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Comment by port11 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for clarifying the language. I don’t understand why we softened ‘botnet’, it’s much clearer and powerful.

You resell a game, bundling a botnet proxy inside, and make it freemium: free if you accept T&C with a service allowing using your device connection for research purposes (or whatever wording could be even more confusing), or pay $20.

It's no longer a botnet, it's a "residential proxy" and you are doing clean business.

I didn’t know this was a thing. Yikes. I’m gonna freak out now and find a way to prevent that in our home network.

And I’d argue that’s not clean business, the user doesn’t know what their connection is being used for :)

"User accepted T&C" is enough to get away with almost anything. It works very well for top IT companies. Upholding new business to higher standards would be unfair.

More than half of LG smart Tv apps seem to have residential proxies: https://spur.us/blog/smart-tv-apps-residential-proxy-sdks

Definitely pretty crazy. This is probably have they’re in the White House, all it takes is a random smart device to install a seemingly benign wallpaper app

In my head this is Joe Pesci saying "the money is now laundered" in Lethal Weapon 2.

Its to distinguish them from traffic that originates from someone spinning up a thousand VPS instances in a datacenter. Its very easy to block data center addresses, but hard to block residential addresses without impacting real customers.

Then it’s a residential botnet.

Trillion dollar AI companies use/used these to scrape the Internet. You don’t want to smear their good names do you?

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