Google Disrupts Large Residential Proxy Network
29 points by krinkle
29 points by krinkle
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipidea
Wonder why they don't mention that residential proxies are also a major source of scrapers for training LLMs! (I don't actually wonder, I know why)
There are startups that provide scraping through residential proxies and don't even feel bad about it: https://scrapeops.io/blog/scraping-shock/ . Hopefully Google indirectly disrupts these ethically dubious businesses.
I mean ideally the CEOs of these startups would be in prison, but yeah, if Google can "enemy-of-my-enemy" them a bit I'll take it.
Leave it to Google to try to make "residential proxy network" in to a bad thing.
Google and Cloudflare have done incredible damage to the Internet, making residential proxies quite necessary for people in certain countries, and now they're surprised they can be used for bad things?
So long as Google and Cloudflare marginalize selected groups of people, workarounds will continue to pop up, and bad actors will invariably use those workarounds for nefarious purposes.
Leave it to Google to try to make "residential proxy network" in to a bad thing
Blame the people installing the proxies without consent and using them to conduct DDOS attacks or AI scraping. Bright Data is another example.
Can you elaborate? How the people in these countries get access to such proxies? Feels like an interesting story.
All I've seen is commercial use of residential proxies.