200GB for $500? What cloud is this?
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.
And you think that's NOT sketchy?
I'm almost afraid to ask where you think the bar is...
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.
Dude, please provide some real solid evidence to back this up, and perhaps come up with another realistic scenario where bypassing captcha is justified.
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.
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.
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
No-one would need captcha automation or residential proxies for a use case like that that's all on the level.
How does a residential proxy help with that?
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.
Even your example sounds sketchy though. If you're not legitimate enough to use the enterprise software, why are purchasing tickets all day? And why do you need to proxy your bandwidth instead of just accessing the site directly. And why aren't you concerned about the fact that it's a crime to bypass the approved channels by hiding behind the proxy to do this?
If it were 2000, people would be sharing their ad clicking startups.
YC has funded a looooooot of sketchy companies.
I'd say it has about the same moral standing as a payday loan.
install a fresh wordpress and you'll be blocking hundreds of Digital Ocean Ip addys within 24 hours..
Or you won't.
If you add a failed login detector you'll see DO, OVH Hetzer and similar are non-stop password guessing your logins everyday.
Maybe your admin password is so long they will never get in, maybe you don't care that your server gets slower responses for actual users as it serves pages and does DB lookups for all the bots trying to use a different password every minute.
Maybe the website owner doesn't know any of these and the open internet is actually legoland where everything is awesome all the time.
e.g. https://www.honeygain.com/ (something like 100GB = $20).
Or law enforcement shows up at their door because their IP is involved in a bunch of illegal stuff.
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).
This is another interesting example where it was allowed
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 almost a necessity these days to have access to that due to how much datacenter ranges are blocked.
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)