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Recreation.gov

recreation.gov

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Re: Recreation.gov

#171

Post by jwives »

allovernow wrote: post #169
bitexploder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience many of the best camp sites I have been to have been in federal forest land on forest roads. The tougher the road the better (limits traffic). I have found some amazing places in Colorado that you could never reserve and they don’t exist as official camp sites. You find a good spot and you camp. Camp grounds with packed in sites are... good for some things. I acknowledge this is a problem for some hi…

How do you find these spots? That sounds like a great excuse to bring out the 4x4.

You look at a map of interesting roads, maybe look at satellite imagery of the area if you're not at all familiar with it, and take your 4x4 out for a drive.

Go slow, keep your eyes open, and you'll probably see a spot which looks perfect to camp at in no time.

Re: Recreation.gov

#172

Post by habosa »

baddox wrote: post #79
habosa wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I hate that visiting a national park now involves the same sort of online shenanigans as getting a popular concert ticket. That's not the vibe that should be associated with our parks system. Anyone botting the site should feel ashamed.

What shenanigans? The popular spots really are popular, which is why nearly everything will be booked to most interested visitors. Are you just suggesting that there shouldn’t be online reservations at all?

If you want a campsite in a major national park you need to look up when they are released (normally 3mo in advance) and wake up at exactly 6:59am and get your trigger finger ready or you really don't stand a chance.

I just wish there was a "calmer" way. The experience of exploring our national parks should be an escape from our hectic every day lives. That begins with getting a place to sleep.

Re: Recreation.gov

#173

Post by k6hkUZtLUM »

packetlag wrote: post #111

Former SRE for the ground up rebuild of Recreation.gov - I gave a talk at Datastax's Accelerate conference this summer about how we built this site, and briefly covered how we combated bots for a while. Enjoy! https://youtu.be/gGDWkkj-UDg

Thanks for the link. I appreciate the work and the backend detail.

Re: Recreation.gov

#174

Post by leggomylibro »

allovernow wrote: post #169
bitexploder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience many of the best camp sites I have been to have been in federal forest land on forest roads. The tougher the road the better (limits traffic). I have found some amazing places in Colorado that you could never reserve and they don’t exist as official camp sites. You find a good spot and you camp. Camp grounds with packed in sites are... good for some things. I acknowledge this is a problem for some hi…

How do you find these spots? That sounds like a great excuse to bring out the 4x4.

These days, forest roads and primitive roads are often marked on Google / Apple maps and OpenStreetMaps. So asking your phone for directions to a national forest usually works well, as long as you check the camping rules and conditions ahead of time. You'll usually just see a series of pull-outs with fire pits and cleared areas along the unpaved roads.

Lands managed by the BLM or USFS usually allow dispersed camping in at least some areas, but it's still a good idea to double-check before you leave, and you should be aware that the same lands are often used for other activities like hunting, logging, horse-riding, grazing, offroad vehicles, etc.

You can also get more specialized outdoors mapping apps which can download data like USGS topographical maps and quad sheets for offline use. If you think you might like the backcountry, a satellite messenger is a good investment and those often have companion phone apps.

Don't forget to bring a big battery if you rely on electronics for mapping, though. And you can usually get decent paper maps from local NPS/USFS/etc visitor centers once you get to the area. The people in those visitor centers will also tell you where good sites / hikes / drives / views are, but then you have to actually talk to someone.

Also, read about pack-in/pack-out policies, what a cathole is, and how to keep your food from attracting animals.

Re: Recreation.gov

#175

Post by peterangular »

carty76ers wrote: post #51
peterangular wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with lots of anti-anti-botting knowledge - both are ineffective. Even if it's a "global rate limit" I'll find out the value (never ran into someone randomizing it) and jump on the web request faster than anyone else RIGHT as it comes up. With CAPTCHAs I'll bypass with a solving service and/or computer vision if it's easy, or even just get past the noCAPTCHA solutions with primed browser instances from cred…

> But don't kid yourself - that would not solve botting at all. What would solve it? Or rather, what is the best defensive measure these days?

At this time - I honestly don't know.

Even the reputation-based stuff is laughable and one can hide a Puppeteer instance with good originating networks, and spoofing a ton of details in the browser. Even if that's a no-go you can also automate plain-old-Chromium/Chrome with extensions and run it in a headless session through something like Xpra. I'm experimenting with Firefox solutions as well.

All-in-all, I've never been stopped - and that's not me stroking my ego... there's TONS of resources out there for this stuff that are just a DuckDuckGo search away.

