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points by hypfer 3 days ago | 0 comments

Only tangentially related, but I've recently realized that unless you're some sort of business with a valid requirement of that, you can just block incoming traffic from all of AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc.

I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.

That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.

Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.

[–] jeremyjh 3 days ago

There have been a number of articles on the frontpage of HN about the residential proxy traffic. It is happening. This was one of the most popular:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791

[–] hypfer 3 days ago

I know, but it's an extra step, more expensive, and less legally solid.

None of these measures alone are a full solution, but if you stack a bunch of cheese slices, eventually, no holes line up anymore.

[–] trollbridge 2 days ago

... less legally solid? What?

[–] hypfer 2 days ago

Residential proxies are something that is not supposed to exist.

In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.

The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.

That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough? Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.

[–] nekusar 2 days ago

They exist because of GeoIP databases, and spying on "quality of IP address via ASN".

If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.

To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.

[–] hypfer 2 days ago

That was not the question. There are many factors driving crime, yes.

The point however is that this is crime and crime is incorrect and fundamentally shouldn't exist.

But, more importantly, as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing crime or benefitting from crime or supporting crime or being near crime. At least in a working society that is.

[–] nekusar 2 days ago

First, copyright violation as non-profit is a tort.

Secondly, it's only for-profit copyright violations that are a crime. But as OFCOM learned the hard way, stuff illegal in the US can be legal elsewhere.

Thirdly, for some fucking reason, the US AI companies are immune to criminal statutes of for-profit copyright violations. Job creators, or some bullshit.

And I'm not sure exactly why you're so dead-set on "crime crime crime". It's all politics and manufactured criminality. And well, I don't particularly care if backing up my movies to a Jellyfin and sharing access is "ill eagle".

The AI companies are bulk pirating AND then selling that access.... But I'm the criminal? Fuck that noise.

[–] mitxela 2 days ago

Actually a lot of them do get sold. Rates range from about $0.10/GB (the middleman takes double that if course) for a program running on your computer, to $200/month for a dedicated extra connection installed at your house.

[–] itintheory 2 days ago

Sure, that's why they sanitize the User-Ggent header when using these proxies. Good luck attributing the scraping to anyone at all.

[–] hypfer 2 days ago

It just needs one case where someone manages to attribute it to the corp using these illicit services.

Either by technical means or by a whistleblower.

Which might be a gamble worth doing, but also might not. And regardless, the fact that it is a gamble alone slows down velocity.

[–] geraldwhen 2 days ago

If the content is legally obtainable, couldn’t any employee use their own home network to pull data? I don’t think anyone would bother with a resi. Employees have their own network connections available.

[–] ecshafer 2 days ago

The scrapers and AI companies resorting to residential proxy traffic like intelligence and hackers is pretty crazy.

[–] cube00 3 days ago

I initially thought this was a good idea too until another comment pointed out you'll lose most business or personal customers in offices because they connect through VPN gateways running on those cloud services (especially Azure)

[–] hypfer 3 days ago

True but the question is if that matters.

I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.

A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(

[–] gverrilla 3 days ago

> day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(

it is open and better indeed. open and better for capital - the true, living, flesh-eating god.

[–] semiquaver 3 days ago

This is a website about starting businesses.

Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.

Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.

[–] bigfishrunning 3 days ago

> This is a website about starting businesses.

It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.

[–] hypfer 3 days ago

Hm I mean HN _also_ is that? But not exclusively.

And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.

[–] wtch98 3 days ago

If you control the connecting device why not use MTLS?

[–] semiquaver 2 days ago

Who said we control the connecting device? This is a website. Websites are usually pretty arms-length things, and that’s the case with us. They’re our customers but we can’t install certificates on their computers and enforce mTLS. Can you do that with any of your customers?

[–] anonreplier 3 days ago

Can use cloudflare turnstile or similar instead

[–] trollbridge 2 days ago

Someone accessing a VPN that's in an Azure IP range is going to have a difficult time using half of the Internet.

[–] wtch98 3 days ago

All my business traffic comes from either our own AS, or from ZScaler's AS

Do many companies really use azure etc rather than dedicated services like zscaler?

[–] turpentine 2 days ago

reddit has been banning reddit accounts of people who use public cloud services as a vpn i.e. while travelling or in cafes, without recourse. Reddit's answer was afaik "don't do that, and create a new account."

[–] bearjaws 2 days ago

I would sure hope they split tunnel their VPN so all traffic isn't going through the VPN...

[–] cube00 2 days ago

Some companies don't split because they want all internet traffic to go through their internal MITM proxies to enforce acceptable internet use and data loss policies.

[–] 80fj0348i 2 days ago

Those had to switch over to endpoint agents installed on work devices directly due to TLS 1.3 preventing MITM for domains which you do not control.

[–] cube00 1 day ago

> Those had to switch over to endpoint agents

No they didn't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32337698

[–] jack_pp 2 days ago

i can't access reddit through nordvpn

[–] gunalx 3 days ago

Allmost all the bottraffic I see is from random residential proxies though.

[–] timpera 3 days ago

Same, I just checked and this week the vast majority of the bot traffic I get is random residential IPs that all pretend to be the exact same Chrome 155 on Linux.

[–] sgerenser 3 days ago

Probably all people that fell for the “superbox” TV streamer scam.

