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While I have sympathy for what the scrapers are trying to do in many cases, it bothers me that this doesn't seem to address what happens when badly-behaved scra

While I have sympathy for what the scrapers are trying to do in many cases, it bothers me that this doesn't seem to address what happens when badly-behaved scrapers cause, in effect, a DOS on the site. For the family of sites I'm responsible for, bot traffic comprises a majority of traffic - that is, to a first approximation, the lion's share of our operational costs are from needing to scale to handle the huge amount of bot traffic. Even when it's not as big as a DOS, it doesn't seem right to me that I can't tell people they're not welcome to cause this additional system load. Or even if there was some standardized way that we could provide a dumb API, just giving them raw data so we don't need to incur the additional expense of the processing for creature comforts on the page designed to make our users happier but the bots won't notice.

svnpenn 5y ago
Implement TLS fingerprinting on your server. People can still fake that if they are determined, but it should cut the abuse way down.
- CWuestefeld 5y ago
  No, nor can we just do it by IP. The bots are MUCH more sophisticated than that. More often than not, it's a cooperating distributed net of hundreds of bots, coming from multiple AWS, Azure, and GCP addresses. So they can pop up anywhere, and that IP could wind up being a real customer next week. And they're only recognizable as a botnet with sophisticated logic looking at the gestalt of web logs. We do use a 3rd party service to help with this - but that on its own is imposing a 5- to 6-digit annual expense on our business.
  - z3c0 5y ago
    Have you considered setting up an API to allow the bots to get what they want without hammering your front-end servers?
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      What makes you think they would use it?
      - z3c0 5y ago
        It's in their interest. I've scraped a lot, and it's not easy to build a reliable process on. Why parse a human interface when there's an application interface available?
    - CWuestefeld 5y ago
      Yes. And if I could get the perpetrators to raise their hands so I could work out an API for them, it would be the path of least resistance. But they take great pains to be anonymous, although I know from circumstantial evidence that at least a good chunk of it is various competitors (or services acting on behalf of competitors) scraping price data. IANAL, but I also wonder if, given that I'd be designing something specifically for competitors to query our prices in order to adjust their own prices, this would constitute some form of illegal collusion.
      - marginalia_nu 5y ago
        What seems to actually work is to identify the bots and instead of giving up your hand by blocking them, to quietly poison the data. Critically, it needs to be subtle enough that it's not immediately obvious the data is manipulated. It should look like a plausible response, only with some random changes.
  - thaumaturgy 5y ago
    There's a lot of metadata available for IPs, and that metadata can be used to aggregate clusters of IPs, and that in turn can be datamined for trending activity, which can be used to sift out abusive activity from normal browsing. If you're dropping 6 figs annually on this and it's still frustrating, I'd be interested in talking with you. I built an abuse prediction system out of this approach for a small company a few years back, it worked well and it'd be cool to revisit the problem.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    > More often than not, it's a cooperating distributed net of hundreds of bots, coming from multiple AWS, Azure, and GCP addresses. those are only the low-effort/cheap ones, the more advanced scraping makes use of residential proxies (peoples' pwned home routers, or where they've installed shady VPN software on their PC that turns them into a proxy) to appear to come from legitimate residential last mile broadband netblocks belonging to comcast, verizon, etc. google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of an iceberg of a bunch of shady grey market shit.
  - listenallyall 5y ago
    > Our annual revenue from the site would put us on the list of top 100 ecommerce sites and you're sweating a 5- to 6- digit annual expense? > all our pricing is custom as negotiated with each customer. > there's a huge number of products (low millions) and many thousands of distinct catalogs Surely the business model where every customer has individually-negotiated pricing model costs a whole lot to implement, further, it gives each customer plenty of incentive to attempt to learn what other customers are paying for the same products. Given the tiny costs of fighting bots, in comparison, your complaints in these threads here seem pretty ridiculous.
