Viewing profile — alexblackwell_
alexblackwell_
HN member- Joined
- Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 5:48 AM UTC
- HN karma
- 66
- Public activity
- 25 items
- HN profile
- View on Hacker News ↗
About alexblackwell_
No profile information was provided.
Recent public activity
-
comment
Comment #47810305
Feel free to try it out and let us know if you have any issues. I was personally skeptical, but it now does about 70% of my "reverse engineering" work. Sometimes needs a bit of gui…
-
comment
Comment #47810285
Web apps like this are few and far between, and piggy-backing on the session/anti-bot tokens from your browser usually works. In really complex cases we do help companies on a whit…
-
comment
Comment #47810275
Interesting. We essentially do the same thing, but with MITM. We have a chrome extension internally, but have found it's a bit of a clunky interface. Might be releasing one soon. T…
-
comment
Comment #47810255
You can prompt the mcp to do this. Honestly considering adding this as a skill in the agent chat. Internally we do this all of the time for our white glove integrations.
-
comment
Comment #47799082
The requests still route through your servers/the data still lives with you. Kampala is a powerful tool but I don't see people replacing the actual apps with it. Most of our custom…
-
comment
Comment #47799040
I wouldn't consider what we do evasion really. We are using real tokens that you have received from your browser as a result of browsing the web. Any good anti-bot will have enforc…
-
comment
Comment #47799013
My broader point is that these ToS clauses are often so broad and vague that they're essentially unenforceable and not meaningful in practice. For example, "Do not use bots" covers…
-
comment
Comment #47798601
sorry a bit confused on your question here. If you're asking about JSON RPC we handle this via parsing. The AI can then handle deducing structure most of the time given enough cont…
-
comment
Comment #47798397
gRPC obscures the keys not the values. Enums and signed ints are sort of tricky, but the latter is just a mapping problem and the former can be figured out through some logical ded…
-
comment
Comment #47798310
Noticed you have two comments here. I think my response to your other comment best answers this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47798259 ). Definitely open to discussing thi…
-
comment
Comment #47798259
The goal is not to scrape sites en-masse, but to allow people to automate their existing workflows and actions that they perform already via a browser. I understand the concerns ar…
-
comment
Comment #47797859
Yep essentially. I would argue that we're probably closer to a MITM proxy like Proxyman than Wireshark. We don't do general packet sniffing (yet), although internally we use our ow…
-
comment
Comment #47797516
Definitely get that. Being hammered by scrapers is a massive PITA (especially with latest aggressive AI crawlers). We focus primarily on allowing people to automate their existing …
-
comment
Comment #47797408
Yep we handle gRPC and websocket. gRPC is a bit sketch/hard to do because of the way the protocol is designed. FWIW not many sites implement gRPC (some google sites and spotify bei…
-
comment
Comment #47796628
Yeah agreed this messaging is a bit confusing. Our focus is on helping people build automations, not do any mass-scale scraping.
-
comment
Comment #47796380
Thanks Ben! For session re-auth we attempt to agentically find the session refresh/login endpoints and make those part of the flow as an auth provider. This can be a bit sketchy th…
-
comment
Comment #47796322
Unfortunately we can’t do much around SSL pinning yet. Not sure how deep you want to go, but there are several Frida scripts that patch common pinning implementations. I also think…
-
comment
Comment #47796161
I’ve probably spent on the order of months of my life in proxyman/charles/burp/powhttp. All are great, but I’ve never been completely satisfied with the UX/features for building au…
-
comment
Comment #47796005
We’ve essentially been using that “recursion” to tune our agent. Having the agent build itself is not something I would have ever thought of though. Curious if you find it genuinel…
-
comment
Comment #47795876
It was the (generated) name of the Conductor workspace when I started the project. We were going to rename it before launch but the name stuck lol :)
-
comment
Comment #47795853
Super cool. I think this is where most automation is heading . Would be curious if you could one-shot the auth flow using Kampala and completely ditch the browser. Also FWIW you ca…
-
comment
Comment #47795657
Zatanna is a DC comic book character. I’m not sure if either of us have even read comics, so not sure where that came from. For Kampala, when I started this I was trying Conductor …
-
comment
Comment #47795393
We’re currently running a variety of stuff for TLS/HTTP2. If you download you can see the full trace of the connection. We dump the TLS connection byte for byte with the different …
-
comment
Comment #47795125
Oops now realizing that pattern where we send you to bottom latest download link is definitely confusing. Fixed so that the top button sends you straight to Download now.
-
story
Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs
Hey! I am Alex and together with my co-founder Tarun built Kampala ( https://www.zatanna.ai/kampala ). It’s a man-in-the-middle (MITM) style proxy that allows you to agentically re…