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Comment by cognitiveinline | Hacker News Reader

Sharing a slice of your internet in a privacy preserving way in exchange for something of value, seems fair, no?

Grey market residential proxy service providers are one of the most common methods of implementing bot spam, social media manipulation and plenty of straight-out fraud.

There's all kinds of things that malicious actors want to do where they value coming from an ordinary (comcast, charter, centurylink, shaw cable, whatever) residential IP.

You make a good point. I've reassessed and agree this is shady, and not a good pattern. And should be disabled/abolished.

I mean, some of us have legitimate business needs to get past cloudflares frankly somewhat bs gatekeeping business model, however

Sure, I do as well, I have my own VPN into my home office that lets me run traffic outbound through its default gateway while I'm somewhere else. But letting random third parties I don't know run traffic through my house is another thing entirely.

If it meant you got to run your traffic through other people's houses, would that be a good trade?

Do you really need residential ip for this? for my news scraping i have choose static datacenter proxy first, rotating only as fallback, direct as last. flaresolverr covered cloudflare js challenge, but it wedge on memory time to time, so i add healthcheck for it. on my own site aws waf meet datacenter ua with captcha, so i understand other side too. residential never was necessary for me, but maybe my targets are just easier, what do you scrape?

To be clear, bot spam and social media manipulation are legitimate business needs for the business selling said services.

You can't have legitimate business needs if you're not a legitimate business in the first place. Ban them all.

Who decides which businesses are legitimate?

Just because others abuse privacy doesn't mean that we should remove privacy from everyone else. They also let you get around geoblocking.

You're free to let strangers download illegal images from a proxy running on your IP, but I sure as hell won't.

If you don't want to share your internet with others, that is your choice, but please don't make seem like you are only sharing the internet with criminals. That is a harmful belief to spread.

Only if the app provides 1. prominently-displayed, informed consent, 2. an option to opt-out without losing app functionality, or 3. joining the botnet provides some kind of actual benefit to the user, besides just money to the developer.

Add to that list respecting the TOS of the user's ISP so that the user does not get banned, and providing some sort of remuneration if illicit activity through the proxy causes problems for the primary user, and then _maybe_ you could call this all not shady as fuck.

If only ISPs would actually crack down on (usually unwitting) users whose systems are participating in a malicious botnet or otherwise have their networks compromised. They could offer temporary disconnection + anti-malware support to get the user cleaned up, if they actually gave a shit.

No residential last mile broadband ISP at the scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of customers is presently willing to spend the salary/benefits/fully loaded employee cost on the massive teams of (somewhat technically clued in, not low wage) people it would take to effectively implement this.

They would be willing if they were themselves held liable for the illicit activity originating from their network otherwise.

except we need ISPs to be treated as relatively neutral parties. we don't hold the water company liable if someone uses water to cook up meth

Apparently at least one of the apps mentioned does that. From the article

>A Pac-Man smart TV app from Bright Data offers users the choice between viewing ads in the game or agreeing to allow their TV to serve as a residential proxy node.

I wonder how informed the end user actually is, and if it's disclosed to them what kind of content might pass through their network as a result of agreeing.

Most traffic is normal scraping like checking amazon prices.

There is really not good excuse to bundle this functionality with an unrelated app in the first place.

Some residential proxy providers offer a few cents for the use of your network.

No need of (2) and (3) - the user can choose to not install/use the app. (1) is the right fair boundary.

Those apps just shouldn't exist.

I don't know how "join your users to a botnet" became some kind of legitimized monetization scheme. Ads are bad enough. What's next? "Participate in a DDOS in order to use our app?"

Sometimes it's botnet, sometimes it's just accessing netflix without hitting big IP range bans.

If there are proxy apps that only do the latter sort of work than I'm actually in favor of them existing and being widespread.

It is the same as when javascript was used to mine cryptocurrency before web browsers blocked it, exploiting other users computers for unfair gain.

Exactly. If there is a legitimate use case for sharing your connection it should be a separate apps users intentionally install.

"train our machine to identify traffic lights" or something

What's the definition of a botnet?

No.

I'm surprised Comcast or some other ISP doesn't step in with a claim of tortious interference. Reselling or granting access to the ISPs services like this is almost always against the ISPs terms of service.

The consumer is in no place to consent to this exchange.

On the other hand if you want to resell 2% of your bandwidth the ISP shouldn't have any say in that.

Oh yes they can. If I'm a consumer, I pay for my connection that is sold to me and held in my name. I have no right to "resell" or "sublet" part of that. It is usually spelled out in the Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy.

At the very least, consumer connections explicitly disallow "Commercial Use". That means that you can't use them to run a business. You can't use them to turn a profit. You can't use them to generate revenue. That means no running servers, and that means no "reselling 2% of your bandwidth" for a few pennies because some Euro-Trash-Stranger wants to borrow it!

> At the very least, consumer connections explicitly disallow "Commercial Use".

And that's really bad! Far more than reselling, you should very much be able to run a website from home!

> And that's really bad!

No, it’s fair, and probably federally regulated.

You wanna run a business? Then get a business license, pay your business taxes, and sign up for a business Internet connection. That’s what they’re made for. Then run your servers to your heart’s content.

What if I don't want to run a business? I just want to run a website!

Okay, I can understand that there are instances where people want to run a website or some kind of server, recreationally, or out-of-pocket, or cooperatively, outside of a business/corporate context.

But I'd say it's fundamentally a market segmentation. ISPs don't want consumers running servers on consumer connections. Think about it. This allows ISPs to plan deployments better. Consumers should be, well, consuming downloads and content rather than distributing it upstream. Therefore, for example, my DOCSIS connection is 10x downstream vs. upstream. And an ISP's consumer-level backbone can be planned much more effectively when consumers are consuming downloads.

If you wanna run a server then go colocate it, or run it as a legit business. You've got to accept some market segmentation here.

I purchased a new HP printer recently, and it's firmly a SOHO printer. Perhaps more powerful than I really needed. And guess what? I found out that it's not really supported by Chromebook or Android drivers. So... I've got to bounce all my print jobs through Linux! Ah well!

Internet service should be as close to a dumb pipe as possible. It can be biased in one direction (though 10:1 is too much and future DOCSIS versions are remedying that) but even a slower upload can and should be able to do basic hosting.

so much of the early aughts small business and startups were people selling stuff and doing things out of ppls home. and not like the "startup industry" startups, actual startups

but aside from that, hosting a website or email server or newsgroup or game server with friends isnt necessarily hosting a business, not everything is a transactional relationship

You literally want to turn the USA into China? Because that's what they have in China! It's even enforced by a layer 4 firewall on every connection.

Tortious interference means preventing some business from making sales. Who is being prevented from selling what?

We have this invention called money so that individuals don't need to wrangle complex swap trades and instead sell the things (usually their time) that they are OK with selling with informed consent and buy the things they want without having to give up things they don't want to or don't understand. If selling your internet connection was a reasonable thing to do there would be dedicated apps/boxes for that instead of this being packaged into random apps.

There are dedicated apps for that. For example ByteLixir.

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