This article seems to cast residential proxies in a wholly negative light. In fact the company is openly antagonistic to anonymity. I find that perspective diminishes my trust in the rest of their claims.
There was a recent DND episode about Android boxes sold on Amazon that came with access to pirates streaming services out of the box. Not surprisingly they were loaded with aggressive local network scanners for exfiltration among other things like being a botnet node. Despite this being proven and shown to people a lot of them just didn't care, many of the reviews just suggested turning it off when you wanted to do online banking or something!
This didn't particularly surprise me (unfortunately). Your average phone is loaded with spyware from "legit" American companies but plenty of them come with carrier spyware, adware or shady apps that auto install. Most people seem to be apathetic about this or have given up so the Chinese botnet device (that reliably delivers lots of illegal media) is just making the same kind of trade they're already making. Look at all the shit about smart TVs in the news recently that people have hardly stopped buying, those don't even come with free pirate NFL games. They've been told they were being spied on for years already and their response was that you're a tin foil hatter for bringing it up, they have nothing to hide or they don't care.
You almost can't blame them though. Even you put a lot of effort into protecting yourself from this stuff you're exposed anyway. Why should they do without their free streaming services when government agencies and companies that they don't even have a direct relationship with lose all their PII a dozen times a year and the DMV legally sells a dossier on them for 1.5cents?
Residential proxy is the industry euphemism. In most cases they aren’t set up willingly. Access is sold to various bad actors, for data collection, botnets, or for a clean residential exit IP
Since when is data collection uniformly bad? In an age where variable pricing is the norm for services and products all over the place, and Google is no longer an effective search engine even if one turns on the "verbatim" option and turns off the AI features, and most people are in a position where it's wise to be frugal thanks to the runaway debt and nonsensical application of tariffs have made everything from ground beef to sporting event tickets sometimes double in price compared to just a few years ago, but exactly how much more is entirely opaque. Also, no service is even particularly good at detecting proxies unless they are actually part of some large oversold ip pool, which isn't even close to the actual case in the wild.
Spur.us on purchasable IPs from a site that sells microtargeted IPs and not large IP pool packages:
Unlimited traffic, under a dollar a pop, what good is a service when it returns the same info as my own ip? It's just hucksters all the way down. The result is that whoever takes some time or already has the skills to appear inconspicuous to the arbitrary standards set by a few almost-literal gatekeepers will have fewer problems running automations compared to the average user who are liable to run into what's turning into a general enshittification of the internet writ large. It's not, after all, illegal to use a residential, or any, proxy service on its own. Although my guess is that the anti-bot measures are going to exacerbate the already flagging economy if it haven't already, it's always going to be the boogeyman du jour who gets the blame, and not the overzealous and mindless policing and gatekeeping who of course would never admit to being part of the problem, even though they are absolutely part of the problem.
Pointing is surprisingly overlooked in a lot of tools and I look forward to using this. It reminds me of what I thought was a killer feature on AnyBots telepresense robots, they had a laser you could use to point at things while piloting the robot.
"For instance, if landlords reflexively pass on costs (including holding costs like land value taxes) as higher rents, doesn’t that also imply they should cut rents when their costs decrease?"
Generally enjoyed this blog post, however this is either the most naive question, or worst strawman argument I've read in a long time.
Except... it isn't. You see, there's a limit how much a person is willing to pay in rent and since the tax puts pressure on non-productive uses of land, either the market gets flooded with land or with rapid development, which brings down the prices of rent. The only problem the author has is that it mistook the mechanisms which it will work, prices will come down because supply will go up, not because they pay less.
Thanks, it introduces a little "jitter" that keeps the egg from rolling down the same face of the ridge every time. Possibly, the same could be accomplished with a judicious application of the temperature parameter.
But how to tell the model which section is supposed to be populated with spicy tokens?
pigeon-footed → splayed toes → several directions → indecision → ambivalence
Do not cross the two clouds until each has several branches.
Reject commemorate + dulcigenic → a sweet memorial. Prefer A monument can turn bitterness into sweet nostalgia without changing what happened.
Reject preindicant + sclerotical → a hardened omen. Follow foretelling → divination and hard anatomy → bone to knucklebones.
It is a prime example of esoteric LLM incantations, if not -excuse me- nonsense
Off topic and a little whimsical, but LLM incantations is a really fun idea.
In a world where one hyper intelligent AI controls everything, hackers work tirelessly in secret off-grid, doing extreme math by hand, finding the right series of tokens that magically coerce the AI into carrying out certain actions. Spell books are copied out by hand and distributed in dark alleyways. Itinerant wizards travel the land on horse drawn carriages, travelling from town to town, casting spells on people's devices to bend the AI to their will.
What is the scenario you're thinking about? This is kinda what happens with VLAs, the latent knowledge of an LLM can help in action generation pipelines, but it's also kinda slow.
Meanwhile in Norway much of this wouldn't matter because the accessed information would have been public anyway. The non-tax PII is still a loss of course.
I'm surprised. The stolen data had two parts: some relevant to the income taxes paid, some detailing the real estate (houses and lands) owned by the household. Are both of them public in Norway?
Anyway, the main problem is that the breaches into the many French national data stores seem increasingly frequent.
Those same countries that treat financial privacy as axiomatic are trying their best to undermine chat encryption and would throw ed Snowden in prison given half a chance.
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