victimized by Google also attacking them.