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Posted by microcode 1 day ago

Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs(spur.us)
259 points | 165 commentspage 2
lukax 1 day ago|
Well, that's how data for training LLMs is scraped.
brikym 23 hours ago||
And price comparison sites big companies don't like since they want to price discriminate. There are positives to it.
handle584 16 hours ago||
Not only this, it also enables sneaker/pokemon/5090 scalping, Chinese/Russian using ChatGPT/Claude. A residential IP in the US is very valuable elsewhere.
h4kunamata 21 hours ago||
I have a 2018 Samsung QLED SmartTV, I use Pihole to block data collection and since it has Google DNS hardcoded in it, I use OPNSense Firewall rules to enforce any DNS request to Pihole.

My TV has only one AD that no longer shows for years now, LG is ADs all over the place. My home setup allows me to have a smartTV without compromises it.

Since it runs TizenOS, I can use my Linux PC to install remove apps from it like installing Jellyfin App so I do not depend on Samsung releasing it to the app store.

cullenking 22 hours ago||
I just implemented bot and crawler detection as well as ASN based blocking for our website, because I’ve seen a massive rise in scraping coming from VPNs and other networks that mix legit and illegitimate traffic to our service. My theory is that small companies are scraping the shit out of everything and selling results to llm creators. It’s going to be interesting to see this expand into residential internet providers through holes like this… wild new world!
xnx 23 hours ago||
What portion of Fox's acquisition thesis for Roku was activating residential proxies (distributed AI crawling!) across all the units?
kristianp 22 hours ago|
Is bypassing scraping blocks the main purpose of these residential proxy networks?
duskwuff 22 hours ago||
Yes. For instance, Bright Data describes itself, on its home page, as the "all in one platform for proxies and web scraping".
kristianp 22 hours ago||
From the article it can be used by botnets as well, linking to https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/01/the-kimwolf-botnet-is-st...
duskwuff 22 hours ago||
Oh, I'm sure there's all sorts of illicit use as well. But scraping is what the network is being actively marketed for, and it probably amounts to most of their traffic by volume.
hnburnsy 20 hours ago||
TV never connected to internet, streaming box, and streaming box on its own isolated vlan (or guest network)
throwawa14223 23 hours ago||
So is there a residential proxy blacklist I can run on my firewall? Any action I can take as an admin to put a stop to this?
topranks 12 hours ago|
It’s very tricky because the IPs are all on normal user ranges you can’t block without blocking those users.

The company behind this blog - spur.us - offer some paid services I think. There is also this project from Wikimedia which uses that data to produce more manageable lists:

https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/sre/CIDERGRINDER

captn3m0 23 hours ago||
Has anyone reversed their SDKs to run a swarm that captures enough traffic to see what requests are actually getting made?
pocksuppet 23 hours ago||
It'll be HTTPS but you might be able to know the website, if it proxies DNS or doesn't use ESNI.
topranks 12 hours ago||
A lot of web scraping. The ones that got KimWolf’d were/are doing a lot of DDoS (SYN floods etc).
londons_explore 16 hours ago||
This is a good thing.

If you could anonymously proxy from anywhere to anywhere else, the internet would be region-lock-free and anonymous again, just like it was to support it's boom in 1999.

Good on these guys I say. When it becomes normalized, we can integrate these 'privacy proxies' into desktop and mobile OS's too.

topranks 12 hours ago||
Nah it’s messing up peoples home internet, and massively abused to perform denial of service attacks and scraping of web content by large AI companies who are otherwise blocked.

Your vision of a randomly-routed mesh internet overlay is also not very scalable bandwidth or latency wise.

jhartikainen 14 hours ago|||
Good point, hadn't thought at all of this kind of perspective. Though the fact it's some dodgy residential proxy provider that runs this stuff makes me feel like it isn't going to become available for something good.
ThePowerOfFuet 14 hours ago||
So you think until someone breaks your door down because of something sent from your connection.
whalesalad 22 hours ago||
I have a few LG OLED tv's. I do not ever connect them to the internet - I just treat them as dumb hdmi/dp displays. One is driven by an Apple TV, the other is connected to a Linux gaming pc. Haven't had any issues at all.
NordStreamYacht 21 hours ago|
I have my smart tv on a separate router and it's powered off most of the time. An accident of wiring.
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