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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

#211

Post by cryptonym »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #163
devmor wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude, and by proxy this business are the epitome of selfish entitlement. You state that you believe you deserve access to others’ resources, at their cost, despite their clear attempts to stop you from using them, simply because you want it.

I mean, this is how Google was built.

Not a fair statement. Google wasn't built on bypassing bot protections.

Google is providing a service to the websites they crawl.

They try to not crawl when we don't want them (robots.txt, clear user-agent, no-index no-follow...).

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

#212

Post by pocksuppet »

saltmate wrote: post #168
fc417fc802 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd counter that your attitude is a techno-authoritarian one. Why should anyone have any say over how I access and use a publicly available resource? At least so long as my actions don't directly cause technical problems for the service operator.

> At least so long as my actions don't directly cause technical problems for the service operator. That's the point of the criticism. The praise of their anti-anti-bot features reads like it is commonly used to cause technical problems to the service providers, be it intended or accepted for the cause.

Anti-bot features are definitely used to cause technical problems to service providers you don't like.

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

#213

Post by pocksuppet »

devmor wrote: post #208
inigyou wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much traffic was that?

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

#214

Post by pocksuppet »

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."

Do you think it is a problem that someone said it's always unethical to violate a restrictions, and someone else brought up Rosa Parks?

I propose a new law myself: as an online discussion gets longer, the probability of someone trying to defeat an argument by stating that it mentioned Rosa Parks or Hitler without engaging with the substance of that argument approaches one.

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

#215

Post by cryptonym »

phantomathkg wrote: post #135
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…

Does it means the Wayback Machine is also unethical to you as well? To me archiving the internet is way more ethical than putting bulk of the content behind paywall.

Coming with proper user-agent sounds ethical. https://archive.org/details/archive.org_bot

Author/publisher are owning their content. Expecting work of others to always be free doesn't sound really ethical.

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

#216

Post by fc417fc802 »

devmor wrote: post #188
fc417fc802 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd counter that your attitude is a techno-authoritarian one. Why should anyone have any say over how I access and use a publicly available resource? At least so long as my actions don't directly cause technical problems for the service operator.

> 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…

> The reasoning you’re describing is not altruistic. It’s the same reasoning used by every AI scraper.

I think that's bad faith on your part. Clearly AI scrapers are aware of what they are doing and simply don't care. The entire purpose of my including the bit you quoted there was to explicitly exclude that sort of behavior.

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

#217

Post by fc417fc802 »

inigyou wrote: post #199
fc417fc802 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is called "victim blaming". You are saying the blame for a problem shouldn't be on those who directly caused the problem, but on those who failed to prevent them from causing the problem. 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.

No, I am saying that the people who went and created conditions that they knew would lead to the problem are the ones to blame. They are not victims except perhaps of their own poor decisions. I explicitly do not think that scalpers are doing anything wrong given that in a capitalistic system someone is always going to arbitrage things.

You don't get to enact poor policy, stick your fingers in your ears, then blame everyone but yourself for the place burning down.

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

#218

Post by baby_souffle »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #159
devmor wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude, and by proxy this business are the epitome of selfish entitlement. You state that you believe you deserve access to others’ resources, at their cost, despite their clear attempts to stop you from using them, simply because you want it.

You can already access these resources. What does it matter if you do the clicking or you have headless chrome do the clicking while you make a cup of coffee?

This is my entire point!

And it’s why scrapers will always win; absolutely worst case, I get a screenshot of the content and have to process it further.

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

#220

Post by QGQBGdeZREunxLe »

y2244 wrote: post #179
timojeajea wrote: post #77

We run a screenshot API (ApiFlash) with Chromium packaged in an AWS Lambda container image instead of Firecracker on EC2. AWS Lambda gives you the isolation and autoscaling for free which is ideal for spiky stateless work like screenshots. I believe we get mostly the same benefits compared to browser-use solution but with a much much simpler architecture. The tradeoff is the AWS lambda cold starts, but in practice se…

Doesnt lambda use Firecracker under the hood?

Yes

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...

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