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Comment by j2kun | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, how would I check my own device for a residential proxy?

Scroll down to "anonymization": https://ipinfo.io/what-is-my-ip

If there's anything there, monitor your network to figure out exactly what

AFAIU that tells you if your access to ipinfo.io is thru a residential proxy, not if somebody else is using a residential proxy on your network.

It's effectively the same thing. If a residential proxy is running on your network, your IP will soon become known as a residential proxy exit.

It detects if your IP is a residential proxy, not if you are using a residential proxy. From the perspective of the outside Internet, they are the same thing, the only one who cares about the difference is you.

We do not run any kind of detection systems when you visit the page. What we do is reference our resproxy detection database, which has a schema like this:

{

  "ip": "175.107.211.204",

  "last_seen": "2025-06-24",

  "percent_days_seen": 14,

  "service": "ipfoxy"

}

We collect the residential proxy data continuously from independent systems; when you visit the page, we take your IP address and look it up in our database. Note the percent_day_seen field, which is frequency metadata. You can also complement it with our device count data to understand if you are on a NATed IP.

If you are on a static IP address and a single user, we flag your IP address as a residential proxy. I think you should install some DNS monitoring service and start uninstalling unnecessary apps from internet-connected devices.

— Abdullah | DevRel, IPinfo

Neat. I almost said "surely this will only detect if your internet connection is itself being routed through a residential proxy", and then I realised that's effectively the same thing!

It lists VPN, Proxy, Tor, etc. Presumably a minus sign in a circle means you don't have the thing?

I had same confusion for a second but the html does clear it up: yes, it means you don't have the thing.

   <li class="...">
     <div class="...">
       <div class="..."></div>
     </div>
     <span class="text-sm">Residential Proxy</span>
     <span class="sr-only">Not detected</span>
   </li>

I pinged the web team, they will work on something to make this more legible. (Edit: they have started work on this; if you have any other feedback, please let me know) — Abdullah | DevRel, IPinfo

Freaky. They have a page explaining the concept (https://ipinfo.io/data/residential-proxy); when I checked it, there was a FOUC showing a full-screen, stretched image of what I think was Dario Amodei's face.

Fantastic question. There is so much IOT garbage out there that someone might slip into my network, what can I do to easily detect it?

I was aghast when my partner connected a pet watering bowl to the WiFi.

My most worrisome IoT device I have on my network is a digital picture frame my wife connected, but I was surprised the company routinely updates it even though it's on Android 6 (!).

https://support.frameo.com/hc/en-us/articles/23433637149842-...

… TIL such things exist. I assume it's networking so that it can grab photos to display from "the cloud" somewhere, and periodically change?

Yes. Smart frames often provide an endpoint where friends or family can send photos that will be automatically added to the rotation.

Great gifts! (At least for those unconcerned with privacy or security, which is most people.)

I suggest you just firewall it away from your important machines and then don't worry about it.

It's been some time since I ran this myself but I used to have an openwrt router sit behind my ISP modem/router (it was one unit).

Multiple times I caught unexpected traffic and was able to block it piecewise including a lightbulb(!) that was sending mb packets of god knows what home.

If they were ethernet based I reckon some smart VLAN capable switches would be nice even at home to keep them out of each others business.

I moved home a few years ago and now I'm back with the ISP router and do often feel a little in the dark about what my network is doing!

https://openwrt.org/

Educate your partner.

I had to recently inform my sister and didn't realize just how unaware the general public was of how utterly terrible things have gotten, like with LG TVs or the Meta Quest's access to your family.

When someone tells you "I have nothing to hide, I don't care", let them know that companies like LG make 5x as much money selling your data as selling $1000 TVs, so clearly your data is valuable and you shouldn't be giving it away for free. That's a message normal people can understand.

This one actually works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713037

Watch egress at the router for anything unaccounted for, tbh.

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