Residential proxies are a very important part of the internet, they allow scraping for archiving, automation and can be used for extra anonymity.

While they have grown a bit too much, they are a natural response to the absurd amount of effort every website is pouring into anti-scraping tech.

> Residential proxies are a very important part of the internet, they allow scraping for archiving, automation and can be used for extra anonymity.

Aren't they almost always run unknowingly, by people tricked into running them?

Leveraging compromised devices is a very important part of the Internet??? This is an incredibly twisted perspective.

Help me understand. As far as I'm aware, these residential proxies are almost always malware.

And making DDoS-attacks nigh impossible to IP block.

Residential proxies are in many cases at least shady, both on the side of who uses them and for what and on providers that are often not above using dark pattern to hide them in some innocuous app for a smart-whatever that silently runs a proxy on a unaware user's connection. And in many places in the world if illegal stuff in done using your connection you are liable, regardless if you knew about it.

I wouldn't call turning on CloudFlare's bot blocker an "absurd amount of effort" from the perspective of site owners.

But getting around it sure is annoying, sometimes I get flagged IP's from Comcast and can't visit sites like costco.com despite not doing any questionable stuff on my network.

Hard disagree. They are malware 99.9% of the time. The utility does not erase the fact they are abusive.

Most tools can be dual-use. Residential proxies are also used by malevolent actors to hack infrastructure or financial institutions and let some other poor soul get investigated for it. This is why we can't have nice things.

"Malware is an important part of the Internet"

> and can be used for extra anonymity

Great, so you can conduct illegal transactions and have some unsuspecting grandma take the blame and have her front door kicked in?

Did a residential proxy provider write this

Residential proxies are a very important part of the internet

So important that we have to trick people into using them. Remember when folks were running SETI@Home? Of course you do, because it was widely thought to be a good thing, and folks willingly signed up.

How many would buy the "box" if the advertising were honest about what's actually in the box?

s/Residential proxies/DDoS networks/, then re-read your comment.

>absurd amount of effort every website is pouring into anti-scraping tech.

Maybe some people do not want to provide their entire website as free training material to [insert LLM lab here]?

Virtually all of it is the product of malware. This is like you saying that robbery is very important because you like buying cheap tools at pawnshops.