21–30 of 36 posts
I haven’t had to go the CV route yet, but I know it’s a matter of time once they “improve” the site and it starts breaking regularly.
Every product zuckerberg has is cancerous except WhatsApp
Statuses cannot be disabled, so the little notification dot is always there (I solved that by archiving everyone's statuses) and the phone call feature cannot start a recording when you get called. If you need to record a call you need to do so separately.
If for some reason you want to stop using WhatsApp, you just cannot. You socially exclude yourself.
Most people you know are there so you cannot just leave it. Some companies run their business there. Some government services and banks have a WhatsApp chat bot, and don't accept email or phone calls anymore.
I wish I could fully leave WhatsApp, but I can't without paying a social price. The network effects are a straitjacket.
I appreciate (and encourage) using real life problems as a pretext for researching new topics and developing new skills, but 1. I'm really curious as to what's the desired outcome here? A spambot to flood people's notifications? 2. I'll admit that I have absolutely no idea how Instagram's API layer (and protection) works but wouldn't capturing the HTTP calls a more appropriate and easier approach to take?
I know agencies get paid to manage other business's instagram accounts, and want ways to post/comment/engage/etc with multiple business's accounts at once. You'd still have a human driving/scheduling/approving the activity, but you wouldn't have to jump between so many hoops to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Social media accounts with lots of engagement and high follower counts are worth big money these days. However, it takes a ton of effort to build that up organically. It's not difficult to see possible motives for something like this. 2. Leveraging their private APIs will get you banned even quicker than OPs method.
Adding to the 2nd point: It's one of the most watched APIs for suspicious activity ever. Anything not from their vanilla app, the littlest dot on their charts will trigger severe alarms and actions. Big correlation systems. The safest path used to be to automate the app itself, through mobile automation, but they even got too sensitive to that. I don't doubt the whole app has a behavioural analysis component, full sc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adding to the 2nd point: It's one of the most watched APIs for suspicious activity ever. Anything not from their vanilla app, the littlest dot on their charts will trigger severe alarms and actions. Big correlation systems. The safest path used to be to automate the app itself, through mobile automation, but they even got too sensitive to that. I don't doubt the whole app has a behavioural analysis component, full sc…
You can trigger their systems even by manually just following and unfollowing to drive account engagement. No automation required.
I appreciate (and encourage) using real life problems as a pretext for researching new topics and developing new skills, but 1. I'm really curious as to what's the desired outcome here? A spambot to flood people's notifications? 2. I'll admit that I have absolutely no idea how Instagram's API layer (and protection) works but wouldn't capturing the HTTP calls a more appropriate and easier approach to take?
But that is part of what makes it interesting to me. Instagram has real anti-abuse systems, rate limits, weird UI states, etc. It's just a good place to experiment, everyone knows about it and it's something I was interested in.
I was totally expecting to get the account banned quickly.
Although I just added a disclaimer to make it clear.
I tried all sorts of automation in the past and always get banned at the end. Not worth it. Use AI or whatever to generate your social media content but always post it manually for best engagement and not getting banned
It failed because the web browser lets the content know where the mouse cursor is, with absolute precission. It shouldn't.
They likely have entire teams working on this, plus adversarial teams trying to break their own detection systems.
I'm blocking as much tracking as I reasonably can and they still caught it within a few days. So I doubt this failed because of one obvious browser API. It is probably a combination of behavioural signals that made the account look automated.
>A full screenshot is huge. Over 7 million pixels on a typical screen. Hmmm i don't think that's true? 1080p is 2M, 2K is 4M, 4K is 8M. Are we really in an era where full 4K is "typical"? For reading Instagram? I've got 4 screens i use on a daily basis that are all 2K or less. I mean my TV was only 1080p until a few months ago lol. Maybe I'm just slow. Also: you're automating the browser, just make the window smaller…
I’ve edited it to focus more on the actual problem: the bot starts with a large visual search space and has to narrow it down to a small target.
Thanks for the feedback.