8 ms·

Show HN: Till – Unblock and scale your web scrapers, with minimal code changes

209 points by paramaw 5y ago

cube00 5y ago
> Till helps you circumvent detected as a web scraper by identifying your scraper as a real web browser. It does this by generating random user-agent headers and randomizing proxy IPs (that you supply) on every HTTP request. How did we start with consent using robots.txt and end up here? A good neighbor doesn't use circumvention.
- JulianWasTaken 5y ago
  And only a few paragraphs down from a heading that says > Till was architected to follow best practices that DataHen has accumulated I know there are plenty of sites out there out to prevent any scraping whatsoever, or to improperly prevent some situations most of us would agree is reasonable behavior, but this appears to be blatantly hostile to web admins out there.
  - cube00 5y ago
    I agree there are cases where entities don't want things scraped that really should be scraped to preserve the history they'd like to rewrite. My concern is that tools like these that use circumvention by default become the go-to when someone needs scraping and makes life hell for us running sites on hardware that's enough to service our small customer base but not an army of bots.
  - paco3346 5y ago
    Admin of a 5000+ website platform (with customer inventory) here. This the exact kind of thing I've been working so hard to block lately. Since Feb 2021 we've seen a substantial increase in scraping of our customers' inventory to the point we now have more bot traffic than human traffic. Annoyingly, only 5-10 requests come from a single IP so we've had to resort to always challenging requests that come from certain ASNs (typically those owned by datacenters). This type of project frustrates me because it knowlingly goes against a site's desired bot action (via robots.txt).
- realusername 5y ago
  We ended up here since some people wrongly decided that only Google has a right to scrape.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    I've run sites that have a lot of pages where 80%+ of the traffic is web crawlers. Google sends some traffic so I can afford to let them scrape. Bing crawls almost as much as Google but sends 5% as much traffic. Baidu crawls more than Google and never sends a single visitor. I hate reinforcing the Google monopoly, but a crawler that doesn't send any traffic is expensive to serve.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      You might want to ask yourself, or your readers, what it is people are trying to access on your site that they cannot by other means. The interfaces for many sites actively and with brutal effectiveness deny ready access to any content not currently featured on the homepage or stream feed. Search features are frequently nonexistent, crippled, or dysfunctional. Last week I found myself stumbling across a now-archived radio programme on a website which afforded exceedingly poor access to the content. The show ran weekly for over a decade, with 531 episodes. Those are visible ... ten at a time ... through either the Archive or Search features. Scraping the site gives me the full archive listing, all 11 years, in a single webpage, that loads in under a second. I can search that by date, title, or guest to find episodes of interest. The utility of this (a few hours work on my part) is much higher than that of the site itself. Often current web sites / apps are little more than wrappers around a JSON delivery-and-parsing engine. Dumping the raw JSON can be much more useful for a technical user. (Reddit, Diaspora, Mastodon, and Ello are several sites in which this is at least somewhat possible.) Much of the suck is imposed by monetisation schemes. One project of mine, decrufting the Washington Post's website, resulted in article pages with two percent the weight of the originally-delivered payload. The de-cruftified version strips not only extraneous JS and CSS, but nags and teasers which are really nothing but distraction to me. Again, that's typical. I'm aware that many scrapers are not benign. More than you might think are, and the fact that casual scraping is a problem for your delivery system reflects more poorly on it than them.
- ok2938 5y ago
  We ended up here, because a) the promise of easy to use structured data - that is inherent in data processing systems - has not been fulfilled: you have to scrape HTML to reconstruct some relational table, and b) information, despite being almost free to transmit in large amounts today, is treated as if it were a physical good, and each copy costs money. There is just lots of money in there, because our economic system looks more backwards than forwards.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  If a real user can access the content then that user should be able to delegate the work to a machine.
  - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
