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Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

blog.cloudflare.com

61–68 of 68 posts

Re: Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does walmart keep prompting you with "Press and hold" anti bot requests? I have a similar project and keep getting these on walmart.

Nope! Not even once, which surprised me. We've done about 6 grocery runs with it now, and it's never been blocked by any anti-bot detection. Maybe it's because I'm signed into my Walmart account already, or because it's using Chrome's devtools protocol to control the browser instead of something like Puppeteer?

it's trivial to detect vanilla CDP sessions.

There's many parameters in calculating a risk profile including having a residential IP number. I think you have that.

Re: Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

#63
post #46

I am not against the idea but Cloudflare should honestly split itself and spinoff the CDN and DDOS/Cybersecurity company if it's also going to do agents. These two feel like they are opposing teams, I don't think they are colluding today, but how long will that last, this seems very suspicious I say that as a long time cloudflare user, I welcome making the platform agent friendly and adding agent specific deployment…

It's pretty bizarre to see them going from being the bot protection platform to differentiating on the kinds of bots they'll block, because now they're facilitating the exact kind of bot automation they made their name protecting against.

Surely it’s smart business to encourage and potentially even profit from both sides of the fence?

Re: Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

#64
I'm intrigued! There's so much movement in the sandbox space. Can someone tell me how a V8 sandbox compares to say Fireworks or if they've chosen one over the other? I think, from a technical standpoint, that it's neat that we already have an entire sandbox in the browser (albeit with a bit of chrome) but someone tell me why it shouldn't be used that way

Re: Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

#65
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty bizarre to see them going from being the bot protection platform to differentiating on the kinds of bots they'll block, because now they're facilitating the exact kind of bot automation they made their name protecting against.

Surely it’s smart business to encourage and potentially even profit from both sides of the fence?

It feels sickening to watch, because you can get a sense of where this is going.

They're cutting AI off at the legs for everyone else, then building the new tool to sell AI enablement.

They'll probably let their customers pay to bypass their protection scheme, which will complete the loop.

It really rubs me the wrong way.

It should 100% be a different company. I don't feel safe with Cloudflare being the ones building this tech.

Re: Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

#66
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope! Not even once, which surprised me. We've done about 6 grocery runs with it now, and it's never been blocked by any anti-bot detection. Maybe it's because I'm signed into my Walmart account already, or because it's using Chrome's devtools protocol to control the browser instead of something like Puppeteer?

it's trivial to detect vanilla CDP sessions. There's many parameters in calculating a risk profile including having a residential IP number. I think you have that.

playwriter.dev will reuse your existing session or cookies I really like it over cdp when its stuff i need done from my regular chrome profile (you can also make separate profiles on chrome so the agent uses only that or smt like that)

Re: Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

#67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope! Not even once, which surprised me. We've done about 6 grocery runs with it now, and it's never been blocked by any anti-bot detection. Maybe it's because I'm signed into my Walmart account already, or because it's using Chrome's devtools protocol to control the browser instead of something like Puppeteer?

it's trivial to detect vanilla CDP sessions. There's many parameters in calculating a risk profile including having a residential IP number. I think you have that.

I was going to say that I'm using Apple's iCloud VPN, but I don't think Chrome actually uses that on Mac. I think you're right, it's probably my residential IP.

Re: Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

#68

Bit surprised nobody's mentioned the security side. The V8 isolate guards the wrong half of this imo. It stops the agent's code from escaping the sandbox, but the risky part of a browser agent isn't code escaping, it's that it reads untrusted pages and then acts on them. A prompt injection on a page doesn't need to break out of V8, it just tells the agent to use its normal tools to do something you didn't intend. So…

Right — the isolate protects the host from the agent, but nothing protects the agent from the page. A commerce agent reading 40 product pages is reading 40 untrusted inputs, any of which can carry instructions. Hidden instructions in product descriptions will become the new blackhat SEO: instead of keyword-stuffing for crawlers, stores get prompt-stuffed for agents.
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