Oct 13, 2026, 12:43 PM@jpoesen I work for a company that hosts public-facing library catalogs. There is now an increasing tax just to put something on the web: bandwidth, web application firewalls, engineering time squashing rude scrapers…
The Internet used to be a nice place to be.
Oct 14, 2026, 4:47 PM@robmckenna @jpoesen Yes, blocking countries used to work. Now that Residential-Proxies-as-a-Service are a thing, the requests are coming from everywhere.
Oct 14, 2026, 4:38 PM@failedLyndonLaRouchite @jpoesen The internet is — at its foundational level — open and unauthenticated. Any machine on the network can communicate with any other machine on the network: your device is a machine on the network and the server is a machine on the network. The web — one application on the network — was built the same way...at its core no permission is needed for any machine to request a web page from a server. (1/n)
Oct 14, 2026, 4:42 PM@failedLyndonLaRouchite @jpoesen Server operators used to be able to stop bots because they came from predictable blocks of network addresses...akin to stopping people at the border with passports from specific countries. Now, however, there are these things called "residential proxies" that funnel traffic through devices that live in people's homes. Keeping with the country border analogy, it is like using a fake passport to bypass the blocks. (2/n)
Oct 14, 2026, 4:45 PM@failedLyndonLaRouchite @jpoesen Residential Proxies are being built into apps that people download to their Smart TVs, smartphones, laptops, etc. The Residential Proxies are then sold as a service to web scrapers. From the owner of the Smart TV's perspective, it might be just one web page request every few hours. From the web server's perspective, it is requests for web pages coming from everywhere...it becomes very hard to filter. (3/3)
Oct 14, 2026, 4:45 PM@failedLyndonLaRouchite @jpoesen (Does that explanation help?)
@dltj @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jpoesen proxies are being embedded into consumer devices? Do you have any sources / references? Not asking to argue, I’m genuinely curious, and of course concerned.
Oct 15, 2026, 8:40 PM@treefifty @failedLyndonLaRouchite @jpoesen Sure! TechCrunch did a story in August: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/03/samsung-bans-smart-tv-apps-that-share-users-internet-connections-with-strangers
Malwarebytes had an article about it last month: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/09/free-streaming-boxes-may-be-routing-criminal-traffic-through-your-home — that hit mainstream local news: https://www.wcpo.com/money/consumer/dont-waste-your-money/trying-to-save-on-streaming-why-off-brand-devices-can-put-personal-data-at-risk
Krebs had an article over the summer: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/read-this-before-you-buy-that-tv-streaming-stick/