    But what when there are separate interfaces specifically designed for real users and machines? Case in point: OpenStreetMap (run by volunteer sysadmins) provides completely open, machine-readable data dumps. You can use these to set up your own geocoding, rendering or similar service. There is copious documentation, several post-processed dumps for particular purposes, etc. etc. OSM also provides a friendly, human-scale, user-facing interface for map browsing and search. There are clearly documented limitations/TOUs for automated use of this interface. Does that prevent people from setting up massive scrapers to scrape the human-facing interface, rather than using the machine-facing data dumps? No, it does not; and the volunteer sysadmins have to spend an inordinate amount of time protecting the service against these people. DataHen's proudly admitted practices ("No need to worry about IP bans, we auto rotate IPs on any requests that are made."; "our massive pool of auto-rotating proxies, user agents, and 'secret-sauce' helps get around them") is directly antithetical to this sort of scenario. I find this incredibly irresponsible and unethical.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Technically, this is the same rabbit hole that leads to DRM and device intent superceding user intent. Because that's the only way to be sure. It's unfortunate that it also allows havoc and burdens good services. But device-over-user is not a future I want to live in.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Of course if there is another, unlimited way of getting the data, then it's perfectly fine to "redirect" people to another avenue. What this conversation is about (since we're talking about web scrapers here, not "data downloaders" or whatever you would call it) is when there is no other avenue to get the data, you should be able to access the same data via a machine as you could when you're a person.
- CiaTransMatters 5y ago
  In order for the CIA to continue its legendary fight against transphobia, it is important for them to use these technologies to gather OSINT on regions that house millions of backwards non-progressives and all of their content. I can't believe HN is such a hotbed for transphobics like this to make comments without moderation or punishment.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  I work on a lot of web scraping and we have business agreements with every site that we scrape explicitly allowing us to do so and with pre-approval for the scraping rate (which we carefully control). None of this gets around over-eager Cloudflare or Akamai rules set up years ago by some contractor that the businesses have no real ability to change.
  - Havoc 5y ago
    Why scrape at all if there are agreements in place. Seems like a API task
    - selcuka 5y ago
      > None of this gets around over-eager Cloudflare or Akamai rules set up years ago by some contractor that the businesses have no real ability to change. If the business has no ability to even change the CloudFlare settings I don't expect them to be able to provide an API.
    - hestefisk 5y ago
      In that case, the web site IS the API… only difference is data is wrapped in HTML not JSON.
    - danpalmer 5y ago
      Only about 1 in 20 of our partners has the in-house tech necessary to provide us an API. In other words, we were able to accerelate our integrations by 20x by scraping.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  Good neighbors don't track people's every move online either, but here we are.
awestroke 5y ago
Looks extremely useful. Starred for if I ever need to do scraping
mellosouls 5y ago
This sounds technically interesting but ethically dubious; also requires sign-up - even though free - which (I think?) is discouraged for Show HN. If you are able to show how this service is administered responsibly with due regard for those running websites and blocking for good reason, best of luck with it.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > This sounds technically interesting but ethically dubious > If you are able to show how this service is administered responsibly Imagine if this was the comments about HTTP when it was first launched (honestly, surely there was, but not as much as praise). Protocols and tools are not ethically dubious or responsible for anything. The users who use those protocols and tools are. Anything that can be used for good/bad can also be used for bad/good.
- OJFord 5y ago
  > also requires sign-up - even though free - which (I think?) is discouraged for Show HN. I don't doubt it's 'community discouraged' because people don't want to have to, but I think the only rule is that there must be something to try out - no announcement-only, sign up for wait-list, hype-building type thing.
- Kiro 5y ago
  > also requires sign-up - even though free - which (I think?) is discouraged for Show HN. Look at past Show HNs and tell me how many respect this. It's such an obsolete rule that it's irrelevant and almost OT to even comment on.
dannyw 5y ago
Can this bypass cloudflare?
- new_guy 5y ago
