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.

▲

Grimblewald 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲

mitxela 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

▲

roosterIllusi0n an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	fluoridation an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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?

▲

gruez 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>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.

▲

walrus01 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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...

▲

gruez 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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...

	▲	walrus01 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My thoughts exactly. In the current environment you could slap "AI" on a potato and get $$$ for it.

▲

nekusar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲

gpt5 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲

ForHackernews 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

▲

warkdarrior 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲

walrus01 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	Dylan16807 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		True but that option got a lot worse when they disabled port forwarding.

▲

xp84 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲

dist-epoch 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

▲

mitxela 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sounds awesome, what's the catch?

	▲	walrus01 27 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You also get to run credit card fraud purchases through your home internet connection, such fun times we live in.
	▲	Dylan16807 30 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

▲

ignoramous an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.