I've banned this account because we don't allow single-purpose accounts on HN, and your account has been doing that for quite some time now.

We ban such accounts regardless of what the single purpose happens to be. Pre-existing agendas are not what HN is for and destroy the curious conversation that it is supposed to be for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

People think this is causing issues for data collection for LLMs, but in reality it's not and there are several very trivial mechanisms to employ in data collection to bypass the "poison data" issue. The internet landscape was already poisoned with fake data, fringe conspiracies, and text before this Poison Fountain initiative.

> Apps are not infected with NetNut. This is just Google abusing their monopoly position to hurt its competitors.

If apps ship with stealth backdoors to sell access to the user's internal residential network, that's malware. I doubt any users want app providers to sell access to their private file server and anything else on their local network.

It doesn't seem like monopoly abuse to exclude such malware from application stores, just like key loggers or apps intercepting other apps network traffic without the user being aware of it (say the banking app's network traffic and password entry).

    if (addr.isSiteLocalAddress() || addr.isLoopbackAddress()) {
        LogUtils.e("PopaTunnelAsyncThread", "Hacking? The Host Resolved Ip is " + addr + " on tunnel id:" + tunnelId);
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Hacking? The tunnel host resolved ip is internal");
    }

Noone complained we can't discriminate DC IPs, though to be fair some (imo bad) operators did just that. This is not even about preventing bots, which has perfectly legitimate usecases (eg. Internet Archive).

This is about filtering out bad bots/actors who have no respect for your resources and will drain all of it causing bad experience for everyone. But because they know they don't respect robots.txt or even simple rate-limiting, they have to employ so-called residential VPNs. They're residential in that they route through real user connections, and so you can't block the IP/subnet without dropping a certain amount of legitimate human-driven traffic.

Personal example: some time ago, i had to disable a wordpress plugin on a site that was causing 100% CPU usage on the whole box (hosting dozens of wordpress instances). That plugin was a simple calendar, but a bot was repeatedly scraping non-existent (or rather, "no event planned for this day") pages for every date in the calendar that you can represent in the DB timestamp, clearing the cache as it went to try and find new events for 1000 years ago. Whoever operates this IP space doesn't matter to me, i'd just like to block them because they don't respect robot.txt… but i can't because they use a "residential proxy" and will change IP address every hour or so.

This is definitely an issue, where data centre addresses are, by default, second class citizens or even persona non grata. The problem is that this reputation has been, unfortunately, well-earned.

There's no easy answer here. The ephemerality and pseudonymity of VPS address usage screams untrustworthy, and the only way to reign that in is better identification of who is using the VPS/address or significantly more restrictive rules applied to data/port usage. And I'm not sure if I like the general direction that points towards - away from the "open internet".