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Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

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Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

#81

Post by direwolf20 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #66
direwolf20 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it also block unwanted traffic from Google apps or does it have a particular hatred for companies that interfere with Google's business model?

Play Protect blocks malicious apps, not network traffic, so no, it obviously doesn't interfere with Google's apps. AFAIK it also left SmartTube (an alternative YouTube client) alone until the developer got pwned and the app trojanized with this kind of SDK, and the clean versions are AFAIK again being left alone. No guarantee that it won't change in the future, of course, but so far they seem to not be abusing it.

Does malicious mean interfering with Google's business model, or does it include intrusive advertising?

Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

#82

Post by direwolf20 »

SOTGO wrote: post #24
direwolf20 wrote: post #16

All of this sounds legal, so on what basis did they get them shut down?

I haven't looked at any court documents, but the WSJ article from Wednesday reported that "Last year, Google sued the anonymous operators of a network of more than 10 million internet-connected televisions, tablets and projectors, saying they had secretly pre-installed residential proxy software on them... an Ipidea spokeswoman acknowledged in an email that the company and its partners had engaged in “relatively aggr…

Google does much worse in Google–branded devices and apps, like the wifi location data harvesting.

Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

#83

Post by kawsper »

whartung wrote: post #6

My understanding is that routing through residential IPs is a part of the business of some VPN providers. I don't know how above board they are on this (as in notifying customers that this may happen, however buried in the usage agreement, or even allowing them to opt out). But, my main point, is that the whole business is "on the up and up" vs some dark botnet.

Oxylabs sells proxies for scrapers, I suppose you can use the socks-proxy as a VPN, and they claim to use Honeygain.

Honeygain is a platform where people sell their residential internet connection and bandwidth to these companies for money.

For comparison Honeygain pays someone 10 cents per GB, and Oxylabs sells it for $8/GB.

Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

#84

Post by CodeMage »

progbits wrote: post #43

I'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.

Getting rid of malware is good. A private for-profit company exercising its power over the Internet, not so much. We should have appropriate organizations for this.

Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

#85

Post by supertrope »

yuliyp wrote: post #79
londons_explore wrote: post #9

We need more residential proxies, not less. I've had enough of companies saying "you're connecting from an AWS IP address, therefore you aren't allowed in, or must buy enterprise licensing". Reddit is an example which totally blocks all data to non-residential IP's. I want exactly the same content visible no matter who you are or where you are connecting from, and a robust network of residential proxies is a stepping…

The end game of that is no useful content being accessible without login, or needing some sort of other proof-of-legitimacy.

Amazon.com now only shows you a few reviews. To see the rest you must login. Social media websites have long gated the carrots behind a login. Anandtech just took their ball and went home by going offline.

Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

#87

Post by chatmasta »

JDye wrote: post #35
samsullivan wrote: post #7

The 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.

The actual secret is to use IPv6 with varied source IPs in the same subnet, you get an insane number of IPs and 90% of anti-scraping software is not specialized enough to realize that any IP in a /64 is the same as a single IP in a /32 in IPv4.

Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

#89

Post by throwoutway »

progbits wrote: post #43

I'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.

> Malware in random apps running on your device without your knowledge is bad.

And ones that have all the indicators of compromise of Russia, Iran, DPRK, PRC, etc

Re: Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

#90

Post by DANmode »

enneff wrote: post #65
direwolf20 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the literal sense. Your traffic is proxied through devices belonging to unwilling strangers.

By “your traffic” you mean device location reports? Or something else?

The data that powers the app tracking your devices, shown on your devices, yes.

(What else?)

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