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Scrape like the big boys

incolumitas.com

121–130 of 196 posts

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s legal if it’s in the contract. Standard for contracts to allow for mistakes and confirmations of prices

It's not mistake if you do it deliberately!

Yes (not saying it's a mistake) but putting confirmation can be in the contract, no law says you only get 1 chance to display price.

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If data is your competitive advantage or product, then what? Accept that your market no longer exists and that there's no way to stop theft?

You're going to need to explain how scraping publicly available information on a website is theft. If information is your competitive advantage maybe you shouldn't have it on a publicly accessible website, and should instead stick it behind an API with pay tiers and a very clear license regarding what you may do with it as an end user. Note, a simple sign up being required to view a website makes it not publicly avai…

It is copyright information, no? So technically it is intellectual property theft if the scraping use is for commercial purposes.

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy at Nike that had to deal with a similar problem. As I recall, they basically gave in -- instead of trying to fight the scrapers, they built them an API so they'd quit trashing the performance of the retail site with all the scraping.

The real Jedi move

Especially if you charge for it, which would save them money, because they wouldn't have to redo their code every time you changed your website.

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to need to explain how scraping publicly available information on a website is theft. If information is your competitive advantage maybe you shouldn't have it on a publicly accessible website, and should instead stick it behind an API with pay tiers and a very clear license regarding what you may do with it as an end user. Note, a simple sign up being required to view a website makes it not publicly avai…

It is copyright information, no? So technically it is intellectual property theft if the scraping use is for commercial purposes.

No? If you place information publicly on a website it's pretty much free game, no copyright violation, especially regarding user generated information. That's my take, but legally it's a gray area and it's still going back and forth in the courts (at least in the US) but for a while before a decision was vacated by the supreme court scraping publicly available information on a site was legally protected and seemingly inline with my thoughts on it.

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If data is your competitive advantage or product, then what? Accept that your market no longer exists and that there's no way to stop theft?

You're going to need to explain how scraping publicly available information on a website is theft. If information is your competitive advantage maybe you shouldn't have it on a publicly accessible website, and should instead stick it behind an API with pay tiers and a very clear license regarding what you may do with it as an end user. Note, a simple sign up being required to view a website makes it not publicly avai…

> You're going to need to explain how scraping publicly available information on a website is theft.

Seriously? Do I need to explain why a song doesn’t enter the public domain when it is played on the radio?

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#126

Where I was working we stopped caring about ips browser etc because it was just a race. What we did was analyzing behaviour of clicks and acted on that. When we recognized it we went on serving a fake page. It cuts down a little bit of costs because it was static pages. In general it took a lot of time for them to discover the pattern and it was way more manageable for us.

We did the same and the bot developers wrote bots that acted like humans. It took them not very long to find out.

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#127
Its easy to detect chrome headless so scraping with it is not really how "big" boys do it :D the only scrapers/bots that are really hard to detect are the ones running and controlling real browser and not chromium. I do a lot od research aggainst abitbot systems, some times is friday night. If you spend each one in pub it doesnt mean your normal.

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to need to explain how scraping publicly available information on a website is theft. If information is your competitive advantage maybe you shouldn't have it on a publicly accessible website, and should instead stick it behind an API with pay tiers and a very clear license regarding what you may do with it as an end user. Note, a simple sign up being required to view a website makes it not publicly avai…

> You're going to need to explain how scraping publicly available information on a website is theft. Seriously? Do I need to explain why a song doesn’t enter the public domain when it is played on the radio?

Do I need to explain that copyright is practically unenforceable in the 21st century? Data is trivially copied and there's nothing you can do to fight that, no amount of laws will ever make it non-trivial again. Even if you successfully sue somebody for this, it won't stop them.

At some point people are gonna have to accept this.

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#129
post #52

I scrap government sites a lot as they don't provide apis. For mobile proxies, I use the proxidize dongles and mobinet.io (free, with Android devices). As stated in the article, with cgNAT it's basically impossible to block them as in my case, half the country couldn't access the sites anymore (if you place them in several locations and use one carrier each there).

Wow, this is super interesting:

https://proxidize.com/

https://mobinet.io/

I feel like I'm getting a glimpse into the dark underbelly of the web.

Re: Scrape like the big boys

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a guy at Nike that had to deal with a similar problem. As I recall, they basically gave in -- instead of trying to fight the scrapers, they built them an API so they'd quit trashing the performance of the retail site with all the scraping.

I think there's an opportunity for a new JS framework to have something like randomly generated dom that will always display the page and elements the same to a human but constantly break paths for computers. Like displaying a table with semantic elements, then divs, then using an iframe with css grid and floating values over the top. This almost seems like a problem for AI to solve.

Even if your DOM is obfuscated, the rendered page remains vulnerable to OCR. Obfuscate the rendered pixels and you’ll annoy your humans and eventually find that the scrapers’ OCR is superhuman.

Still, maybe AI comes into it. Maybe poisoning the data is the right way to do it conditioned on ML-juiced anomaly detection.

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