Comment by jsheard 9 hours ago
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).
A very common and pro-consumer use for residential proxies is price scraping and price comparisons.
Most businesses don't want to compete on price and are extremely unhappy if you tell people that their competition sells the same stuff but for less, that their "best deal of the month" is actually a price raise, or that they significantly raise toilet paper prices every time there's a natural disaster.
> 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.
And you think that's NOT sketchy?
I'm almost afraid to ask where you think the bar is...
It's exactly as sketchy as having a hypothetical robot sit down at a console and type it out. Which, IMO, is not very sketchy at all.
And why is it? A company provides you an API for a "fee" and a free web-based interface, as long as you are agile enough to use it, with some limitations per ip/cookie. You choose the second path and automate it. What's wrong with that? Limits of the free access are the public contract. You're not obliged to play along with someone's "monetary spirit".
And in practice, APIs are often much more PITA than the actual interface, but you can't buy unlimited web automation. Few years ago one of my projects literally OCRed data from an android phone screen because receiving it via API took a couple minutes longer and involved email-like back and forth with polling and id matching after a convoluted authentication that fails every few requests.
Agreed. Just for reference, one of our most popular use-cases is automating data entry into CRMs without APIs... No one wants to be doing this stuff manually, and automating it has some serious positive QoL impact
We get a lot of requests for bad usage (ie spinning up upvote rings on Reddit) but we don't want to support things like that
> one of our most popular use-cases is automating data entry into CRMs without APIs... No one wants to be doing this stuff manually, and automating it has some serious positive QoL impact
No-one would need captcha automation or residential proxies for a use case like that that's all on the level.
But no one can or needs to use a residential proxy for automating CRM data entry.
Imagine a legitimate travel agency cannot book 100 United tickets a day via methods outlined in business contracts and need to resort to shady practice.
Dude, please provide some real solid evidence to back this up, and perhaps come up with another realistic scenario where bypassing captcha is justified.
> Imagine a legitimate travel agency cannot book 100 United tickets a day
That's the whole point, I never said travel agency, I was thinking a company with travelling consultants.
How TF is it "shady" to purchase and use airfare?
And again, bypassing captcha, say, to purchase tickets isn't evil either, if you are purchasing them for use and not for resale. It would just allow a person to book tickets for 50 people without wasting 6 hours to complete 25 CAPTCHAS and type in my information 25 times.
CAPTCHA is a blunt instrument deployed in an attempt to mitigate abuse, but it has a massive bad side effect that for every heavy user (not just evil users), it requires a human butt to be in a seat somewhere to do mindless busywork that could otherwise be automated. Working around that (sounds like OP agrees to do so on a case by case basis) is not inherently evil. It's as evil (or benign) as whatever you're using it for.
You ever see that video of the women paying a thousand dollars to skip to the front of the release day line to buy one of the first generation iPhones?
Then when she did and the employees told her they limited customers to buying one or two iPhones per person she becomes incredibly flustered. The guy who sold his spot in the line celebrates with a free phone.
What you’re describing is analogous and there’s a reason that went viral on the internet and was reported on in the mainstream, but I won’t spell it out for you.
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.