Item — HN Reader

Grey market residential proxy service providers are one of the most common methods of implementing bot spam, social media manipulation and plenty of straight-out fraud.

There's all kinds of things that malicious actors want to do where they value coming from an ordinary (comcast, charter, centurylink, shaw cable, whatever) residential IP.

3 comments

You make a good point. I've reassessed and agree this is shady, and not a good pattern. And should be disabled/abolished.

I mean, some of us have legitimate business needs to get past cloudflares frankly somewhat bs gatekeeping business model, however

Sure, I do as well, I have my own VPN into my home office that lets me run traffic outbound through its default gateway while I'm somewhere else. But letting random third parties I don't know run traffic through my house is another thing entirely.

If it meant you got to run your traffic through other people's houses, would that be a good trade?

Do you really need residential ip for this? for my news scraping i have choose static datacenter proxy first, rotating only as fallback, direct as last. flaresolverr covered cloudflare js challenge, but it wedge on memory time to time, so i add healthcheck for it. on my own site aws waf meet datacenter ua with captcha, so i understand other side too. residential never was necessary for me, but maybe my targets are just easier, what do you scrape?

To be clear, bot spam and social media manipulation are legitimate business needs for the business selling said services.

You can't have legitimate business needs if you're not a legitimate business in the first place. Ban them all.

Who decides which businesses are legitimate?

Just because others abuse privacy doesn't mean that we should remove privacy from everyone else. They also let you get around geoblocking.

You're free to let strangers download illegal images from a proxy running on your IP, but I sure as hell won't.

If you don't want to share your internet with others, that is your choice, but please don't make seem like you are only sharing the internet with criminals. That is a harmful belief to spread.