Comment by perks_12
Comment by perks_12 9 hours ago
200GB for $500? What cloud is this?
Comment by perks_12 9 hours ago
200GB for $500? What cloud is this?
I use one. I run a bot on IRC that extracts the <title> of every link posted (or downloads the image/whatever and extracts Metadata) and announces that to the channel. It has become more and more pointless to run this on a vps. Google/YouTube block the IP range, a lot of websites return the cloudflare security check, Amazon works on some days and doesn't on others... Ever since I proxy via residential proxies it just works. I'm a smooth criminal. :>
I feel your pain, but I refuse to cave. Say, 10% of the links fail to load, so what? It is their loss, not mine.
There's many reputable residential proxy networks too, usually there's a lot of vetting involved too as they don't want people running illegal activities though their network.
It's almost a necessity these days to have access to that due to how much datacenter ranges are blocked.
It's kind of surprising that a presumptively legitimate company (and YC-funded startup) would out themselves as buying black market residential proxy bandwidth, isn't it?
Their frontpage also advertises the ability to pass CAPTCHAs, whether by automation or more likely by delegating them to third-world CAPTCHA farms. If that's a major selling point for your automation service then your target market probably ranges from dubious (e.g. data scrapers trying to get around limits) to extremely dubious (e.g. ticket scalpers, spammers, click fraud, etc).
Just because something can be used for sketchy purposes doesn't mean that's the only purpose of it. there are thousands of situations where people are forced to interact with a shitty website 100x per day and the site won't provide an api. Imagine if your job was booking plane tickets all day. United could provide you an API key to do so via an API, but in practice they won't, only some enterprisey travel software company can get that kind of access, for a steep fee. You could build a tool which automatically puts together an itinerary based on rules and books it, through a tool like this. Perhaps a slightly contrived example but I believe things like this definitely happen.
It's almost never done with the full understanding of the person providing the proxy, doesn't matter if they get promised some change, their browser addons betray them or they install bundleware/adware.
I'd say it has about the same moral standing as a payday loan.
How long have you been here? It's not surprising at all. HN and YC have not demonstrated an aversion to "uh, greyhat" activity.
If it were 2000, people would be sharing their ad clicking startups.
YC has funded a looooooot of sketchy companies.
Here more on "free VPNs”
https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/what-is-wrong-with-free-vpn-s...
Usually such proxy networks are outright criminal (even if users are not).
It’s not necessarily malware. There are services that are pretty upfront and pay cash money for residential US bandwidth. That said, naive people might be surprised when their IP starts getting blocked.
e.g. https://www.honeygain.com/ (something like 100GB = $20).
>>>and it's legal to scrape publicly available data, even if the websites hosting it try to block it
Is that something that's been fully decided? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc. is the most relevant case I'm aware of, and it suggests it might actually be illegal (if you know you've been blocked, at least).
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/court-rules-in-favor-of-a-...
This is another interesting example where it was allowed
An employee of one proxy network describes that exact business model here:
Yeah, the author confirmed it in this thread actually:
Residential proxy service
https://smartproxy.com/proxies/residential-proxies/pricing
(may not be this service, but this is an example, and the price is consistent with their larger commitments)
Blizzard quite famously used BitTorrent to save bandwidth, dunno if they still do:
I don't think it's a cloud. It's more likely a residential proxy network, which are typically created by installing malware on users' machines.
The operators of these proxy networks want to avoid detection by both the users whose bandwidth they're stealing, and by the companies whose data is being scraped. So they want to make the bandwidth very expensive. And that expensive bandwidth in turn means that their only clients are dodgy as well. Either people looking to scrape data without consent and monetize it, or outright criminals.