- userbinator 5y ago
  TLS fingerprinting is one of the ways minority browsers and OS setups get unfairly excluded. I have an intense hatred of Cloudflare for popularising that. Yes, there are ways around it, but I still don't think I should have to fight to use the user-agent I want.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    I don't want to say tough cookies, but if OPs characterization isn't hyperbole("the lion's share of our operational costs are from needing to scale to handle the huge amount of bot traffic."), then it can be a situation where you have to choose between 1) cut off a huge chunk of bots, but upset a tiny percent of users, and improve the service for everyone else, or 2) simply not provide the service at all due to costs.
  - nyuszika7h 5y ago
    I don't think it's likely to cause issues if implemented properly. Realistically you can't really build a list of "good" TLS fingerprints because there are a lot of different browser/device combinations, so in my experience most sites usually just block "bad" ones known to belong to popular request libraries and such.
borski 5y ago
You could ban their IPs?
- KMnO4 5y ago
  IP bans are equivalent to residential door locks. They’re only deterring the most trivial attacks. In school I needed to scrape a few hundred thousand pages of a proteomics database website. For some reason you had to view each entry one at a time. There was IP throttling which banned you if you made requests too quickly. But slowing the script to 1 request per second would have taken days to scrape the site. So I paid <$5 for a list of 500 proxy servers and distributed it, completing the task in under half an hour.
  - l33t2328 5y ago
    Using proxies to hide your identity to get around a denial of access seems to get awfully close to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act(in USA, at least). I’m surprised your school was okay with it.
    - KMnO4 5y ago
      Don't worry, I don't live in the USA. Thanks for your concern though.
  - borski 5y ago
    I agree it’s not perfect. It’s also significantly better than nothing.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      It's also completely insufficient despite being better. There are so many scraper services that its just a matter of paying a small amount of money to make use of tens of thousands of IPs spread across ISPs and countries.
  - inshadows 5y ago
    Can you share where did you get such a nice proxy for 500 proxies? TIA
forgotmypw17 5y ago
Yes, I think working to accommodate the non-humans along with the humans is the right approach here. Scrapers have a limited range of IPs, so rate-limiting them and stalling (or dropping) request responses is one way to deal with the DoS scenario. For my sites, I have placed the majority behind HTTP Basic Auth...
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  You realistically can't. There are services like [0][1] that mean any IP could be a scraper node. [0] https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies [1] https://oxylabs.io/products/residential-proxy-pool https://oxylabs.io/products/residential-proxy-pool
  - orlp 5y ago
    > How does Bright Data acquire its residential IPs? > Bright Data has built a unique consumer IP model by which all involved parties are fairly compensated for their voluntary participation. App owners install a unique Software Development Kit (SDK) to their applications and receive monthly remuneration based on the number of users who opt-in. App users can voluntarily opt-in and are compensated through an ad-free user experience or enjoy an upgraded version of the app they are using for free. These consumers or ‘peers’ serve as the basis of our network and can opt-out at any time. This model has brought into existence an unrivaled, first of its kind, ethically sound, and compliant network of real consumers. I don't know how they can say with a straight face that this is 'ethically sound'. They have, essentially, created a botnet, but apparently because it's "AdTech" and the user "opts-in" (read: they click on random buttons until they hit one that makes the banner/ad go away) it's suddenly not malware.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      NordVPN (Tesonet) has another business doing the same thing. They sell the IP addresses/bandwidth of their NordVPN customers to anyone who needs bulk mobile or residential IP addresses. That's right, installing their VPN software adds your IP address to a pool that NordVPN then resells. Xfinity/Comcast sort of pioneered this with their wifi routers that automatically expose an isolated wifi network called 'xfinity' (IIRC) whether you agree or not.
Nextgrid 5y ago
But don't you already have countermeasures to deter DoS attacks or malicious human users (what if someone pays or convinces people to open your site and press F5 repeatedly)? If not, you should, and the badly-behaved scrapers are actually a good wake-up call.
