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Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

rrweb.io

31–40 of 56 posts

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#31
This is so awesome that you made this open source. There's a bunch of companies that basically use this tech and making lots of $$. We're actually working on a user testing service and currently using a chrome extension to record video:

https://www.userlook.co

May consider switching and using your library!

Thanks for sharing this :)

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#33

Looks really cool, but I find myself thinking about the privacy implications of using this, especially by default. Even if the user gives consent, it still implies recording every single mouse movement and keystroke on the site. Has this been normalised? Is this the new default? Food for thought.

Totally agreed with your consideration about privacy. Unfortunately, as I wrote in my blog post, some commercial products already shipped features like this.

So another passion of rrweb is to teach people the 'power' of the modern browsers, and I also wish rrweb has a chance to improve the standard of web privacy.

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#34

Great work yz-yu. Hope you've learned a lot- I've personally found the session replay space to be incredibly rewarding. However, as a session replay industry competitor and a former security researcher for most industry players, I caution anyone thinking of using a side-project like this on production applications to proceed slowly with care. Security and Privacy are extremely hard to get right here. The tricky thing…

Definitely learned a lot and enjoy the process and thanks for your really important suggestions.

Quote from my introduction blog post:

===

Today we already have some commercial session replay products like Logrocket, Fullstory, etc.

If you are just looking for a ready-to-use tool and would like to pay for its service, I would recommend you to use the above products, because they have well-tested backend services that can store the data for you and perform some higher order features.

===

So I don't think rrweb is a competitor of these commercial products.

Actually, I would like to see rrweb grows into a base of many commercial products in the future, which means it handles most of the privacy and security issues, so the other developers can build many fancy projects base on it without spending time on the hard part again and again.

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#36

Great work yz-yu. Hope you've learned a lot- I've personally found the session replay space to be incredibly rewarding. However, as a session replay industry competitor and a former security researcher for most industry players, I caution anyone thinking of using a side-project like this on production applications to proceed slowly with care. Security and Privacy are extremely hard to get right here. The tricky thing…

To add to the key point about privacy, this research from Princeton is really illuminating and scary: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/11/15/no-boundaries-exfil...

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#37

Great work yz-yu. Hope you've learned a lot- I've personally found the session replay space to be incredibly rewarding. However, as a session replay industry competitor and a former security researcher for most industry players, I caution anyone thinking of using a side-project like this on production applications to proceed slowly with care. Security and Privacy are extremely hard to get right here. The tricky thing…

You are absolutely correct with regard to privacy and security for any public facing application. However I still think this is fantastic for very specific production use cases. For instance I am working on a very large, but entirely internal web application. The application includes trade secrets that we would never want exposed to a third party, but it is not the kind of application that would ever contain personal information. So this is pretty much perfect for our production use case since the recorded information never has to leave our control and the only users of our application would be employees. Any concern about a bad actor trying to harm our system or steal information is handled at an entirely different level.

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#38

Great work yz-yu. Hope you've learned a lot- I've personally found the session replay space to be incredibly rewarding. However, as a session replay industry competitor and a former security researcher for most industry players, I caution anyone thinking of using a side-project like this on production applications to proceed slowly with care. Security and Privacy are extremely hard to get right here. The tricky thing…

To add to the key point about privacy, this research from Princeton is really illuminating and scary: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/11/15/no-boundaries-exfil...

I might be alone on this one, but I feel the Freedom-to-Tinker report was unfair to the analytics providers. I know the folks in the industry work really hard towards privacy and security. They go out of their way to make it clear that not everything is automatically censored, and provide easy tools to limit data and visualize what is and isn't recorded. Holding PII and other sensitive data truly is a liability- nobody wants it.

Companies like Walgreens should be entirely to blame.

I really do appreciate how they author(s) in that report uncovered how those services where used in practice.

[I'm not with any party listed in the report]

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#40

Great work yz-yu. Hope you've learned a lot- I've personally found the session replay space to be incredibly rewarding. However, as a session replay industry competitor and a former security researcher for most industry players, I caution anyone thinking of using a side-project like this on production applications to proceed slowly with care. Security and Privacy are extremely hard to get right here. The tricky thing…

I would love to read more about these kind of security issues, maybe you have a blog about this?

Or some great resources maybe?

I know of the obvious ones like OWASP; but that only scratches the surface.

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