The biggest thing is if they start aggressively fingerprinting bots, they're going to start blocking user real people. It's all based on a score - and getting a good score is just a matter of a credible proxy, CAPTCHA bypassing services, and making a browser look highly credible.

---

For a "real" answer of some value - as a web developer myself, I'd try to make it as expensive as possible for them. Which specifically would be to implement a non-standard CAPTCHA solution and do rate/conversion-limiting per-network. The reason I didn't say this up-front is because it's not a solid solution - it's just increasing the barrier of difficulty and cost for those that are trying to automate around your solution.

Re: Recreation.gov

#176

Post by peterangular »

gitgud wrote: post #54
peterangular wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with lots of anti-anti-botting knowledge - both are ineffective. Even if it's a "global rate limit" I'll find out the value (never ran into someone randomizing it) and jump on the web request faster than anyone else RIGHT as it comes up. With CAPTCHAs I'll bypass with a solving service and/or computer vision if it's easy, or even just get past the noCAPTCHA solutions with primed browser instances from cred…

> But don't kid yourself - that would not solve botting at all. Surely capatcha's and rate limiting raises the bar for people botting. It couldn't make it any worse right?

It increases the barrier and cost for sure! But the thing is if you get someone who's even remotely sophisticated we can get past this sorta stuff in short order.

For something that's highly desirable like tickets, Nike drops, or apparently campsites there are many people with sufficient ability to bypass this stuff.

Re: Recreation.gov

#177

Post by [deleted] »

oefrha wrote: post #19
abhiminator wrote: post #4

This is fantastic. The search RP displays parks and sites in the increasing order of distance as well as the price from the input zip code, and pulls together places from different government agencies like Fish and Wildlife Service, NPS, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, etc. They also seem to have a nice collection of KB articles under the 'Help' link [0] in the header. [0] https://recreationonestoppr…

I can't be the only one who's not a fan of being served close to a megabyte of JavaScript for some support articles (site is useless without JS). To add insult to injury, the landing page has a 2118x1415, 2.6MiB background image.[1] Doing a `-quality 70 -resize 50%` conversion to JPEG results in a mere 176KiB. Although, having experienced service-now.com in other settings, it definitely could be worse. [1] https://re…

[deleted]

Re: Recreation.gov

#178

Post by peterangular »

nython wrote: post #74
peterangular wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with lots of anti-anti-botting knowledge - both are ineffective. Even if it's a "global rate limit" I'll find out the value (never ran into someone randomizing it) and jump on the web request faster than anyone else RIGHT as it comes up. With CAPTCHAs I'll bypass with a solving service and/or computer vision if it's easy, or even just get past the noCAPTCHA solutions with primed browser instances from cred…

> As someone with lots of anti-anti-botting knowledge Any recommendations for books/other information sources? Currently doing some backend work for a company that mainly does scraping and a lot of this seems to be based on the tribal knowledge of the resident old wise one.

I sorta disagree on this being tribal knowledge - a lot of this stuff is out there if you're willing to dig a bit. Tons of it comes down to network reputation and having a legitimate-looking bot. If you're scraping at scale it's an infrastructure problem just as much as it is a fingerprinting one.

Stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20479015 is a goldmine for me and it usually is a fun weekend working around said methods in a lab-like environment.

> resident old wise one

He's just invested the time in picking this skillset up - it's definitely not just something you're an expert on after a few small projects. It takes years of having things break over, and over, and over [...]

There's a small Discord server that I setup for people who do a lot of RPA/web scraping if you're interested in joining a "tribe". My contact info is accessible through my profile if you're interested =)

Re: Recreation.gov

#179

Post by peterangular »

svdr wrote: post #53
peterangular wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with lots of anti-anti-botting knowledge - both are ineffective. Even if it's a "global rate limit" I'll find out the value (never ran into someone randomizing it) and jump on the web request faster than anyone else RIGHT as it comes up. With CAPTCHAs I'll bypass with a solving service and/or computer vision if it's easy, or even just get past the noCAPTCHA solutions with primed browser instances from cred…

So what does help against bots?

Answered further up in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21631112

It's a cat and mouse game for sure, but the answer is usually nothing if the person is sophisticated enough. You can only increase the difficulty/cost (covered in that comment).

Re: Recreation.gov

#180

Post by peterangular »

CaptainMarvel wrote: post #70
gitgud wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But don't kid yourself - that would not solve botting at all. Surely capatcha's and rate limiting raises the bar for people botting. It couldn't make it any worse right?

If it doesn’t make it any better, then captcha makes it works for real humans

Yep - and as someone who's ran a lot of conversion-based online solutions this is 100% true. Even when you account for automated sign-ups etc. the inclusion of a CAPTCHA will ding your rates.
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