rmbyrro 5y ago
I have sympathy for your operational issues and costs, but isn't this kind of complaint the same as a shopping mall/center complaining of people who go in, check some info and go out without buying? I understand that bots have leverage and automation, but so does you to reach a larger audience. Should we continue to benefit from one side of the leverage, while complaining about the other side?
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  It's more like a mall complaining that while they're trying to serve 1000 customers, someone has gone and dumped 10000000 roombas throughout the stores which are going around scanning all the price tags.
- CWuestefeld 5y ago
  No. When I say that bots exceed the amount of real traffic, I'm including people "window shopping" on the good side. My complaint is more like, somebody wants to know the prices of all our products, and that we have roughly X products (where X is a very large number). They get X friends to all go into the store almost simultaneously, each writing down the price of the particular product they've been assigned to research. When they do this, there's scant space left in the store for even the browsing kind of customers to walk in. (of course I exaggerate a bit, but that's the idea)
  - mrobins 5y ago
    I’m sympathetic to the complaints about “rude” scraping behavior but there’s an easy solution. Rather than make people consume boatloads of resources they don’t want (individual page views, images, scripts, etc.) just build good interoperability tools that give the people what they want. In the physical example above that would be a product catalog that’s easily replicated with a CSV product listing or an API.
    - jensensbutton 5y ago
      You don't know why any random scraper is scraping you and thus you don't know what api to build that will do them from scraping. Also, it's likely easier for them to contribute scraping than write a bunch of code to integrate with your API so it there's no incentive for them to do so either.
linuxdude314 5y ago
If most of your traffic is bots, is the site even worth running? This really is akin to the question, “Should others be allowed to take my photo or try to talk to me in public?” Of course the answer should be yes, the internet is the digital equivalent of a public space. If you make it accessible, anyone should be able to consume. If you don’t want it scraped add auth!
- simiones 5y ago
  Do you also believe someone running a drone to follow and photograph you, personally, wherever you go in public would be fair and legal?
kstrauser 5y ago
I've told this story before, but it was fun, so I'm sharing it again: I'll skip the details, but a previous employer dealt with a large, then-new .mil website. Our customers would log into the site to check on the status of their invoices, and each page load would take approximately 1 minute. Seriously. It took about 10 minutes to log in and get to the list of invoices available to be checked, then another minute to look at one of them, then another minute to get out of it and back into the list, and so on. My job was to write a scraper for that website. It ran all night to fetch data into our DB, and then our website could show the same information to our customers in a matter of milliseconds (or all at once if they wanted one big aggregate report). Our customers loved this. The .mil website's developer hated it, and blamed all sorts of their tech problems on us, although: - While optimizing, I figured out how to skip lots of intermediate page loads and go directly to the invoices we wanted to see. - We ran our scraper at night so that it wouldn't interfere with their site during the day. - Because each of our customers had to check each one of their invoices every day if they wanted to get paid, and we were doing it more efficiently, our total load on their site was lower than the total load of our customers would be. Their site kept crashing, and we were there scapegoat. It was great fun when they blamed us in a public meeting, and we responded that we'd actually disabled our crawler for the past week, so the problem was still on their end. Eventually, they threatened to cut off all our access to the site. We helpfully pointed out that their brand new site wasn't ADA compliant, and we had vision-impaired customers who weren't able to use it. We offered to allow our customers to run the same reports from our website, for free, at no cost to the .mil agency, so that they wouldn't have to rebuild their website from the ground up. They saw it our way and begrudgingly allowed us to keep scraping.
- dwater 5y ago
  I have worked with .mil customers who paid us to scrape and index their website because they didn't have a better way to access their official, public documents.
  - jll29 5y ago
