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How to Use SOCKS5 Proxies for Automated Data Collection?

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In an age dominated by the free flow of information, the ability to send, collect, and analyze data the fastest gives modern companies and freelancers a great opportunity to dominate their respective markets. Nowadays, even for business models that are less dependent on the constant flow of knowledge, the inclusion of data collection mechanisms has had a positive impact on their growth and development.

Knowledge is power, and there is hardly any instance where the impact of automated data aggregation did not provide fantastic results. Nowadays, you can find many internet users practicing data scraping and mining skills to fuel their hobbies, save money through the discovery of affordable deals or transform the developing skill into a potential career.

However, despite the immense benefits, the rules of Internet Protocol are not too favorable for automated data gathering. If you include the abundance of surveillance tools on popular websites, collecting information with bots and automated scripts can be very hard, even near impossible. That being said, if access to valuable public data is almost non-existent, what is the key to successful information extraction? How do the best data scientists manage to collect massive data sets and never get punished with an IP ban in the process?

Thankfully, there is an easy but very effective solution that protects all data scrapers with incredible results – SOCKS5 proxies. In this beginner’s guide, we will discuss the basics of web scraping and explain why many data scientists buy SOCKS5 proxy servers to maximize the effectiveness of data collection bots. For example, with a good provider by your side, you can use multiple scrapers on a popular site and never get caught. The best suppliers in the industry offer great deals that let you buy SOCKS5 proxy servers with various available adjustments. You can even pick the source of your IP address, be it a datacenter, residential or mobile proxy server. For business-related use cases, most companies buy SOCKS5 proxy servers with a residential IP because it provides the highest level of anonymity. As we continue discussing the benefits of intermediary servers, keep in mind that this type yields the best possible results.

Why is SOCKS5 the Best Proxy Protocol?

Proxy servers hide your IP address by adding an additional stop for your web connection, where its identity gets stripped, and the server continues the connection on your behalf but under a different network identity. In many cases, proxy services are restricted to browsing sessions, meaning they only protect internet connections via your browser app.

The SOCKS5 protocol expands the use of intermediary servers by providing support for TCP and UDP connections, which effectively covers streaming, gaming, torrent downloads, and other use cases. This includes the use of web scrapers and other data collection tools.

Automated Web Scraping Explained

Data scraping tools download the targeted web page and parse its information, leaving only the most relevant data shown in a readable and understandable format. With this method, modern companies successfully track any changes and decisions made by competitors and other parties.

For example, if you are running a business that sells furniture, it might be a good idea to find your top competitors and scrape their websites. If they sell similar or identical products, keeping an eye on their pricing will help you undercut them, prepare discount deals, or include additional offers that they lack. The possibilities are endless, but without sufficient flow of information, any changes start to feel like inadequate predictions.

Main Benefits of SOCKS5 Proxies in Web Scraping

The addition of SOCKS5 proxies unlocks the unprecedented efficiency and scalability of the data collection process that is otherwise heavily restricted by web protection tools and algorithms. They provide the necessary level of anonymity by masking the data scraper’s IP address. With the help of a legitimate proxy provider, users can customize rotation options and start swapping IPs at specific time intervals and never get flagged for bot use.

If there are instances where website access is restricted in your location or your main IP got banned by the site’s owner, you can start celebrating, as those limitations no longer exist thanks to SOCKS5 proxies. After informing the provider of what servers you need, you can pivot your connection through proxies in different locations and regain access to the site without any problems.

Unrestricted access to data is already a major victory, but the perfect opportunities for scalability make everything infinitely better. With an appropriate subscription that unlocks access to a massive network of residential proxy IPs, you can use hundreds of web scraping tools at the same time to significantly speed up collection efforts and never get caught.

SOCKS5 Proxy Strategies for Effective Data Scraping

Below are the most common approaches for using SOCKS5 proxies to get the most out of web scraping. Make sure to test them before moving to your main targets to get the most out of both tools and their beautiful combination.

IP Rotation Intervals

Most proxy providers that offer SOCKS5 proxies also have the previously mentioned IP rotation options with customizable intervals. With constant and irregular changes to the scraping bot’s IP address, it is far less likely to be identified as a non-human connection.

Speed optimization

SOCKS5 proxies lose less internet speed than other proxy types, which allows you to reach and collect information faster, a perk that is crucial when targeting multiple websites at the same time.

Scalability

With optimized speeds and customized identity rotation, modern companies can distribute access into multiple parallel connections and protect each one with quality residential IPs.

Summary

Among the available proxy types, SOCKS5 proxies are the best option for many use cases, including automated data collection efforts. With unlimited access to remote locations and the best residential servers for a proper disguise, businesses collect valuable insights that let them evolve, expand, and dominate their respective market.

Fundamental AI Problem Solved by UK Startup Zoea for Code Generation

London-based AI startup, Zoea Ltd, has created a ground-breaking yet simple approach that massively minimises the combinatorial explosion in certain classes of problems. This phenomenon arises when the number of potential states in a system grows exponentially, such as the possible board configurations in a chess game, which makes solving many problems extremely difficult, if not impossible. The issue is particularly prevalent in AI but can also arise in other domains. 

The new approach has been developed within the context of the existing Zoea code generation system. Zoea transforms a set of test cases, comprising example inputs and corresponding outputs, into code directly, using a classic AI technique called Inductive Programming. Inductive Programming provides significant benefits over deep learning, such as greater transparency and the elimination of the need for training. However, it also suffers from the combinatorial explosion, which was the primary problem that Zoea set out to solve. 

Zoea’s breakthrough method reduces the amount of work required by between five and twenty orders of magnitude, depending on the size of the required program. This is equivalent to the difference between a problem taking around 950 years to solve verses taking just three seconds. 

The approach relies on the fact that programming languages have approximately 200 instructions, but most individual programs use fewer than ten of them. Therefore, if one could guess the instructions required for a given problem, it would be much easier to solve. In the new approach, guesses take the form of thousands of overlapping subsets of instructions, each containing between ten and fifty instructions derived from existing code. 

The probability of at least one subset containing all the required instructions is very high, as the distribution of instructions used by human developers is highly skewed and these patterns are preserved in the subsets. The subsets also allow problems to be tackled by hundreds or thousands of computers in parallel, with minimal duplication of effort due to overlap. Furthermore, even with thousands of subsets, less than ten guesses are required to find a solution in 50% of cases. 

This approach will enable Zoea to produce much larger programs in considerably less time, making Inductive Programming a more compelling option for AI-based code generation. Additionally, variations of this approach may help address the combinatorial explosion in other areas of AI and computing. 

“Some of the best brains in AI have been trying to solve this problem for decades” says Edward McDaid, CTO at Zoea Ltd. “The answer has in fact been hiding in plain sight the whole time”. 

“So far we’ve only scratched the surface with this new approach. There are a lot of improvements and refinements that are possible which could deliver even bigger benefits”. 

Full details of the approach and the results have been peer reviewed, published and were recently presented at the ICAART 2023 AI conference in Lisbon. 

A preprint of the paper is available here and a non-technical blog post is available here.