  These guys bypass cloudflare https://microlink.io https://microlink.io it's open source but it's just more convenient to pay and forget about it.
- jonatron 5y ago
  Cloudflare have a few configuration options for the level of bot protection, so it's probably more a question of what percentage would be blocked for a particular site.
  - yourad_io 5y ago
    This is entirely correct. It will also depend on the proxy's ASN, the rate of requests, the ability to solve captchas and the presence of an actual js environment in the browser (as opposed to, say, curl - Cloudflare uses a javascript environment check script to detect puppeteer/selenium etc.)
    - yourad_io 5y ago
      > repository contains research from CloudFlare's AntiDDoS, JS Challenge, Captcha Challenges, and CloudFlare WAF. https://github.com/scaredos/cfresearch https://github.com/scaredos/cfresearch
- tintt 5y ago
  Sometimes I, a human being, can’t bypass Cloudflare
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Why is this on Github if I still need an API and cannot run it locally since the actual code is not public? Or is this some sort of „source available“ content marketing nonsense?
captainmuon 5y ago
This looks really interesting, I'm going to bookmark it! > Proxy IP address rotation I wonder where you would get a decent proxy list nowadays. In the late 90s, you could find list of accidental open proxies that "hackers" collected. But nowadays I've only seen really shady "residential proxies" that are basically private PCs with malware. Is there a decent source for proxies that are not widely blocked and not criminal and not too expensive? And by the way, while many people here question the morality of scraping, I have at least two legitimate use cases: 1) I built a little "vertical" search engine for a niche, using a combination of scraping and RSS. It doesn't consume much traffic and does really help people discover content in this niche. 2) A friend does research on urban development and rent prices and they scrape rent ads to get their data (or let students type it off manually, I'm not sure...)
- showerst 5y ago
  I run a number of proxies for (legally) scraping government data sites with overly restrictive views/hour policies. They're just squid boxes spun up on various cheap VPS providers. A $5 digitalocean instance will power a lot of squid traffic, and as long as you stay away from AWS, the IP ranges tend not to be banned. Just make sure to lock down your allowed source list, so you don't become one of those hacked open proxies!
kordlessagain 5y ago
If anyone needs a screenshot bot: https://github.com/kordless/grub-2.0 https://github.com/kordless/grub-2.0 Still need to do some work on it, but it does do the job!
aftbit 5y ago
What's the difference between the linked repo and the hosted service at https://till.datahen.com/api/v1 https://till.datahen.com/api/v1 ? Why do I need to sign up for a token if I am hosting my own server? Or otherwise, why do I need to host a server if I'm just calling your APIs? What sort of scraped data is exposed to the till hosted service?
- paramaw 5y ago
  We don't have a hosted service at the moment. It's all run on premise. The API link you mentioned is for a Till instance to validate the token and for usage stats reporting for each user. The Auth token validates each user's free and premium features and limits based on usage stats more specifically total requests counts and cache hits counter. We don't record nor track anything related to the requests made on Till.
JeremyBanks 5y ago
> Till was architected to follow best practices that DataHen has accumulated over the years of scraping at a massive scale. The best practice is not to build a business that's built on evading the security of the people you're depending on. Just get into crime if you want to do that.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
what kinds of scraping is being talked about here? As a maintainer of many a website I hate seeing so so much bot traffic these days. So many sketchy foreign things. And then throw in the spam/vulnerability testing bots/random URLs etc. sigh. Filling up the logs..Filling up the logs. Almost totally dependent on Cloudflare to mitigate these days/as an in-between.
- DaveExeter 5y ago
  I have simple PHP code that adds misbehaving IP address to iptables. Keeps the logs clean, because they can't even connect over port 80.
k1rcher 5y ago
Does this have any sort of JavaScript emulation/support? Or is it purely HTTP requests? The GID signature piece is especially interesting, I have ran into blockers in scaling scrapers in the past and this sort of organizational/tracking platform sounds awesome.
- paramaw 5y ago
  You can connect your local browser to Till. But, you need to have your browser to accept a custom CA(Certificate Authority). Instructions here: https://till.datahen.com/docs/installation#ca https://till.datahen.com/docs/installation#ca
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

