Story
An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation
1 report
1 website
1 discussion
Latest report
Overview
Scraper attacks originate from numerous sources, often involving millions of unique IP addresses making multiple requests in a short period. The user-agent field in these requests is typically manipulated to appear as legitimate browser traffic.
Summary from lwn.net.
Reports
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Community reactions
Each reaction summarizes sampled comments from the linked discussion.
Hacker News · lwn.net
Hacker News discussion ↗
Historical count: 5 · 5 saved in sample · Historical sample
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Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-07-11.
- Praise: A better common crawl could reset the baseline for information accessibility, leveling the playing field against AI labs hoarding data.
- Praise: The push for a common crawl database would eliminate the need for scraping, benefiting both website operators and users.
- Praise: Residential proxies are seen as the last anti-hero of the open internet, providing access where traditional methods fail.
- Concern: The sheer volume of scraping is alarming, with millions of requests raising ethical concerns and the potential for abuse.
- Concern: Using residential proxies is highly unethical, with many comparing it to botnets, which undermines trust in internet practices.
- Concern: The intensity of bot traffic is damaging to low-volume users, as aggressive bot defense measures end up blocking legitimate crawlers.