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Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

You cannot block LLM crawlers by IP address, because some of them use residential proxies. Source: 1) a friend admins a slightly popular site and has decent bot detection heuristics, 2) just Google “residential proxy LLM”, they are not exactly hiding. Strip-mining original intellectual property for commercial usage is big business.

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How does this work? Why would people let randos use their home internet connections? I googled it but the companies selling these services are not exactly forthcoming on how they obtained their "millions of residential IP addresses".

Are these botnets? Are AI companies mass-funding criminal malware companies?

>Are these botnets? Are AI companies mass-funding criminal malware companies?

Without a doubt some of them are botnets. AI companies got their initial foothold by violating copyright en masse with pirated textbook dumps for training data, and whatnot. Why should they suddenly develop scruples now?

I have seen it claimed that's a way of monetizing free phone apps. Just bundle a proxy and get paid for that.

A recent HN thread about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746156

It used to be Hola VPN which would let you use someone else’s connection and in the same way someone could use yours which was communicated transparently, that same hola client would also route business users. Im sure many other free VPN clients do the same thing nowadays.

so user either has a malware proxy running requests without being noticed or voluntarily signed up as a proxy to make extra $ off their home connection. Either way I dont care if their IP is blocked. Only problem is if users behind CGNAT get their IP blocked then legitimate users may later be blocked.

edit: ah yes another person above mentioned VPN's thats a good possibility, also another vector is users on mobile can sell their extra data that they dont use to 3rd parties. probably many more ways to acquire endpoints.

“Known IP addresses” to me implies an infrequently changing list of large datacenter ranges. Maintaining a dynamic list (along with any metadata required for throttling purposes) of individual IPs is a different undertaking with higher level of effort.

Of course, if you don’t care about affecting genuine users then it is much simpler. One could say it’s collateral damage and show a message suggesting to boycott companies and/or business practices that prompted these measures.

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