209 points by paramaw 5y ago

> Till helps you circumvent detected as a web scraper by identifying your scraper as a real web browser. It does this by generating random user-agent headers and randomizing proxy IPs (that you supply) on every HTTP request. How did we start with consent using robots.txt and end up here? A good neighbor doesn't use circumvention.

JulianWasTaken 5y ago
And only a few paragraphs down from a heading that says > Till was architected to follow best practices that DataHen has accumulated I know there are plenty of sites out there out to prevent any scraping whatsoever, or to improperly prevent some situations most of us would agree is reasonable behavior, but this appears to be blatantly hostile to web admins out there.
- cube00 5y ago
  I agree there are cases where entities don't want things scraped that really should be scraped to preserve the history they'd like to rewrite. My concern is that tools like these that use circumvention by default become the go-to when someone needs scraping and makes life hell for us running sites on hardware that's enough to service our small customer base but not an army of bots.
- paco3346 5y ago
  Admin of a 5000+ website platform (with customer inventory) here. This the exact kind of thing I've been working so hard to block lately. Since Feb 2021 we've seen a substantial increase in scraping of our customers' inventory to the point we now have more bot traffic than human traffic. Annoyingly, only 5-10 requests come from a single IP so we've had to resort to always challenging requests that come from certain ASNs (typically those owned by datacenters). This type of project frustrates me because it knowlingly goes against a site's desired bot action (via robots.txt).
realusername 5y ago
We ended up here since some people wrongly decided that only Google has a right to scrape.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  I've run sites that have a lot of pages where 80%+ of the traffic is web crawlers. Google sends some traffic so I can afford to let them scrape. Bing crawls almost as much as Google but sends 5% as much traffic. Baidu crawls more than Google and never sends a single visitor. I hate reinforcing the Google monopoly, but a crawler that doesn't send any traffic is expensive to serve.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    You might want to ask yourself, or your readers, what it is people are trying to access on your site that they cannot by other means. The interfaces for many sites actively and with brutal effectiveness deny ready access to any content not currently featured on the homepage or stream feed. Search features are frequently nonexistent, crippled, or dysfunctional. Last week I found myself stumbling across a now-archived radio programme on a website which afforded exceedingly poor access to the content. The show ran weekly for over a decade, with 531 episodes. Those are visible ... ten at a time ... through either the Archive or Search features. Scraping the site gives me the full archive listing, all 11 years, in a single webpage, that loads in under a second. I can search that by date, title, or guest to find episodes of interest. The utility of this (a few hours work on my part) is much higher than that of the site itself. Often current web sites / apps are little more than wrappers around a JSON delivery-and-parsing engine. Dumping the raw JSON can be much more useful for a technical user. (Reddit, Diaspora, Mastodon, and Ello are several sites in which this is at least somewhat possible.) Much of the suck is imposed by monetisation schemes. One project of mine, decrufting the Washington Post's website, resulted in article pages with two percent the weight of the originally-delivered payload. The de-cruftified version strips not only extraneous JS and CSS, but nags and teasers which are really nothing but distraction to me. Again, that's typical. I'm aware that many scrapers are not benign. More than you might think are, and the fact that casual scraping is a problem for your delivery system reflects more poorly on it than them.