    This is not .mil specific: I've been told of a case where an airline first legally attacked a flight search engine (Skyscanner) for scraping, and then told them to continue when they realized that their own search engine couldn't handle all the traffic, and even if it could, it was more expensive per query than routing via Skyscanner.
bequanna 5y ago
As someone that has been on the other end, I can tell you devs don’t want to use selenium or inspect requests to reverse engineer your UI and wish there were more clean APIs. Have you tried making your UI more challenging to scrape and adding a simple API that requires free registration?
- JimBlackwood 5y ago
  So much this! I work in E-Commerce and (needless to say) we scrape a lot of websites. Due to our growth and the increase in scrapers we require, I’ve been writing a proposal to a higher up to talk to our biggest competitors to all set up a public API that batches the data for a smaller amount of requests. It would save everyone quite some traffic and effort.
userbinator 5y ago
That's what rate-limiting is for. Don't be so aggressive with it that you start hitting the faster visitors, however, or they may soon go somewhere else (has happened to me a few times).
- loceng 5y ago
  Do you know if there's a way to rate limit logged-in users differently than visitors of a site?
  - minusf 5y ago
    nginx can be set up to do that using the session cookie.
  - rolph 5y ago
    rate limiting can be a double edged sword, you can be better off giving a scraper highest bandwidth so they are gone sooner, otherwise somthing like making a zip or other sort of compilation of the site available may be an option. just what kind of scraper you have is a concern. does scraper just want a bunch of stock images; or does scraper have FOMO on web trinkets; or does scraper want to mirror/impersonate your site. the last option is the most concerning because then; scraper is mirroring bcz your site is cool and local UI/UX is wanted; or is scraper phishing smishing or otherwise duping your users.
    - loceng 5y ago
      Yeah, good points to consider. I think the sites that would be scrapped the most would be where the data is regularly and reliably up-to-date, and a large volume of it at that - so not just one scraper but many different parties may on a daily or weekly basis try to scrap every page. I feel that ruling should have the caveat that if a fair cost paid API version for getting publicly listed data then the scrapers must legally use that (say no more than 5% more than cost of CPU/bandwidth/etc of the scraping behaviour); ideally a rule too that at minimum there be a delay if they are republishing that data without your permission, so at least you as the platform/source/reason for the data being up-to-date aren't harmed too - which may then kill the source platform over time if regular visitors somehow start going to the competitor publishing the data.
ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
As other have said (A) there are plenty of countermeasures you can take, but also (B) you are frustrated that you are providing something free to the public and then annoyed at the "wrong" customers are using your product and costing you money. I'm sorry, but this is a failure of your business model. If we were to analogize this to a non-internet example: (1) A company throws a free concert/event and believes they will make money by alcohol sales. (2) A bunch of sober/non-drinking folks attend the concert but only drink water (3) Company blames the concert attendees for "taking advantage" of them when they really just had poor company policies and a bad business model. Put things behind authentication and authorization. Add a paywall. Implement DDOS and detection and banning approaches for scrapers. Etc etc. But don't make something public and then get mad at THE PUBLIC for using it. Behind that machine is a person, who happens to be a member of the public.
- noisenotsignal 5y ago
  There are certain classes of websites where the proposed solutions aren’t a great fit. For example, a shopping site hiding their catalog behind paywalls or authentication would raise barriers to entry such that a lot of genuine customers would be lost. I don’t think the business model is in general to be blamed here and it’s ok to acknowledge the unfortunate overhead and costs added by site usage patterns (e.g. scraping) that are counter to the expectation.
- inlined 5y ago
  Alternatively it could be seen that your juice company offers free samples. Then somebody abuses free and takes gallons home with them to bottle and sell as their own. That’s what it feels like when someone is scraping your network to bootstrap a competitor.
  - ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
    Again, what you call abuse of free samples, someone else calls a savvy strategy tailored to you're poorly crafted business plan. Have ways to limit the free samples or else it's your fault...
