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Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked

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Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked

#51

Post by stronglikedan »

fooqux wrote: post #13
cr125rider wrote: post #12

Earlier 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?

If it's just impersonating me to help me better consume the content as if I were the one driving, then it's perfectly ethical, and not even related to a bot ban. Shades of gray and all...

Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked

#53

Post by coldbrewed »

kfhfardin wrote: post #44
deckar01 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fingerpri…

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Making people actually read content doesn't strike me as cruel. Tedious, sure, but not cruel. What is cruel is seeing all of our collective individuality and artistic expression jammed into an LLM, sold back to us by the token, and forced into our lives by an economy increasingly skewed towards holders of capital.

Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked

#55

Post by lemagedurage »

TrevorFSmith wrote: post #5

Is 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.

Use cases range from sending 100s of requests per second just to bring a website down to doing a montly request to a municipality's endpoint to get a local dashboard of when trash is picked up. I don't think you can pass a single judgement of automating web requests in general.

Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked

#56

Post by m12k »

xena wrote: post #24

Things like this make me wish that we have to pass ethics courses to work in tech.

Reminds me of this old joke: No ethically trained software engineer would ever write a destroyBaghdad function - they’d write a destroyCity function to which you could pass Baghdad as a parameter.

Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked

#57

Post by ryandrake »

kfhfardin wrote: post #44
deckar01 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fingerpri…

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Ideally, there would be a better way for web hosts to block bandwidth-hogging, but not block bots. I don't think anyone cares if some automated user-agent requests a 1KB file from their web site. They care that automated systems are sucking down TBs per day, all day, every day.

Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked

#59

Post by arendtio »

dclaw wrote: post #36

This 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…

And those bot protection mechanisms and ad-enforcement layers that terrorize humans are okay or what? Yes, I accept that many pages don't want me there and just don't use them anymore, but it sucks.

I am not saying that forks like this are a good idea, but I have enough frustration with said techniques that I sympathize with the effort.

Re: Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked

#60

Post by kfhfardin »

coldbrewed wrote: post #53
kfhfardin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Making people actually read content doesn't strike me as cruel. Tedious, sure, but not cruel. What is cruel is seeing all of our collective individuality and artistic expression jammed into an LLM, sold back to us by the token, and forced into our lives by an economy increasingly skewed towards holders of capital.

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