ok2938 5y ago
We ended up here, because a) the promise of easy to use structured data - that is inherent in data processing systems - has not been fulfilled: you have to scrape HTML to reconstruct some relational table, and b) information, despite being almost free to transmit in large amounts today, is treated as if it were a physical good, and each copy costs money. There is just lots of money in there, because our economic system looks more backwards than forwards.
Nextgrid 5y ago
If a real user can access the content then that user should be able to delegate the work to a machine.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  But what when there are separate interfaces specifically designed for real users and machines? Case in point: OpenStreetMap (run by volunteer sysadmins) provides completely open, machine-readable data dumps. You can use these to set up your own geocoding, rendering or similar service. There is copious documentation, several post-processed dumps for particular purposes, etc. etc. OSM also provides a friendly, human-scale, user-facing interface for map browsing and search. There are clearly documented limitations/TOUs for automated use of this interface. Does that prevent people from setting up massive scrapers to scrape the human-facing interface, rather than using the machine-facing data dumps? No, it does not; and the volunteer sysadmins have to spend an inordinate amount of time protecting the service against these people. DataHen's proudly admitted practices ("No need to worry about IP bans, we auto rotate IPs on any requests that are made."; "our massive pool of auto-rotating proxies, user agents, and 'secret-sauce' helps get around them") is directly antithetical to this sort of scenario. I find this incredibly irresponsible and unethical.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Technically, this is the same rabbit hole that leads to DRM and device intent superceding user intent. Because that's the only way to be sure. It's unfortunate that it also allows havoc and burdens good services. But device-over-user is not a future I want to live in.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Of course if there is another, unlimited way of getting the data, then it's perfectly fine to "redirect" people to another avenue. What this conversation is about (since we're talking about web scrapers here, not "data downloaders" or whatever you would call it) is when there is no other avenue to get the data, you should be able to access the same data via a machine as you could when you're a person.
CiaTransMatters 5y ago
In order for the CIA to continue its legendary fight against transphobia, it is important for them to use these technologies to gather OSINT on regions that house millions of backwards non-progressives and all of their content. I can't believe HN is such a hotbed for transphobics like this to make comments without moderation or punishment.
danpalmer 5y ago
I work on a lot of web scraping and we have business agreements with every site that we scrape explicitly allowing us to do so and with pre-approval for the scraping rate (which we carefully control). None of this gets around over-eager Cloudflare or Akamai rules set up years ago by some contractor that the businesses have no real ability to change.
- Havoc 5y ago
  Why scrape at all if there are agreements in place. Seems like a API task
  - selcuka 5y ago
    > None of this gets around over-eager Cloudflare or Akamai rules set up years ago by some contractor that the businesses have no real ability to change. If the business has no ability to even change the CloudFlare settings I don't expect them to be able to provide an API.
  - hestefisk 5y ago
    In that case, the web site IS the API… only difference is data is wrapped in HTML not JSON.
  - danpalmer 5y ago
    Only about 1 in 20 of our partners has the in-house tech necessary to provide us an API. In other words, we were able to accerelate our integrations by 20x by scraping.
anigbrowl 5y ago
Good neighbors don't track people's every move online either, but here we are.

