361–370 of 422 posts
Residential Proxies are the most emblematic technology of our era- a group of people looked at something that used to be considered a crime (botnets) and realized that if they just did it openly, no one would ever punish them.
I think they also have to operate in countries that don't mind shady things like this.
Residential Proxies are the most emblematic technology of our era- a group of people looked at something that used to be considered a crime (botnets) and realized that if they just did it openly, no one would ever punish them.
TIL: > Many providers build their proxy pools by partnering with device owners who agree to share their bandwidth, while others use embedded SDKs in free apps or VPNs. WTF. That's just botnets. Source: https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2026/evading-re...
In theory, proof of work that is used to mine a cryptocurrency could be a solution. Bitcoin and others are already secured via massive pow computations. If we could shift that into browsers, no additional energy would be used and we could solve an issue that has been unsolved for too long: How to pay websites that provide useful information other than with ads. The question is which resources typical consumer hardwar…
Better skip the PoW part as it'll be wildly inefficient for most of the work done. Instead, exchange web traffic for actual $. Say, some kind of tokens that are easily turned back into hard cash through a 3rd party. Requesting a 100KB file? Okay, that'll be a $0.00002 token, please! (visitor's user agent provides it in a manner transparent to regular web users). Requesting a 3MB image? Okay, that'll be a $0.0005 toke…
> There are ways to tell the difference — the bots usually do not fetch images or CSS, for example — but, by the time that determination is made, the address in question will not be used again. Blocking the address at that point is just a waste of time. Maybe there's no point for the scanned server to block the address, but couldn't collective / shared block lists help with sites that may get scanned by the same addr…
How much does routing traffic though residential proxies cost?
Sorry, I understand scraping is a problem, but talking about open Internet while simultaneously complaining you can no longer discriminate datacenter IPs like you used to is hypocrisy. I use a datacenter-based IPv6 address because my local ISPs don't offer v6 connectivity and the Internet is already broken for me. And generally the entire idea of a "residential" IP address smells.
Noone complained we can't discriminate DC IPs, though to be fair some (imo bad) operators did just that. This is not even about preventing bots, which has perfectly legitimate usecases (eg. Internet Archive). This is about filtering out bad bots/actors who have no respect for your resources and will drain all of it causing bad experience for everyone. But because they know they don't respect robots.txt or even simple…
Sorry, I understand scraping is a problem, but talking about open Internet while simultaneously complaining you can no longer discriminate datacenter IPs like you used to is hypocrisy. I use a datacenter-based IPv6 address because my local ISPs don't offer v6 connectivity and the Internet is already broken for me. And generally the entire idea of a "residential" IP address smells.
This is definitely an issue, where data centre addresses are, by default, second class citizens or even persona non grata. The problem is that this reputation has been, unfortunately, well-earned. There's no easy answer here. The ephemerality and pseudonymity of VPS address usage screams untrustworthy, and the only way to reign that in is better identification of who is using the VPS/address or significantly more res…
>There are ways to tell the difference — the bots usually do not fetch images or CSS, for example — but, by the time that determination is made, the address in question will not be used again. Blocking the address at that point is just a waste of time. I don't get it. Don't we keep blacklists of this stuff? And if they hammer thousands of requests per site per second and never reuse an IP, they'd run out of addresses…
Blocking in ipv6 works roughly the same way as in ipv4, just that the scale is different. Instead of blocking something like a company's /24 or an ISP's /16 when they don't respond to abuse messages, you block the company's /48 or the ISP's /32. It'll vary per organisation how large a range they got exactly but you can see that in WHOIS. End users are no longer at a /32 (v4) but at /64 (v6), or some prosumers might h…
Anyone who has bigger than /48 is no longer an individual user. They could be an ISP set up solely for scraping, though that comes with some fees and requirements.
Ever since bots became a problem on the internet 10-20 years ago, it has seemed like the common-sense solution is some kind of micropayment. Pay $0.01 to view the page. When money is on the line, scrapers are likely to be more well-behaved, even if they do pay. The problem is, and has always been, the friction of payment. How do you pay $0.01? The credit card processors will tack on a $6 surcharge. We need a trusted…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I get kicked out of Epstein island because I refuse to **** a child, that doesn't make me a bad actor.
And then going there 1 million times under fake identities? Yeah, I'm sure that's not a bad actor.