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I doubt the 50K number. This isn't a personal attack, I'm just speaking from experience at personally running a proxy database for more than a year. We spider a lot of the free sites, as well as doing a bit of probability-based scanning (e.g. concentrated probes where we have multiple proxies in the same /24, and test probes where we have multiple proxies in the same /16), and testing inbound connections for proxies. I ran this off my cablemodem for 10 months, so indeed, DSL would have no problem scanning thousands. Now that we're sitting on 10Mbps we've improved our scanning drastically.
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I am not sure what you doubt about it. It isn't a theory, it's something I have done multiple times. As for "probability" scanning, that is just a natural part of finding proxies. There are certain ranges which tend to be a great deal more fruitful than others. A proxy-scanning newbie may not know that and would have less productive scans, but I don't think newbies are who we need protecting from.
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The oldest open proxy in the database is 194.78.zzz.240:80 (added 393 days ago).
The oldest anonymous open proxy in the database is 194.78.zzz.240:80 (added 393 days ago).
...all proxies aren't as transient as you may think...
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I did not say that all proxies were transient, only that a great number get found and die each day. As long as we're on the subject, though, <B>most</B> proxies <B>are</B> extremely transient. Proxies that remain open and usable for 393 days are the exception and not the rule. You know that. If you have been doing this for as long as you say, you must realize that. In fact, that is one of the main reasons your list needs to be of only 9K proxies, because of all the open proxies scanned and distributed in a given period of time, most of them die rather quickly.
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...though they certainly are transient to an extent. Point being, you could give me a list of a billion supposed proxy IPs, it's worthless unless it's scanned repeatedly every day. Rosinstruments' site (and many other free proxy sites) are good examples of "big proxy lists" gone awry, where not only do many of the IPs listed not actually proxy HTTP connections, they aren't tested routinely enough to make the list worth anything. Even if you could come up with 50K proxies by this weekend, 40K of them would be dead by the time you finished compiling the list. And there's the rub. No other site probes as frequently as we do, no other site lists as many real, live, verified proxies as we do. I've been looking for viable competition for 393 days and I haven't found it yet.
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As I said, I am not familiar with either of the sites you listed so I can't really say anything about them. To the issue of you vs your competition, that's between you and your customers. I am not comparing your service to any others. I've never paid for proxies because I have no problem getting my own when I need them. Your service may very well be the best of its kind, but you are expresing doubt about higher numbers of proxies just because you don't have that many. That's a bit egotistical.
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I find it difficult to believe that you had 140K valid, working open proxies at a time. Again, this is not a personal attack, I don't know you so I can't argue.
I refer back to atomintersoft who claims to have 200K+ proxies, most of which either are not public proxies, or were never proxies to begin with; and their number has been going up for years - if someone had 140K at a time, wouldn't there be freelists out there with that many, or more?
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Lets be honest, here, that is a personal attack. You've basically called me a liar. That's fine, I have a thick skin and I am not concerned with whether or not you believe me. The statement that I had 140,000 working proxies at one time is simple fact. To be more accurate, it was closer to 147,000. I rounded down.
About the "if someone had..." part, I don't see how one logically follows the other. I spent weeks culling those from various sources, weeding out the dead and useless ones and scanning my own to compile the list. At it's height, (both working and non-working) I had over 800,000 lines in my proxy database just from lists I found on the net. All proxies were by IP address, so there were no duplicates (there were gateways, of course, but no duplicate IPs). The vast majority of those 800,000 were crap, but between those and the ones I scanned I put together a whopping list of usable proxies. Obviously, they were of the flaky sort (up and down, dead in a day, etc) but if someone were looking to conduct shady activities, that list would have been more than enough.
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I think to the days of cyberarmy.com's proxy list, where their "tester" would report positive if a given host was responding on the speficied port. There was no actual attempt made to use the proxy. There are many such so-called "proxy lists" made up of IPs which are nothing more than webservers which don't actually relay HTTP requests.
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Again, you are referring to other specific services that I have no experience with (I am familiar with CyberArmy, but I never used their proxy list) and none of the places you mention are among those I visit or have visited in the past. Even if you have the best up-to-date verified list available from any service like your own, it's still only 9K proxies. They may all work all the time, but a person who wants to hack or card or hitbot only needs proxies that will be live for hours or even less. Those are extremely unlikely to be on your list because they are up and down so fast and those make up the majority of the proxies in use.
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In other words, the majority of people can't find 50,000 proxies on their own by this weekend, eh?
Anyway, I ain't saying you're BSing, just saying I have a tough time believing your numbers, and an even tougher time believing that those numbers could possibly be recent.
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Most people probably can't find 50,000 by this weekend. The thing is, they only need to find, say, 9,500 to completely get around being blocked by your service.
Again, you're expressing doubt about my statements. Take some time and look around at my posts. You'll find plenty of people here who don't like me because we've had an argument or I don't share their views or some other petty reason but you won't find anyone who will tell you I've ever done them wrong in a business deal or lied to them or claimed to have something I don't have or be able to provide something I can't provide or be able to do something I can't do. Basically, you're not going to find a single person who has had any dealings with me that will tell you I am dishonest in any way.
I never said that list was recent. It has been a couple of years since I had the giant list but I have had use for proxies dozens of times between then and now and I am quite confident that I could produce what I said I could if I had incentive to do so. Leaving that aside, I could most certainly find more than 9,000.
My reply was not meant to imply that your site is sub-standard. I just felt the need to say something when you basically waved off the idea that anyone could have more than you.
SpaceAce