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gdulli 5y ago
When the original ruling in favor of HiQ came out, it still allowed for LinkedIn to block certain kinds of malicious scraping. LinkedIn had been specifically blocking HiQ, and was ordered to stop doing that.
brailsafe 5y ago
You probably can. On the protocol level with JSON-LD or other rich data packages that generate xml or standardized json endpoints. I did this for an open data portal, and this is something most G7 governments do with their federal open data portals using off the shelf packages (that are worth researching a bit obviously first), particularly in the python and flask world. We were still getting hammered by China at our Taiwanese language subdomain, but that was a different concern
YPCrumble 5y ago
Reading your comment my impression is that this is either an exaggeration or a very unique type of site if bots make up the majority of traffic to the point that scrapers are anywhere near the primary load factor. Would someone let me know if I’m just plain wrong in this assumption? I’ve run many types of sites and scrapers have never been anywhere close to the main source of traffic or even particularly noticeable compared to regular users. Even considering a very commonly scraped site like LinkedIn or Craigslist - for any site of any magnitude like this public pages are going to be cached so additional scrapers are going to have negligible impact. And a rate limit is probably one line of config. I’m not saying you are necessarily wrong, but I can’t imagine a scenario that you’re describing and would love to hear of one.
- nojito 5y ago
  Bandwidth isn't free.
  - YPCrumble 5y ago
    I didn’t say it is free, I said that the bandwidth for bots is negligible compared to that of regular users.
    - nojito 5y ago
      Negligible isn’t free either.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  > a very unique type of site if bots make up the majority of traffic Pretty much Twitter and the majority of such websites.
  - YPCrumble 5y ago
    Do you really believe bots make up a significant amount of Twitter’s operating cost? Like I said they’re just accessing cached tweets and are rate limited. How can the bot usage possibly be more than a small part of twitter’s operating cost?
throw10920 5y ago
Have you considered serving a proof-of-work challenge to clients accessing your website? Minimal cost on legit users, but large costs on large-scale web-scraping operations, and it doesn't matter if they split up their efforts across a bunch of IP addresses - they're still going to have to do those computations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- nyuszika7h 5y ago
  No thanks, as a user I would stay far away from such websites. This is akin to crypto miners. I don't need them to drive up my electricity costs and also contribute to global warming in the process. It's not worth the cost.
  - fouric 5y ago
    This is completely absurd - anti-spam PoW is not remotely comparable to crypto miners, and the electricity cost will be so far below the noise floor of owning a computer in the first place that you will literally not notice (and neither will the environment), unless website owners are completely insane and set up multi-second challenges (which, they won't). And, it's absolutely worth the cost - as a website owner, you get to impose costs on botting operations with minimal penalties for normal users and minimal environmental impact. Bots work because the costs of renting an AWS server and scraping websites (or sending spam, whatever) are extremely tiny - adding PoW challenges to everything that could be spammed suddenly massively changes the cost of running those spam operations, and would result in noticeably less spam if deployed widely. In fact, the net "environmental impact" would be negative, as botters start to shut down operations due to greatly increased operational costs.
  - danamit 5y ago
    You do PoW every time you send an email.
colinmhayes 5y ago
I'm sympathetic to this. I built a search engine for my senior project and my half baked scraper ended up taking down duke law's site during their registration period. Ended up getting a not so kindly worded email from them, but honestly this wasn't an especially hard problem to solve. All of my traffic was coming from the cluster that was on my university's subnet, it wouldn't have been that hard to for them to IP address timeouts when my crawler started scraping thousands of pages a second on their site. Not to victim blame, this was totally my fault, but I was a bit surprised that they hadn't experienced this before with how much automated scraping goes on.
- brightball 5y ago
  I’m honestly more interested in bot detection than anything else at this point. It seems like it should be perfectly legal to detect and then hold the connection open for a long period of time without giving a useful response. Or even send highly compressed gzip responses designed to fill their drives. Legal or not, I can’t see any good reason that we can’t make it painful.
