alt Hacker NewsThe dirty secret is a lot of them come through "residential proxies", aka backdoored home routers, iot devices with shitty security, etc. Basically the scrapers who are often also third party, go to these "companies" and buy access to these "residential proxies". Some are more... considerate than others.
Why? Data. Every bit of it is it might be valuable. And not to sound tin foil hatty, but we are getting closer to a post-quantum time (if we aren't already ).
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Has this actually been investigated and proven to be true? I see allegations, but no facts really.
It seems to me to be just as likely that people are installing LLM chatbot apps that do the occasional bit of scraping work on the sly, covered by some agreed EULA.
it isn't that hard to just buy a bunch of sim cards and put them in a modem and use that. it's good enough as a residential proxy. source: I did that before, when I worked on plaid-like thing.
How can I detect if my router is backdoored, or being used as a residential proxy?