To avoid throttling / blockage, web scraping (data extraction) for AI is being re-routed through residential smart TVs by Israeli company Bright Data.

https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/

The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy - Include Security Research Blog

In this post we look under the hood of BrightData's SDK and how it turns ordinary consumer TVs into exit nodes of an enormous commercial, residential proxy network leveraged by the AI industry to scrape web data and train language learning models.

Include Security Research Blog
@aaronpettman always fucking Israeli companies in the middle of terrible spyware/malware or "ad tech". Fuck.

@aaronpettman how to stop this bullshit with #pihole

Approach 1: DNS block (trivial, effective for network-routed devices):

proxyjs.brdtnet.com
proxyjs.luminatinet.com
proxyjs.bright-sdk.com
clientsdk.bright-sdk.com
clientsdk.brdtnet.com

Blocking proxyjs.* kills the peer tunnel without affecting any customer who legitimately uses Bright Data’s customer-facing proxy service on a different domain.