  - fjabre 5y ago
    Make it painful if they abuse the site. We all benefit from open data. Polite scrapers are just fine and a natural part of the web ecosystem. Google has been scraping the web all day every day for decades now.
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hardtke 5y ago
The problem with many sites (and LinkedIn in particular) is that they whitelist a bunch of specific websites, presumably based on the business interests, but disallow everyone else in their robots.txt. You should either allow all scrapers that respect certain load requirements or allow none. Anything that Google is allowed to see and include in their search results should be fair game. Here's the end of LinkedIn's robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: / # Notice: If you would like to crawl LinkedIn, # please email whitelist-crawl@linkedin.com to apply # for white listing.
- diamondage 5y ago
  And this is what the HiQ case hinged on. LinkedIn were essentially selectively applying the computer fraud and abuse act based on their business interests - that was never going to sit well with judges.
- JimBlackwood 5y ago
  Btw, LinkedIn does have an API for things like Sales Navigator. It used some weird partnership program (SNAP) to get into it and it starts at (I think) 1500$/year per user. Still pretty cheap though, I think you’d get the value out of that quite quickly for a >300 people company.
car_analogy 5y ago
> Even when it's not as big as a DOS, it doesn't seem right to me that I can't tell people they're not welcome to cause this additional system load. You can tell them. You just can't prosecute them if they don't obey.
voxic11 5y ago
The court just ruled that scraping on its own isn't a violation of the CFAA. Meaning it doesn't count as the crime of "accessing a protected computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access and obtaining information". However presumably all the other provisions of the CFAA still apply, so if your scraping damages the functioning of a internet service then you still would have committed the crime of "Damaging a protected computer by intentional access". Negligently damaging a protected computer is punishable by 1 year in prison on the first offence. Recklessly damaging a protected computer is punishable by 1-5 years on the first offense. And intentionally damaging a protected computer is punishable by 1-10 years for the first offense. These penalties can go up to 20 years for repeated offenses.
davidhyde 5y ago
I don't know what kind of data you serve up but perhaps you could serve low quality or inaccurate content from addresses that are guessed from your api. I.e. endpoints not normally reachable in the normal functioning of your web app should return reasonable junk. A mixture of accurate and inaccurate data becomes worthless for bots and worthless data is not worth scraping. Just an idea!
bastardoperator 5y ago
Have you considered using a cache service like cloudflare?
KennyBlanken 5y ago
> While I have sympathy for what the scrapers are trying to do in many cases, it bothers me that this doesn't seem to address what happens when badly-behaved scrapers cause, in effect, a DOS on the site. Like when Aaron Swartz spent months hammering JSTOR causing it to become so slow it was almost unusuable, and despite knowing that he was causing widespread problems (including the eventual banning of MIT's entire IP range) actually worked to add additional laptops and improve his scraping speed...all the while going out of his way to subvert MIT's netops group trying to figure out where he was on the network. JSTOR, by the way, is a non-profit that provides aggregate access to their cataloged archive of journals, for schools and libraries to access journals they would otherwise never be able to afford. In many cases, free access.
- uncletammy 5y ago
  The effect on Jstore's revenue would have been negligible. I'm surprised to see someone so cold and unfeeling about Aaron Swartz. Especially considering the massive injustice with regards to application of the law and sentencing. > Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.
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asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
Seems like you could sue the scraper for that, then? If they cause you damages by their unapproved actions, you have a tort claim.
FrenchDevRemote 5y ago
What have you done to protect the site? Most automation libraries are detectable(puppeteer, even with extra-stealth, selenium, playwright...) The only library that I know that is more or less undetectable is used by a just a few hundred people...
- JimBlackwood 5y ago
  Colour me interested in this library! :)
- collegeburner 5y ago
  Curious, what library is that?

