191–200 of 251 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, it's a web request. It's not that deep.
Dude, as someone who runs web servers, my pockets are not that deep. I’m struggling to keep the websites of hundreds of hobbyists and small businesses alive right now because of people like this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who uses service providers like this? I use change detection to monitor all sorts of websites for changes. Some of my favorite authors don't have RSS. I always set up price monitoring for any big ticket item I'm considering like appliances so I can see how their pricing changes over time. I also use scrapers for websites that don't have an API. I like having all of my purchase history indexed in a database where I…
The litmus test here is whether they support https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ out of the box or not They do not.
> Plain headless Chromium is easy to detect by websites with anti-bot measures. Plain headless Chromium avoided getting blocked by websites only 2% of the time, according to our stealth benchmark. > Our browsers avoid blocks 81% of the time on our stealth benchmark, and 84.8% on Halluminate BrowserBench, the highest of any provider. Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of an…
Whether or not scrapping publically available websites is unethical is probably up for debate. In some cases at least, courts have found it to be legal, even when the site is throwing up technical barriers or issues cease and desists. What is likely unethical is the fact that they offer residential proxies. The residential providers of those proxies are frequently not aware they’ve been opted in to provide such a ser…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of anti-bot measures is to get rid of bots - you are not wanted there. Unethical just because it does something someone else doesn't want? I guess it depends on why and what the intention is. I don't have time to sit 24/7 in front of a computer to get a ticket to some events, does that mean it's unethical for me to use my own bot so I c…
Its unethical because you're intentionally bypassing restrictions. Just because others do it doesn't mean its okay. If you saw a sign in a store that said "1 per person" or "for registered guests only", would you ignore it?
I'm a bit surprised that with all this, they still stuck with Chromium. We have a much less sophisticated setup in our web-access MCP server[0] where browser instances are spawned as subprocesses and the biggest win in stability, CPU and memory usage we had was in switching from Chrome to Lightpanda[1]. Fitting to the statement at the end of the article, the faster browser to boot might be one that allocates less mem…
We decided to maintain Chromium as engine for stealth purposes. Browsers like LightPanda lack stealth at all, they are trivial to detect. There are ways to make Chromium more performant, by removing everything that you don't need. We believe that Chromium can reach that performance without starting an entire engine from scratch, and without losing stealth, a top priority for us. The language is not the problem, C++ i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An example I ran into recently: I wanted to scrape pricing data for used cars, to better inform a friend's decision about what to purchase. I know there's a relationship between mileage and depreciation, but wanted to have a better sense of what that relationship is to know whether a given car was over or underpriced. Similarly, if I was pulling that data to build a service of my own to offer to users... is that unet…
> scrape pricing data for used cars Time was you could get lovely json feeds from every site by iterating the inspector curl statement. Now-a-days you can't even use Selenium without Cloudflare getting grouchy. Last fall had to make my spreadsheet like a cave-person control c, control v. It wouldn't be so bad if the dealer aggregators' coverage was xor, but you have to dedupe listings. Then there is the whole online…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of anti-bot measures is to get rid of bots - you are not wanted there. Unethical just because it does something someone else doesn't want? I guess it depends on why and what the intention is. I don't have time to sit 24/7 in front of a computer to get a ticket to some events, does that mean it's unethical for me to use my own bot so I c…
> But if I did so for scalping purposes? Then yeah, I'd agree it's unethical. Is scalping actually unethical though? Sure it's unpopular, but I'd argue that's just your average person not properly grasping supply and demand and thinking through the consequences. If you want to sell something below market then you should raffle it off and take extensive measures to prevent transfer of ownership. The current practice i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its unethical because you're intentionally bypassing restrictions. Just because others do it doesn't mean its okay. If you saw a sign in a store that said "1 per person" or "for registered guests only", would you ignore it?
Was Rosa Parks unethical for sitting down on a bus? The point is that the context matters: both the users context and the context of the restriction. It’s not as clear cut as “ignoring restrictions = bad”. The restriction itself can be unethical, in the same way that bypassing a restriction can be unethical.
orf's law: > As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison with Rosa Parks approaches one."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unbelievable how somebody could defend scalping. There is no ethical or moral value in that practice outside of "I can earn money with that".
I'm not defending the overall arrangement, simply pointing out that the blame is misplaced. If you want to sell below market value in a capitalist system then you must take appropriate measures to prevent a market from forming. More or less by design if one can form then it will. Similarly I do not attempt to blame the rank and file employees of the ad tech industry for the actions of their employers, nor of the defe…
You're right but in a different way. Scalpers aren't independent, they work for the artists to maximise artist revenue while absorbing the PR hit themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of anti-bot measures is to get rid of bots - you are not wanted there. Unethical just because it does something someone else doesn't want? I guess it depends on why and what the intention is. I don't have time to sit 24/7 in front of a computer to get a ticket to some events, does that mean it's unethical for me to use my own bot so I c…
What do you think of Anubis and Cloudflare? If they block your bot, is that unethical? Seems like doing business with other people should normally be based on mutual consent, not whatever you can get away with technically.