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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

>types of operator running residential-proxy networks to attack web sites.

This is such a malicious interpretation. Do you think VPN operating are also trying to attack websites? Both offer the same kind of product.

>paid for hijacking their users' network connections

Nothing is being hijacked. Again the author is using wording to try and paint these people as malicious actors.

>Recently, LWN was subjected what was, by far, the heaviest scraper attack yet.

LWN is a static site. To me it seems more expensive to use Anubis than just serve the actual page.

>will now check for NetNut-infected apps

Apps are not infected with NetNut. This is just Google abusing their monopoly position to hurt its competitors.

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> Apps are not infected with NetNut. This is just Google abusing their monopoly position to hurt its competitors.

If apps ship with stealth backdoors to sell access to the user's internal residential network, that's malware. I doubt any users want app providers to sell access to their private file server and anything else on their local network.

It doesn't seem like monopoly abuse to exclude such malware from application stores, just like key loggers or apps intercepting other apps network traffic without the user being aware of it (say the banking app's network traffic and password entry).

>sell access to the user's internal residential network

That is not what the SDK was doing. The actual code in the SDK protects against this (simplified to take less space):

    if (addr.isSiteLocalAddress() || addr.isLoopbackAddress()) {
        LogUtils.e("PopaTunnelAsyncThread", "Hacking? The Host Resolved Ip is " + addr + " on tunnel id:" + tunnelId);
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Hacking? The tunnel host resolved ip is internal");
    }

Local and loopback addresses like 10.0.0.0, 172.16.0.0, 192.168.0.0, and 127.0.0.0 do not work. It will not connect to people's private file servers on their network.

It'll still connect to IPv6 addresses and bypass any firewalls.

Also users might become part (victim?) of a police investigation because of illegal actions that seem to originate from their local residential connection.

So still good to take down such backdoors. Would be nice to go after the botnet operators as well...

Instead require app developers to explicitly call out this monetization method. This is neither designed to be a backdoor, nor a botnet. These are harmful classifications which can encourage people to try and target them like malware, when they are essential tools for privacy, bypassing geoblocking, and being able to collect public information from sites. The average person is not going to be involved with a police investigation. That has a tiny probability of happen and trying to blow it up to such proportions is dangerous to the existing of this important tool.

Any webpage you visit can trigger an illegal action on your internet connection with a simple image tag, for example <img src="https://www.google.com/search?q=I+just+killed+my+wife.+How+s...">. It doesn't seem to be a real concern.

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