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Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

zatanna.ai

31–40 of 97 posts

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#31
post #28

This makes me want to never create a public service again.

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 workflows. For all hosted workflows we have rate limits to prevent mass scraping/affecting server workload in any real capacity. In fact, because we don't load js/html and hit endpoints directly I would guess that we consume less server resources in the end.

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#32
post #20

Congratulations. How do you handle SSL pinning ? Most of the apps I interact with have some sort of SSL pinning, which is the hard part to circumvent. I tried Kampala but got stuck at the usual place; as soon as I enable it, chatGPT stops working. Most of my iPhone apps stop responding etc. I would love to try using this tool to build an agent that can simply subscribe me to my gym lessons instead of me having to go…

[flagged]

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#35

It seems like it’s quite HTTP-centric (like most of the web…). I didn’t see anything on the page about this - can it also intercept / “reverse engineer” service calls that go over gRPC or WebSocket? I’m guessing at least a partial “yes” if the gRPC traffic uses grpc-web/Envoy? Seems like a great product, potentially quite powerful for automated testing of SPAs.

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 being the only two I can think of), and if they do they usually have decent APIs. Feel free to try and lmk if you have any issues!

so how do you parse gRPC binary? unless you have proto definitions, it is blackbox and is totally unsuable, isn't it?

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#38
smeels like severe breach of ToS. virtually every single website and app mandates not to reverse engineer and not to temper with inner workings (including client-server networking).

side note, YC25/YC26 batches have multiple startups that blantly violate ToS and sitting on a timebomb just pending a lawsuite and Cease and Desist Letters.

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#40
so if API is published, there is nothing to reverse engineer.

and if API is not published, and you MITM with self-compromised CAs, and then use it (commercially?) you ~100% breaking ToS.

this is just un-ethical. or YC does not have regard anymore for such things?

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