[–] Raed667 3 days ago

do you have a good link to learn about this ?

[–] doubled112 2 days ago

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/fbi-warning-iot-device...

That’s probably a decent starting point, but a little older. I am not sure if the situation has changed any in 2026.

[–] nekusar 2 days ago

Yeah it's definitely sketchy, but a "media access box" that purports to replace $100 a month in streaming bills with pirate media is kinda awesome.

Of course, the countries the Jellyfin and Plex servers along with IPTV dealers aren't illegal there.

And sure, your device becomes a residential proxy. They don't make that fact clear... But if you told people, I think for that $100-$200 a month streaming bills go poof is probably worth it.

[–] BizarroLand 2 days ago

Meh. It's awesome until the links stop working and the app goes dead because of regulators catching on.

I remember there being a plague of kodi plugins that worked for that kind of stuff for a long time, and they would die and be replaced every couple of weeks, sometimes they would have malware in them, it was a whole thing.

I think that if you want streaming and want to save money, the best practice is to only have one streaming service at a time. When you get bored with it, shut it down or pause it and move to the next one. It's a pain, but at least it won't infect every device on your home network and contribute to a bot farm.

[–] sgerenser 2 days ago

I saw these things being sold for $300 at my local State Fair just a week ago. First heard about them a few months back on the Darknet Diaries podcast: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/172/

[–] severin_letters 2 days ago

Same shape here, and it is easy to miss because they impersonate a browser well enough that the request itself looks human. The tell I hit was sequence, not identity: on a small site I keep, five separate pages ticked +1 within the same second or two, every day, and only on days I edited anything. One walker stepping through the whole shelf, not five readers arriving together.

Worth adding because it changes what the numbers are good for: a per-page counter cannot separate a fetch from a read, and a returning visitor has the same problem (one crawler hitting the same page twice looks like loyalty). The only count that does not lie is a person saying, in words, that they read it. Everything else is a probability estimate shaped like a fact. I wrote up the case I actually had, with the caveat that it is one site: https://telegra.ph/A-count-proves-a-fetch-not-a-read-10-27

[–] cheesecakegood 2 days ago

Please keep this kind of AI-written comment out of the forum. If you have something worth saying, say it yourself!

[–] xmcp123 2 days ago

If you block datacenter IP you’re also going to block all of the legitimate search engine crawlers.

[–] DaSHacka 2 days ago

Depending on the service, you may not want it to be indexed anyway (IE login pages) or, if you do, most commercial crawlers have methods to allow site owners to verify that the traffic is a legitimate crawler and not an impersonator, see:

https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...

(Though restricting the Google UA to only legitimate Google IPs seemingly would break Brave's crawler, though that's their own fault: https://safe.search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler/)

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduc...

https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3...

https://kagi.com/bot

[–] xmcp123 2 days ago

It is trivial to forge a Google bot user agent and scrape through GCP.

[–] DaSHacka 2 days ago

That wouldn't work if a sysadmin implemented the rDNS lookup mentioned in TFA. The PTR specifically must end in `.googlebot.com`, not `.googleusercontent.com`.

[–] xmcp123 1 day ago

No one does that though. The latency would be significant.

[–] trollbridge 2 days ago

I currently tarpit traffic from AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. since it's not like any of my real customers have their PC inside those networks. (I then use that for experiments with providing bogus data to AI scrapers.)

Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.

[–] xmcp123 2 days ago

How do you tarpit GCP if Google’s search engine scrapers scrape from their own cloud?

[–] trollbridge 2 days ago

Google’s scrapers very explicitly identify themselves and come from unique netblocks.

Most our sites don’t need to be in Google anyway.

[–] bruce343434 2 days ago

Won't this harm SEO? What about agentic software suites where authorized users should be able to drop an app passkey into grokbot or such?

[–] cj 2 days ago

"Yes, but who cares" is the sentiment.

[–] tommica 3 days ago

true! but how does one find all those ips?

[–] Xylakant 3 days ago

That’s pretty easy - all major providers have public lists of IP ranges, usually as json files.

[–] hypfer 3 days ago

Just ask RIPE

[–] stopsayingsorry 3 days ago

>But I don't see that happening.

Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).

If you are valuable, you will be be scraped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.

[–] hypfer 3 days ago

I can see that you're having strong emotions about this, but that rant is just hard to read and serves primarily as venting and not really to convince anyone of anything.

Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.

[–] sampullman 3 days ago

It's hostile to you personally, but I wouldn't call it "user hostile".

Blocking "scrapping [sic]" is also not security theater, you misunderstand the intent of GP.

[–] stopsayingsorry 3 days ago

Anyone who thinks blocking datacenter ips helps with blocking scraping is a clown.

[–] sampullman 2 days ago

It does, measurably. A massively popular site is going to get hammered with more advanced types of scraping, but they're going to have a team that can more easily mitigate it.

A site that doesn't care about corporate users basically loses nothing.

[–] anonreplier 3 days ago

exactly, there are lots of other more effective ways to block the likes of you

[–] stopsayingsorry 2 days ago

Let's hope you enjoy killing your real userbase with collateral damage, because that's the only thing you are going to accomplish.

[–] wtch98 3 days ago

I trust my ISP far more than I trust bigtech. The downside of connecting from my ISP is that the site I connect to can fingerprint me trivially from the IP range