A mobile proxy changes address mid-session: what a platform keeps

Your session lives in your own browser: it is a key the platform issued at login, and it is not tied to an address. A new address in the middle of the day does not sign you out on its own.

What a platform remembers is different: the address the key used to arrive from and the one it arrives from now. It weighs the distance between those two against what a live phone does.

1. 1

   The key in the browser

   It was issued to you at login and is not tied to an address.

2. 2

   The address on every request

   It sits on every request, and there is no removing it.

3. 3

   The distance between the two

   Whether a live mobile network ever makes a jump like that.

On a live phone the address changes by itself: a move between towers, a walk out of the metro, a modem rebooted overnight. A platform sees this every day and does not read it as a trick.

A jump inside one network and one country looks ordinary. What does not is an address that reached another carrier or another continent within five minutes.

Your profile takes its clock and its language list from the country of its address. The address moves to another country, the clock stays where it was, and one visit hands the platform two countries at once.

Each of the 114 sets names a country of its own: every country there has its own timezone and its own order of languages. So the cost sits not in the address but in the pair that no longer answers for it.

The interval comes from a list: do not change, every ten minutes, every half hour, every hour. There is no free entry on purpose: a change every minute would burn a seller's daily allowance within the hour, and that allowance is what you paid for.

The first item on the list is an honest no. The countdown starts from the minute you opened the profile, and only open profiles are counted at all.

One mobile proxy can sit on five profiles at once. The interval comes due on each of them, and one command goes to the seller for all five.

Otherwise those same five profiles would burn your allowance five times faster, and a neighbour would have its address pulled about several times in a row. The old country is forgotten on all five.

All of this is about the button in the proxy library. You see the address twice: measured fresh before the command and again four seconds after it. Those two are what get compared, not yesterday's note about the proxy.

There are three answers, and all three are said out loud. The address changed, the address stayed, the check did not go through: the third of those is not a softer way of saying the second. A change that runs on a timer shows none of this yet: it works silently.

1. 1

   The address before

   Measured now, not taken from an older note.

2. 2

   Four seconds of pause

   The pause is our choice. A modem sometimes needs longer, and then the third answer comes back.

3. 3

   The address after

   No answer, and you are told the check did not go through.

A timer runs inside the app, and once a minute it looks at which open profiles have run out their interval. The interval counts from the minute the profile was opened or from the previous change, whichever came later.

A closed profile is left alone: its change allowance at the seller is not burned while it does nothing. Open it again and the count starts afresh from that minute.

You enter the IP change link into the proxy record in the library, not into a profile. That is what makes the change shared: however many profiles sit on one proxy, the link is one, and it is pulled once per tick.

The link is taken over http and https. A link that arrived from the server will not be followed into your private network; one you typed yourself the app treats as yours.

A change of address on a mobile proxy usually leaves the country as it was, but the app does not count on that. After a change the exit country is forgotten for every profile on that proxy, not only the one that asked for it.

On the next launch the country is asked again, and the clock and the language settle by it. So a profile whose address moved from one country to another is not left with a foreign clock.

With several proxies and more profiles, the library hands addresses out around a ring: the first profile gets the first address, the second the second, down the list and then from the top again. Across closed profiles, fifty profiles and ten addresses land exactly five to an address.

An open profile is skipped and keeps its address, but it does not hold its place: everyone standing behind it takes the next address around the ring. Hand out addresses with the profiles closed if an even layout matters to you.

The shortest interval on the list is ten minutes. Five minutes stand as a floor on another road, for those who create profiles from their own scripts rather than from the window: there an interval under five minutes is raised to five.

The reason is the same either way: at a seller of mobile addresses a change costs money or is counted per day, and a profile changing its address every minute would burn the allowance within the hour.

Open a profile, write down the address and the country, wait for a change and read both again. Check the clock and the language of the profile in the same pass.

The country held, and to a platform the change looks like an ordinary move between towers. The country changed but the clock did not, and you are naming two countries at once.