Defrauding ad networks doesn't seem like a bad thing, although using my internet connection as a proxy is obviously terrible. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my connection is being sold as a VPN service by the vendor.
It'll be a marginal effect, but fake clicks impacts the ad buyer, which then impacts their financials and pricing.
The only winner here is the scammers running the fake affiliate sites on which these sticks are "clicking". Or, am I missing some facet of this enterprise?
What this misses is the person buying the TV stick doesn't care about the impact on the ad market. The bigger problem is residential proxying, because their IP will end up getting used for something bad.
Probably, but in the worst-case scenario you could unwittingly become an accessory to a felony if the proxy is used to access CSAM. Especially if the proxy ends up caching files.
There have been cases of tor exit node operators being investigated for CSAM. Im not aware of any charges but that's the sort of thing where being in the vicinity of the investigation can be almost as bad.
They can stop paying for obtrusive ads where either they make everyone's life worse or get defrauded, save money using only ethical advertising and use this saved money to improve the quality of their products or pay their workers a little better.
Another winner is the person who gets to watch cheap digital TV, without putting together a usable antenna and limiting their reception to the broadcast channels that are nearby.
I mean: They just pay the money, plug the thing in, push some buttons, and: TV happens. Right?
You really don't want fraudulent clicks ("invalid traffic", per industry lingo) coming from your home network, because any publishers (apps and websites, per normal-people lingo) who use tools designed to block invalid traffic might start flagging legitimate traffic from your network.
Can confirm. I used to use Ad Nauseam (Firefox extension that clicks all ads), eventually stopped when I was getting captcha'd left and right.
Also, visitors on my wifi started getting strange ads. Yes I threw off the algo, but I'm a guy with wife, I'd rather get car ads than like divorce lawyers + gay dating sites.
Theres the question of whether or not the fraudulent advertisement clicking is using enough traffic to inconvenience or impose fees upon the user but otherwise I agree with you and am tempted to buy one just to fuck with advertisers.
Backdoors and spying are also a problem in theory except at this point you can't even trust "legitimate" companies on that front so it's a moot point.
> otherwise I agree with you and am tempted to buy one just to fuck with advertisers.
How that actually works in practice is that your favorite sites make less money and your IP gets a bad reputation so you CAPTCHAs or outright blocked. There’s no “sticking it to the man” here, just contributing to the frictional grind making the internet worse for ordinary people.
You are drastically over-estimating how much fondness I have had for the web ever since social media companies and search providers colluded to drive everybody into their walled-off fiefdoms.
Frankly, I pay for most of the things I care about in the internet nowadays. Substack, Medium, newspapers, youtube premium, manning books, safari books. TV streaming.
The ad supported web is, with very few exceptions, useless.
If all they did was shove banner ads for boner-pills in my face like they used to 25 years ago I wouldn't mind and I might even turn off adblock. The problem is that modern advertisements on the internet are spyware at best and a malware vector at worst.
It's arguably fraudulent to even refer to it as "advertising" at this point, clearly that's just a cover to give them an excuse to sell data to silicon valley corporations that are unironically named after fictional devices used by sci-fi/fantasy villains to manipulate people.
Fraud that destroys market trust in a market that mostly deals in surveillance and selling intrusive data that was collected mostly unknowingly from the subject seems great to everyone who has any amount of integrity.
Exactly. I consider defrauding ad networks even a civic duty of legitimate resistance. The issue I see with those boxes is the risk of being involved in actual crimes due to the residencial proxy.
why is running a proxy a bad thing? someone profiting off it could be bad maybe, but even that is good if it pays for my subscription.
but compare running tor nodes, and especially exit nodes. that surely would be a good thing, so at least if you think tor is good then running a proxy should be the same and it should be normalized.
doing it in secret without the user knowing is what's bad
Indeed without my permission is implied. Without it, you have no idea what traffic is being routed and could be on the hook for something nasty like CSAM.
Those are different issues. Permission doesn't mean you know what the content is, and lack of permission doesn't mean they're going to load anything weird or bad. Lack of permission implies worse ethics overall, but an operation focused on clicking ads will be loading relatively normal sites.
No. You would not be “on the hook” for this as they implied. They are fearmongering. Even if a statute could somehow be stretched to cover it, it would be a nightmare to prosecute something like this. The media would jump all over it.
From the outside, I don't see the problem. The sites I visit, including LWN, never seem slow or have downtime as a result of this increase in traffic. I hear complaints from people hosting small sites, but they never seem to include concrete examples of downtime or measurably bad user experience. Why does it matter if the server load is high if everything stays functioning? Going from 5-20% to 60-80% load hardly seems like a catastrophe to me when the remaining headroom was not going to be used for anything else. Having your data that's public-enough to be scraped/cited/parodied/ridiculed included in a training set also doesn't seem like a problem. Are they struggling to pay bandwidth usage bills? Is there some actually-necessary intervention required to keep things running smooth, as opposed to panicking and taking unnecessary preventative action?
if proxies are legal, then i am not associated with what goes through my proxy. ISPs ate not associated with the activity that goes through them either.
and what about tor? should that be shut down too? or is there a legitimate reason for it to use residential proxies?