awestroke 5y ago

Looks extremely useful. Starred for if I ever need to do scraping

mellosouls 5y ago

This sounds technically interesting but ethically dubious; also requires sign-up - even though free - which (I think?) is discouraged for Show HN. If you are able to show how this service is administered responsibly with due regard for those running websites and blocking for good reason, best of luck with it.

capableweb 5y ago
> This sounds technically interesting but ethically dubious > If you are able to show how this service is administered responsibly Imagine if this was the comments about HTTP when it was first launched (honestly, surely there was, but not as much as praise). Protocols and tools are not ethically dubious or responsible for anything. The users who use those protocols and tools are. Anything that can be used for good/bad can also be used for bad/good.
OJFord 5y ago
> also requires sign-up - even though free - which (I think?) is discouraged for Show HN. I don't doubt it's 'community discouraged' because people don't want to have to, but I think the only rule is that there must be something to try out - no announcement-only, sign up for wait-list, hype-building type thing.
Kiro 5y ago
> also requires sign-up - even though free - which (I think?) is discouraged for Show HN. Look at past Show HNs and tell me how many respect this. It's such an obsolete rule that it's irrelevant and almost OT to even comment on.

dannyw 5y ago

Can this bypass cloudflare?

new_guy 5y ago
These guys bypass cloudflare https://microlink.io https://microlink.io it's open source but it's just more convenient to pay and forget about it.
jonatron 5y ago
Cloudflare have a few configuration options for the level of bot protection, so it's probably more a question of what percentage would be blocked for a particular site.
- yourad_io 5y ago
  This is entirely correct. It will also depend on the proxy's ASN, the rate of requests, the ability to solve captchas and the presence of an actual js environment in the browser (as opposed to, say, curl - Cloudflare uses a javascript environment check script to detect puppeteer/selenium etc.)
  - yourad_io 5y ago
    > repository contains research from CloudFlare's AntiDDoS, JS Challenge, Captcha Challenges, and CloudFlare WAF. https://github.com/scaredos/cfresearch https://github.com/scaredos/cfresearch
tintt 5y ago
Sometimes I, a human being, can’t bypass Cloudflare

axiosgunnar 5y ago

Why is this on Github if I still need an API and cannot run it locally since the actual code is not public? Or is this some sort of „source available“ content marketing nonsense?

captainmuon 5y ago

This looks really interesting, I'm going to bookmark it! > Proxy IP address rotation I wonder where you would get a decent proxy list nowadays. In the late 90s, you could find list of accidental open proxies that "hackers" collected. But nowadays I've only seen really shady "residential proxies" that are basically private PCs with malware. Is there a decent source for proxies that are not widely blocked and not criminal and not too expensive? And by the way, while many people here question the morality of scraping, I have at least two legitimate use cases: 1) I built a little "vertical" search engine for a niche, using a combination of scraping and RSS. It doesn't consume much traffic and does really help people discover content in this niche. 2) A friend does research on urban development and rent prices and they scrape rent ads to get their data (or let students type it off manually, I'm not sure...)

showerst 5y ago
I run a number of proxies for (legally) scraping government data sites with overly restrictive views/hour policies. They're just squid boxes spun up on various cheap VPS providers. A $5 digitalocean instance will power a lot of squid traffic, and as long as you stay away from AWS, the IP ranges tend not to be banned. Just make sure to lock down your allowed source list, so you don't become one of those hacked open proxies!

kordlessagain 5y ago

If anyone needs a screenshot bot: https://github.com/kordless/grub-2.0 https://github.com/kordless/grub-2.0 Still need to do some work on it, but it does do the job!

aftbit 5y ago

What's the difference between the linked repo and the hosted service at https://till.datahen.com/api/v1 https://till.datahen.com/api/v1 ? Why do I need to sign up for a token if I am hosting my own server? Or otherwise, why do I need to host a server if I'm just calling your APIs? What sort of scraped data is exposed to the till hosted service?

paramaw 5y ago
We don't have a hosted service at the moment. It's all run on premise. The API link you mentioned is for a Till instance to validate the token and for usage stats reporting for each user. The Auth token validates each user's free and premium features and limits based on usage stats more specifically total requests counts and cache hits counter. We don't record nor track anything related to the requests made on Till.

JeremyBanks 5y ago

> Till was architected to follow best practices that DataHen has accumulated over the years of scraping at a massive scale. The best practice is not to build a business that's built on evading the security of the people you're depending on. Just get into crime if you want to do that.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

what kinds of scraping is being talked about here? As a maintainer of many a website I hate seeing so so much bot traffic these days. So many sketchy foreign things. And then throw in the spam/vulnerability testing bots/random URLs etc. sigh. Filling up the logs..Filling up the logs. Almost totally dependent on Cloudflare to mitigate these days/as an in-between.

DaveExeter 5y ago
I have simple PHP code that adds misbehaving IP address to iptables. Keeps the logs clean, because they can't even connect over port 80.

k1rcher 5y ago

Does this have any sort of JavaScript emulation/support? Or is it purely HTTP requests? The GID signature piece is especially interesting, I have ran into blockers in scaling scrapers in the past and this sort of organizational/tracking platform sounds awesome.

paramaw 5y ago
You can connect your local browser to Till. But, you need to have your browser to accept a custom CA(Certificate Authority). Instructions here: https://till.datahen.com/docs/installation#ca https://till.datahen.com/docs/installation#ca

deleted 5y ago

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