7 ms·

sounds like a botnet to me

• ronsor 1y ago
  because it is, but it's a legal botnet
• derefr 1y ago
  Eh. To me, a bot is something users don't know they're running, and would shut off if they knew it was there. Proxyware is more like a crypto miner — the original kind, from back when crypto-mining was something a regular computer could feasibly do with pure CPU power. It's something users intentionally install and run and even maintain, because they see it as providing them some potential amount of value. Not a bot; just a P2P network client. Compare/contrast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_(P2P) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_(P2P) — pieces of software which offer users a similar devil's bargain, but instead of "you get a VPN; we get to use your computer as a VPN", it's "you get to pirate things; we get to use your hard drive as a cache node in our distributed, encrypted-and-striped pirated media cache." (And both of these are different still to something like BitTorrent, where the user only ever seeds what they themselves have previously leeched — which is much less questionable in terms of what sort of activity you're agreeing to play host to.)
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
    AFAIK much of the proxyware runs without the informed consent of the user. Sure, there may be some note on page 252 of the EULA of whatever adware the user downloaded, but most users wouldn't be aware of it.
• whatsupdog 1y ago
  Botnet with extra steps.