Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you feel entitled to navigate to a website you neither own nor pay for via a method the owner expressly forbids?
Why do you feel entitled to dictate what user agent I use, if it’s well-behaved?
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Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
31–40 of 78 posts
Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
#32Things like this make me wish that we have to pass ethics courses to work in tech.
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Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
#33Man, this sucks. I doubt there’s anything that I can say to get people to stop doing things like this, but the eventual outcome here isn’t going to be freedom for you to scrape sites that are trying to avoid being DDoSed by bots, but instead that we all end up in a world where device attestation is required to do practically anything online. And for what?
Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trojan Horse probably wouldn't make a very good name for a browser.
Since my grade-school mascot/team was "The Trojans" and my adopted hometown is firmly rooted in pre-Christian Greek culture and mythology, I am currently studying the Trojan War, and I may observe that "Trojan" is an extremely perspicacious brand-name for condoms, more than the average guy would expect.
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Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
#35> Bot detectors flag automation by reading the browser fingerprint; Fortress corrects that fingerprint inside Chromium's C++, so the browser presents as an ordinary Chrome install.
This does not seem like it would work against anything but the most basic bot protection.
Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
#36This is really unacceptable folks. There are those of us that have to keep these sites up, and it's seriously been a few years of nightmare scrapers and botnets, and stupid things like this that you are trying to legitimize that will make this worse. If a site doesn't want you, you should go away. There's a reason for it. Not every website is backed by a billion/trillion dollar company with the resources to absorb things.
Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
#37Is it ethical to scrape when a site has explicitly blocked bots? I know a fair number of people who run small sites who are already considering closing them down because the bots are relentlessly hammering their sites and driving up hosting costs.
> Is it ethical to scrape when a site has explicitly blocked bots Ethical? ppl get jailed in China for this. "Breaching computer systems" is a felony.
I know for a fact companies in China do this. One paid me directly for work in this space, and in another, I found my own OSS project
in their artifact cache while working there.
I've only ever gotten in trouble in the UK
Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
#38This is really unacceptable folks. There are those of us that have to keep these sites up, and it's seriously been a few years of nightmare scrapers and botnets, and stupid things like this that you are trying to legitimize that will make this worse. If a site doesn't want you, you should go away. There's a reason for it. Not every website is backed by a billion/trillion dollar company with the resources to absorb th…
Making a network request from a script is not abuse, consuming excess bandwidth is. Scrapers already spoof browser reputation and cycle IPs while abusing bandwidth. Recently I wanted to convert the results of an Autotrader filter into a table so I could supplement it with data they don’t track (towing capacity). It was two pages of results, but requesting it from a script was aggressively blocked by browser fingerprinting. I had to port it to JS and run it in my browser console manually to get the data out, wasting my time.
Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
#39> Bot detectors flag automation by reading the browser fingerprint; Fortress corrects that fingerprint inside Chromium's C++, so the browser presents as an ordinary Chrome install. This does not seem like it would work against anything but the most basic bot protection.
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Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it really depends on how the bot is run. If the bot is replacing me navigating there manually, absolutely. If it’s sucking up content to rip off and make someone else billions of dollars, no.
Why do you feel entitled to navigate to a website you neither own nor pay for via a method the owner expressly forbids?
Accessibility, saving time, personal preference. Any number of reasonable things that don’t put undue stress on the host