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Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
- il-b 2mo agoThe authors are proud of facilitating the theft of intellectual property. Disgusting.
- phoghed 2mo agoDid you rage equally against the machine when wget --mirror came out?
- zombot 2mo agoIs it possible to give negative stars to a GitHub repo? This one would be a prime candidate for that feature.
- tomsop 2mo ago[flagged]
- newaccountman2 2mo agoodd name; shouldn't it be named after something that stealthily infiltrates fortresses?
- LoganDark 2mo agoTrojan Horse probably wouldn't make a very good name for a browser.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoSince my grade-school mascot/team was "The Trojans" and my adopted hometown is firmly rooted in pre-Christian Greek culture and mythology, I am currently studying the Trojan War, and I may observe that "Trojan" is an extremely perspicacious brand-name for condoms, more than the average guy would expect.
- abtonmoy 2mo agowhich is exactly the problem, a condom is famous for stopping things getting through and we do the literal opposite.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoActually condoms are famous for being quite unreliable and failing. People using them are often uninformed and inept, using them incorrectly and hastily. This is exactly why they are distributed with gusto by certain services that profit from “surprise pregnancy”.
- newaccountman2 2mo agololwtf, not expected a conspiracy I expected to see someone touting Doesn't even make sense; clearly they have a non-zero preventative effect, so there would be no benefit from such a service[0] handing out condoms. It would be worse for them than doing nothing. [0] I doubt a for-profit company just raking in dough from abortions exists, sounds like some dumbass Fox News bullshit, but admittedly, it is luckily not a space with which I am familiar lol
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- kfhfardin 2mo ago[dead]
- ArmanLuthra 2mo agofellow contributor on this. we thought of it the other way round: your automation is the fortress, and every bot-detector trying to fingerprint it is the siege. also most good burglar names were taken on PyPI
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- arhamshahrier 2mo agoin my defence, i did lobby hard for "GuyWhoWavesYouThroughTheGate"
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoAlgae
- TrevorFSmith 2mo agoIs it ethical to scrape when a site has explicitly blocked bots? I know a fair number of people who run small sites who are already considering closing them down because the bots are relentlessly hammering their sites and driving up hosting costs.
- est 2mo ago> Is it ethical to scrape when a site has explicitly blocked bots Ethical? ppl get jailed in China for this. "Breaching computer systems" is a felony.
- yogorenapan 2mo agoI know for a fact companies in China do this. One paid me directly for work in this space, and in another, I found my own OSS project in their artifact cache while working there. I've only ever gotten in trouble in the UK
- maxglute 2mo agoI suppose it's like trying to enforce no picture rule in public.
- LoganDark 2mo agoIt's most definitely unethical.
- cr125rider 2mo agoI think it really depends on how the bot is run. If the bot is replacing me navigating there manually, absolutely. If it’s sucking up content to rip off and make someone else billions of dollars, no.
- fooqux 2mo agoWhy do you feel entitled to navigate to a website you neither own nor pay for via a method the owner expressly forbids?
- xena 2mo agoThings like this make me wish that we have to pass ethics courses to work in tech.
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- m12k 2mo agoReminds me of this old joke: No ethically trained software engineer would ever write a destroyBaghdad function - they’d write a destroyCity function to which you could pass Baghdad as a parameter.
- csnover 2mo agoMan, this sucks. I doubt there’s anything that I can say to get people to stop doing things like this, but the eventual outcome here isn’t going to be freedom for you to scrape sites that are trying to avoid being DDoSed by bots, but instead that we all end up in a world where device attestation is required to do practically anything online. And for what?
- xnx 2mo ago> Bot detectors flag automation by reading the browser fingerprint; Fortress corrects that fingerprint inside Chromium's C++, so the browser presents as an ordinary Chrome install. This does not seem like it would work against anything but the most basic bot protection.
- arhamshahrier 2mo ago[dead]
- ArmanLuthra 2mo ago[dead]
- dclaw 2mo agoThis is really unacceptable folks. There are those of us that have to keep these sites up, and it's seriously been a few years of nightmare scrapers and botnets, and stupid things like this that you are trying to legitimize that will make this worse. If a site doesn't want you, you should go away. There's a reason for it. Not every website is backed by a billion/trillion dollar company with the resources to absorb things.
- deckar01 2mo agoMaking a network request from a script is not abuse, consuming excess bandwidth is. Scrapers already spoof browser reputation and cycle IPs while abusing bandwidth. Recently I wanted to convert the results of an Autotrader filter into a table so I could supplement it with data they don’t track (towing capacity). It was two pages of results, but requesting it from a script was aggressively blocked by browser fingerprinting. I had to port it to JS and run it in my browser console manually to get the data out, wasting my time.
- transcriptase 2mo agoThat’s the point. For every legitimate though ultimately unimportant use case like yours there are a thousand others who would scrape the results 86,400 times a day to either try to sell or mirror and plaster with their own ads.
- dclaw 2mo agoIt's not just excess bandwidth. It's cpu cycles, poor site coding, database issues. Like I said, not everything is backed by a huge company that has the money/hardware/engineering resources to absorb the load.
- kfhfardin 2mo ago[dead]
- coldbrewed 2mo agoMaking people actually read content doesn't strike me as cruel. Tedious, sure, but not cruel. What is cruel is seeing all of our collective individuality and artistic expression jammed into an LLM, sold back to us by the token, and forced into our lives by an economy increasingly skewed towards holders of capital.
- CivBase 2mo agoUnconscionable.
- tomsop 2mo ago[flagged]
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoDoes Anubis still work? (against this?)
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- grvtygi 2mo ago[flagged]
- RandomGerm4n 2mo agoI think that instead of trying to prevent web scraping, websites should try to make it easier so that it generates less traffic. As long as any user is allowed to view the website, there will always be a way to scrape it anyway. If there were simply a monthly updated torrent available on a standardized subpage, such as example.com/scrape, scraping would be much less harmful.
- Avery29 2mo agoFor agent/browser automation, getting blocked is only one part of the problem. The other hard part is knowing whether the page you got back is the real page, a degraded version, or some silent challenge page.