svnpenn 5y ago

Implement TLS fingerprinting on your server. People can still fake that if they are determined, but it should cut the abuse way down.

CWuestefeld 5y ago
No, nor can we just do it by IP. The bots are MUCH more sophisticated than that. More often than not, it's a cooperating distributed net of hundreds of bots, coming from multiple AWS, Azure, and GCP addresses. So they can pop up anywhere, and that IP could wind up being a real customer next week. And they're only recognizable as a botnet with sophisticated logic looking at the gestalt of web logs. We do use a 3rd party service to help with this - but that on its own is imposing a 5- to 6-digit annual expense on our business.
- z3c0 5y ago
  Have you considered setting up an API to allow the bots to get what they want without hammering your front-end servers?
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    What makes you think they would use it?
    - z3c0 5y ago
      It's in their interest. I've scraped a lot, and it's not easy to build a reliable process on. Why parse a human interface when there's an application interface available?
  - CWuestefeld 5y ago
    Yes. And if I could get the perpetrators to raise their hands so I could work out an API for them, it would be the path of least resistance. But they take great pains to be anonymous, although I know from circumstantial evidence that at least a good chunk of it is various competitors (or services acting on behalf of competitors) scraping price data. IANAL, but I also wonder if, given that I'd be designing something specifically for competitors to query our prices in order to adjust their own prices, this would constitute some form of illegal collusion.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      What seems to actually work is to identify the bots and instead of giving up your hand by blocking them, to quietly poison the data. Critically, it needs to be subtle enough that it's not immediately obvious the data is manipulated. It should look like a plausible response, only with some random changes.
- thaumaturgy 5y ago
  There's a lot of metadata available for IPs, and that metadata can be used to aggregate clusters of IPs, and that in turn can be datamined for trending activity, which can be used to sift out abusive activity from normal browsing. If you're dropping 6 figs annually on this and it's still frustrating, I'd be interested in talking with you. I built an abuse prediction system out of this approach for a small company a few years back, it worked well and it'd be cool to revisit the problem.
- walrus01 5y ago
  > More often than not, it's a cooperating distributed net of hundreds of bots, coming from multiple AWS, Azure, and GCP addresses. those are only the low-effort/cheap ones, the more advanced scraping makes use of residential proxies (peoples' pwned home routers, or where they've installed shady VPN software on their PC that turns them into a proxy) to appear to come from legitimate residential last mile broadband netblocks belonging to comcast, verizon, etc. google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of an iceberg of a bunch of shady grey market shit.
- listenallyall 5y ago
  > Our annual revenue from the site would put us on the list of top 100 ecommerce sites and you're sweating a 5- to 6- digit annual expense? > all our pricing is custom as negotiated with each customer. > there's a huge number of products (low millions) and many thousands of distinct catalogs Surely the business model where every customer has individually-negotiated pricing model costs a whole lot to implement, further, it gives each customer plenty of incentive to attempt to learn what other customers are paying for the same products. Given the tiny costs of fighting bots, in comparison, your complaints in these threads here seem pretty ridiculous.
userbinator 5y ago
TLS fingerprinting is one of the ways minority browsers and OS setups get unfairly excluded. I have an intense hatred of Cloudflare for popularising that. Yes, there are ways around it, but I still don't think I should have to fight to use the user-agent I want.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  I don't want to say tough cookies, but if OPs characterization isn't hyperbole("the lion's share of our operational costs are from needing to scale to handle the huge amount of bot traffic."), then it can be a situation where you have to choose between 1) cut off a huge chunk of bots, but upset a tiny percent of users, and improve the service for everyone else, or 2) simply not provide the service at all due to costs.
- nyuszika7h 5y ago
  I don't think it's likely to cause issues if implemented properly. Realistically you can't really build a list of "good" TLS fingerprints because there are a lot of different browser/device combinations, so in my experience most sites usually just block "bad" ones known to belong to popular request libraries and such.

borski 5y ago

You could ban their IPs?

KMnO4 5y ago
IP bans are equivalent to residential door locks. They’re only deterring the most trivial attacks. In school I needed to scrape a few hundred thousand pages of a proteomics database website. For some reason you had to view each entry one at a time. There was IP throttling which banned you if you made requests too quickly. But slowing the script to 1 request per second would have taken days to scrape the site. So I paid <$5 for a list of 500 proxy servers and distributed it, completing the task in under half an hour.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  Using proxies to hide your identity to get around a denial of access seems to get awfully close to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act(in USA, at least). I’m surprised your school was okay with it.
  - KMnO4 5y ago
    Don't worry, I don't live in the USA. Thanks for your concern though.
- borski 5y ago
  I agree it’s not perfect. It’s also significantly better than nothing.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    It's also completely insufficient despite being better. There are so many scraper services that its just a matter of paying a small amount of money to make use of tens of thousands of IPs spread across ISPs and countries.
- inshadows 5y ago
  Can you share where did you get such a nice proxy for 500 proxies? TIA

forgotmypw17 5y ago

Yes, I think working to accommodate the non-humans along with the humans is the right approach here. Scrapers have a limited range of IPs, so rate-limiting them and stalling (or dropping) request responses is one way to deal with the DoS scenario. For my sites, I have placed the majority behind HTTP Basic Auth...

