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If you want to do something about the onslaught of AI crawling DDoSing every website on the internet: check to see if something you own is a residential proxy. Smart TVs are the most common culprit. Ideally, disconnect them from the internet entirely, but if not that at least uninstall unused apps.

There are basically two kinds of residential proxies: apps that act as a proxy service as their monetization model (sometimes in lieu of ads) and straight up malware compromising IoT devices. The former is very common on televisions, which are always on and easy to ignore.

While you're in there turning off motion smoothing, do this for your relatives or parents' tvs too. Any Tizen or Android TV app that isn't a streaming service you pay for has a pretty good chance to be a residential proxy. Apparently *one in four* Tizen apps had a residential proxy SDK.

Most people don't even *know* that this residential proxy industry exists, but their existence is right now one of the main reasons why AI scraping is such a problem. Those are the people supplying the AI scrapers with more IP addresses than you can fail2ban.

And it's entirely unregulated, totally shady shit. Those companies will publicly claim that they have "consent" from the owners of these devices to use them for proxying, but the reality is that they 1. have no way of really knowing if app developers got effective consent, 2. no they didn't lol

These companies explicitly market themselves to people running AI scrapers; Bright Data, probably the biggest resproxy provider, leads their sales pitch with "experience seamless scraping". Every time you see that annoying Anubis loading bar, *these fuckers are to blame.*

whoa. we never installed anything on our samsung tv, do you know if this is solely an issue with third party apps? this is the first i heard of it and the article doesn't say