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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg.

You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.

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Yep.

And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"

Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.

And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.

Residential proxies are achieved in many, many ways. The most common is simply people installing software and leaving some checkbox checked, or agreeing to it unknowingly. In the same way that smart TV downloadable apps and games tend to include them.

Wait, so I can have free movies and subvert the adtech business model at the same time? What's the catch?

Anyone can buy traffic on the proxy, not just click fraud, but cc fraud et al as well. Caveat emptor, it’s really not worth it compared to setting up a 3 USD per month Hetzner proxy box yourself, if you’re looking to pirate movies.

For some more context: We run a business based on data scraping and metered residential proxies have never been cheaper. Countries that used to be 10 USD/GB just ten years ago are down to 1 USD.

Hetzner?! No, I would never use them if I wanted to host a pirate proxy myself. Very crude, trigger happy, operating in a country very cosy with all the police organisations.

100% this. Pirating in Germany is probably the stupidest thing one can do, because enforcement is done by individual lawyers via a process called Abmahnung. Courts (and therefore providers) are very friendly to those. Everyone knows someone who got "the letter".

> Caveat emptor, it’s really not worth it compared to setting up a 3 USD per month Hetzner proxy box yourself, if you’re looking to pirate movies.

How does that work? Wouldn’t Hetzner know who you are (because you pay them), meaning that if you’re caught pirating on it they could just know it was you and hand you over?

And don’t think Herzner wouldn’t hand you over. My only experience with them was during a job, when an external company complained about something on a single section of a massive website (everything was legitimate, we weren’t doing anything remotely shady) and Hetzner straight up took the whole website down and demanded a change. Shoot first, ask later. I wasn’t directly involved with managing the website, but the whole thing soured me on Hetzner.

This is the bread and butter for commercial VPN services. The VPN knows who you are (maybe, unless you pay crypto/cash), and the rights-holders know your VPN address (from joining/logging a BitTorrent swarm, for instance), but the better providers keep no logs, and I'm guessing there's too many individuals to target effectively.

I've received a nasty letter from the ISP over BitTorrent (someone's phone joined my wifi, torrenting without my knowledge), but using a VPN seems sufficient. I think the Hetzener suggestion is a VPS for running the software stack. You could alternatively self host on hardware in your home.

Exactly my thought. For, say, $50/month I can get a second ISP to my house, host the proxy (and only that) on that link, and enjoy free movies. It is cheaper than having 2-3 streaming service subscriptions.

Or for $5/mo you could have a mullvad subscription and a vpn-aware bittorrent client that knows how to pause if the vpn drops.

You're underestimating the ease of use of these pirate boxes.

Also most of them are for pirating live TV. You can't watch live TV through Bittorrent, you just can't, it doesn't work that way. Sports fans need less than 5 seconds of latency relative to the loudest neighbor they can hear, or they'll hate your service.

True but that option got a lot worse when they disabled port forwarding.

These residential proxies are also used by scrapers. From scraping stores to scalp merchandise, to scrapers of data for AI training.

Sounds awesome, what's the catch?

You also get to run credit card fraud purchases through your home internet connection, such fun times we live in.

So what's the catch? Has anyone ever been arrested for proxying a fraudulent credit card transaction?

Probably not. But do you really want the hassle of explaining the proxy to the police when they get a report of CSAM content uploaded from your IP?

Has that ever happened?

It's a possibility. I don't know about CSAM but I know someone who was arrested for death threats sent to a politician after running a tor exit node. Eventually not charged, but he lost all his computing equipment for a couple of months

From 2009: https://archive.torproject.org/websites/lists.torproject.org...

Has anything changed since 2009?

> Eventually not charged

Theres your answer.

Considering the question was "has that every happened?" regarding the police getting a report and you having to explain the proxy to them, I guess you mean the answer is yes and your attitude is misplaced?

ehh, subvert is a stretch. But yes, you too can be a minor accessory to scams run by thieves to rob advertisers, with enriching the world's largest ad company as a side-effect. Not exactly a Robin Hood situation given that tons of the advertisers being robbed are just normal small developers trying to get their apps out there.

The more these small devs realize their ad spend is going to bots, the less they'll spend. Like the OP.

Once the word gets around, even small non-techy businesses will pick up on it.

Grey? There's multiple conferences that "ethically sourced" proxy providers feature at now (ex: extractsummit.io)

Web scraping (for LLM inference / training) I guess has transformed "residential proxies" into a giant industry.

"ethically sourced" means someone clicked "agree" on their LG TV terms of service, as opposed to having a virus on their computer

also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes. its to get at tgeir IP, it has nothing to do with space, cooling, etc.

No that makes no sense. They only need a tiny device to act as a proxy. It makes no sense to colocate the expensive GPUs

Yeah, the usual approach here is to offer a free VPN service, and then piggyback traffic over the user’s internet provider. Much, much more scalable and cheaper than offering to put GPUs at a user’s home.

Wow, that's genius. Basically, user gets a VPN but so does provider, in a sense.

You can offer them a free anything, really. It's a pretty convenient way to pay, that mostly doesn't affect the user at all (unless their connection is very slow), but generates value.

"value"

Yes, it does. Just because the value is for someone else and not you, that doesn't make it any less real.

It makes sense when someone else is paying for the power. The AI capabilities of mobile cpus is for pushing cloud based AI to your device. You pay the power bill while retaining the same lack of privacy as cloud hosted AI.

I'm pretty sure the company that owns the compute is the one paying for the power. Who would agree to have an ugly noisy cube in their property that they have to pay maintenance for? What would they get out of that deal?

Which hyperscalers are doing that? I've heard of one startup trying this, XFRA, currently in early pilot phases. But I'd be pretty surprised to hear that AWS or Google are paying people to host GPU clusters in their home.

>also why hyperscalers are paying folks to host gpu clusters in their homes

Source? There's definitely shady people paying people to host proxies, but hyperscalers doing it would be surprising.

My understanding of it so far is that it is at most, 50 or 100 houses as a test... It's a startup that wants to make it wide scale but hasn't got there yet.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=span+resi...

Calling them a "hyperscaler" is a stretch. By all accounts it's some renewables startup that's trying to pivot into AI because obviously AI = $$$, and calling themselves a "hyperscaler" in the process. Calling them a "hyperscaler" makes as much sense as some guy who runs a homelab in his basement as a "datacenter".

https://www.span.io/blog/span-announces-xfra-a-distributed-d...

My thoughts exactly. In the current environment you could slap "AI" on a potato and get $$$ for it.

They are basically rebranding the Folding@Home idea and adding modern words to market it.

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