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How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

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Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#201

Post by inigyou »

dist-epoch wrote: post #63
sillysaurusx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I haven't tried this out yet.) My use case would be to take a snapshot of each HN story. This is surprisingly hard, because most websites prevent bots from doing that. For example, Claude has a lot of trouble reading HN's front page. HN itself is fine, but the moment you ask it to pick out an article, it often chokes. The website has put up a verification captcha, or it's a paywall, etc. Paywalls can be bypassed by…

> one bot taking a snapshot isn't going to make a difference until half of HN users start asking their agent to do the same, to summarize the top HN articles every day

Did that happen?

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#202

Post by Natfan »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #143
dist-epoch wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one bot taking a snapshot isn't going to make a difference until half of HN users start asking their agent to do the same, to summarize the top HN articles every day

I don't think half is a realistic number, and any realistic numbers are not going to change the server load much. The real cost of that scenario is all the AI compute.

no, to dang the real cost would be bandwidth

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#203

Post by inigyou »

cute_boi wrote: post #26
losteric wrote: post #9

> 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…

Exactly these crappy companies like browser use is causing more captcha etc.. All these scraper companies should've been regulated heavily. They use residential proxy creating incentive for hacking IOT devices etc..

The captchas are caused by captcha companies, nobody else

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#205

Post by orf »

Natfan wrote: post #198
orf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

we need a new version of Godwin's Law after this comment. orf's law: > As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison with Rosa Parks approaches one."

> As a discussion regarding if it’s ethical to ignore restrictions progresses, the probability of someone bringing up a famous case where someone ignored unethical restrictions approaches one

Seems reasonable to me. Substitute Rosa parks with another example of unethical restrictions if you wish - there are many.

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#206

Post by intrasight »

zx8080 wrote: post #182

> cloud browsers. We need to create them constantly, sometimes thousands at a time, and throw them away as soon as sessions end. Oh that's why the captcha is unpassable for regular people now. It's just yesterday with another evolution of captcha on lenovo.com I was not able to finish my purchase. Thank you very much, seriously.

So why don't they get rid of captcha and just require a login?

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#207

Post by nish__ »

intrasight wrote: post #206
zx8080 wrote: post #182

> cloud browsers. We need to create them constantly, sometimes thousands at a time, and throw them away as soon as sessions end. Oh that's why the captcha is unpassable for regular people now. It's just yesterday with another evolution of captcha on lenovo.com I was not able to finish my purchase. Thank you very much, seriously.

So why don't they get rid of captcha and just require a login?

Because money.

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#208

Post by devmor »

inigyou wrote: post #190
devmor wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least so long as my actions don't directly cause technical problems for the service operator. But they do. The reasoning you’re describing is not altruistic. It’s the same reasoning used by every AI scraper. It’s the very reason I am paying a couple hundred dollars out of my own pocket every month to keep the websites of hundreds of small businesses and hobbyists online while I try to help them move to bigger cl…

Maybe if you weren't using expensive anti-bot solutions people wouldn't use expensive bots.

That’s a great theory, unfortunately it’s defeated by the fact that I didn’t need to use anti-bot solutions until I was charged for 38,000x my normal ingress traffic in a single month by bot traffic.

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#209

Post by cindyllm »

inigyou wrote: post #192
arianvanp wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"we don't negotiate with terrorists"

[dead]

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#210

Post by pocksuppet »

Natfan wrote: post #195
Reformedot wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

why are you making the internet worse for everyone with this "stealth" initiative? you are effectively lying to website operators.

lying to website operators is allowed. Website operators aren't paragons of virtue, you know.
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