Unit 42's write-up on Kimwolf v7 from August has a detail that's easy to skim past. The botnet spreads by misusing residential proxy services to reach Android Debug Bridge on local networks. So your cheap TV box doesn't have to face the internet. If something on your network is working as a proxy exit, whoever buys that exit may be able to reach what's next to it.

Some Android TV boxes ship with ADB enabled on port 5555, with no authentication. Unit 42's advice is to treat these boxes as untrusted, and to disable ADB or restrict it to USB.

I'd also put them on their own VLAN or guest network and scan your LAN for 5555 this week. It takes a minute and it's the one check here you can do without trusting anybody's marketing.

Disclosure: we run a proxy service, so this is our own industry's mess. Curious whether anyone here has found 5555 open on a box they own.

Easy one to miss if you run a lot of pages in one automated Chrome behind a proxy: Chrome allows 32 simultaneous connections through an HTTP/1.1 proxy. Past that, requests wait inside the browser before the proxy ever sees them.

So throughput sits flat no matter how many tabs you add, and it's tempting to blame the proxy and go looking for a bigger plan. That won't help. Splitting the work over several browsers will.

Two more Chrome oddities in the same area. A user:pass@ URL in --proxy-server fails with net::ERR_NO_SUPPORTED_PROXIES, because Chrome doesn't use credentials embedded in proxy settings. And a password-protected SOCKS5 server doesn't work at all, since Chrome supports no SOCKS5 auth methods, so you get net::ERR_SOCKS_CONNECTION_FAILED whatever your code does.

Easy one to miss if you're checking a Shopify store for other markets: a VPN or proxy won't show you different shipping rates. Shopify ties rates to the shipping zone of the checkout address, so a local IP changes nothing there. A test checkout with a local address does.

Prices, currency, catalog and translations you can check for free in the admin: Markets, click the market, then More actions > View online store. Products > View as shows the market's currency and which products aren't published for it.

What the preview can't show is the IP-driven stuff: the automatic redirect, geo app popups, the cookie banner, apps that block VPNs. For that you need a connection in the country and a clean browser profile, and you have to load the root domain, because Shopify only redirects on the first page a visitor opens. Land on /de/ directly and you skip the very redirect you wanted to test.

The cookie banner is the sneaky one. With automated privacy settings on, Shopify sets it up for UK and EEA visitors when you have active markets there, so from a US desk you just never see it.

How are you handling multi-market QA for stores like this, manual passes or something scripted?

If you've got anything running on Google's Custom Search JSON API, it's on a clock. Google closed it to new customers and their overview page says it's gone on January 1, 2027.

Easy to miss in the docs: one call returns 10 results and a query tops out at 100. So pulling the top 100 for a single keyword is 10 billable calls.

For checking your own site's rankings there's an easier path anyway. The Search Console API hands you query, page, country and device rows, up to 25,000 per request, and it's all within Google's rules.

Anyone already moved off Custom Search? What did you switch to?