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

zatanna.ai

41–50 of 97 posts

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

#41

Wireshark + some post processing?

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 own packet sniffing tools for reverse engineering on-prem installations.

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

#42

Congrats. You may want to consider dropping the "reverse engineer" language though, since most every application's ToS is clear on that being prohibited. Perhaps just "replay any application" or similar.

Yeah agreed this messaging is a bit confusing. Our focus is on helping people build automations, not do any mass-scale scraping.

Automations are also often prohibited by TOS.

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

#43

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?

> anymore

Ehh…

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

#44

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.

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 around this being unethical, and it's something I spent a lot of time thinking about when I worked on automations previously. I've written a decent amount about how I don't think that sneaker bots or ticket bots are ethical. I don't support mass scraping websites/making the web more inaccessible for others.

I do have to push back on the ToS comments though. Automation is used daily by nearly all companies. RPA is a billion dollar industry. Browserbase raised at 300M valuation. Is using puppeteer to automate a form submission a violation of ToS? If so then why is using a screen reader not? Is it the intention? Why is hitting network requests directly different? I personally don't think that automation is unethical (as long as it is not affecting server capacity). I don't think the answer to the ethical problems in scraping is just not to automate at all. Open to disagreement here though.

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

#45
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 res…

Oh no I’m not worried about the resources or rate limits.

If I’d make a mobile app and users simply use your automation service instead of my mobile app, I’d lose traffic/money/motivation to improve it.

If they run into issues from your service now it could make my app look bad while the error isn’t with the app.

See tailwind for an example tale.

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

#46

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?

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 this more here. Not sure if I agree on the self-compromised CA bit. MITM proxies have been used for 20+ years for debugging. In fact, I use Kampala to debug our personal APIs/web app all of the time.

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

#47

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?

> this is just un-ethical.

There is nothing unethical about this. You can technically do this with a browser and its dev tools.

You being here is far more unethical than this app.

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

#48

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.

Wait till these sites discover web browsers and developer tools.

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

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 deduction. gRPC isn't designed to obscure request content, but for over the wire efficiency.

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

#50
post #30

how does this work? for eg, how is it possible to even deduce bitcoin structure from rpc list?

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 context
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