KptMarchewa 5y ago
You realistically can't. There are services like [0][1] that mean any IP could be a scraper node. [0] https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies [1] https://oxylabs.io/products/residential-proxy-pool https://oxylabs.io/products/residential-proxy-pool
- orlp 5y ago
  > How does Bright Data acquire its residential IPs? > Bright Data has built a unique consumer IP model by which all involved parties are fairly compensated for their voluntary participation. App owners install a unique Software Development Kit (SDK) to their applications and receive monthly remuneration based on the number of users who opt-in. App users can voluntarily opt-in and are compensated through an ad-free user experience or enjoy an upgraded version of the app they are using for free. These consumers or ‘peers’ serve as the basis of our network and can opt-out at any time. This model has brought into existence an unrivaled, first of its kind, ethically sound, and compliant network of real consumers. I don't know how they can say with a straight face that this is 'ethically sound'. They have, essentially, created a botnet, but apparently because it's "AdTech" and the user "opts-in" (read: they click on random buttons until they hit one that makes the banner/ad go away) it's suddenly not malware.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    NordVPN (Tesonet) has another business doing the same thing. They sell the IP addresses/bandwidth of their NordVPN customers to anyone who needs bulk mobile or residential IP addresses. That's right, installing their VPN software adds your IP address to a pool that NordVPN then resells. Xfinity/Comcast sort of pioneered this with their wifi routers that automatically expose an isolated wifi network called 'xfinity' (IIRC) whether you agree or not.

Nextgrid 5y ago

But don't you already have countermeasures to deter DoS attacks or malicious human users (what if someone pays or convinces people to open your site and press F5 repeatedly)? If not, you should, and the badly-behaved scrapers are actually a good wake-up call.

rmbyrro 5y ago

I have sympathy for your operational issues and costs, but isn't this kind of complaint the same as a shopping mall/center complaining of people who go in, check some info and go out without buying? I understand that bots have leverage and automation, but so does you to reach a larger audience. Should we continue to benefit from one side of the leverage, while complaining about the other side?

wlesieutre 5y ago
It's more like a mall complaining that while they're trying to serve 1000 customers, someone has gone and dumped 10000000 roombas throughout the stores which are going around scanning all the price tags.
CWuestefeld 5y ago
No. When I say that bots exceed the amount of real traffic, I'm including people "window shopping" on the good side. My complaint is more like, somebody wants to know the prices of all our products, and that we have roughly X products (where X is a very large number). They get X friends to all go into the store almost simultaneously, each writing down the price of the particular product they've been assigned to research. When they do this, there's scant space left in the store for even the browsing kind of customers to walk in. (of course I exaggerate a bit, but that's the idea)
- mrobins 5y ago
  I’m sympathetic to the complaints about “rude” scraping behavior but there’s an easy solution. Rather than make people consume boatloads of resources they don’t want (individual page views, images, scripts, etc.) just build good interoperability tools that give the people what they want. In the physical example above that would be a product catalog that’s easily replicated with a CSV product listing or an API.
  - jensensbutton 5y ago
    You don't know why any random scraper is scraping you and thus you don't know what api to build that will do them from scraping. Also, it's likely easier for them to contribute scraping than write a bunch of code to integrate with your API so it there's no incentive for them to do so either.

linuxdude314 5y ago

If most of your traffic is bots, is the site even worth running? This really is akin to the question, “Should others be allowed to take my photo or try to talk to me in public?” Of course the answer should be yes, the internet is the digital equivalent of a public space. If you make it accessible, anyone should be able to consume. If you don’t want it scraped add auth!

simiones 5y ago
Do you also believe someone running a drone to follow and photograph you, personally, wherever you go in public would be fair and legal?

kstrauser 5y ago

I've told this story before, but it was fun, so I'm sharing it again: I'll skip the details, but a previous employer dealt with a large, then-new .mil website. Our customers would log into the site to check on the status of their invoices, and each page load would take approximately 1 minute. Seriously. It took about 10 minutes to log in and get to the list of invoices available to be checked, then another minute to look at one of them, then another minute to get out of it and back into the list, and so on. My job was to write a scraper for that website. It ran all night to fetch data into our DB, and then our website could show the same information to our customers in a matter of milliseconds (or all at once if they wanted one big aggregate report). Our customers loved this. The .mil website's developer hated it, and blamed all sorts of their tech problems on us, although: - While optimizing, I figured out how to skip lots of intermediate page loads and go directly to the invoices we wanted to see. - We ran our scraper at night so that it wouldn't interfere with their site during the day. - Because each of our customers had to check each one of their invoices every day if they wanted to get paid, and we were doing it more efficiently, our total load on their site was lower than the total load of our customers would be. Their site kept crashing, and we were there scapegoat. It was great fun when they blamed us in a public meeting, and we responded that we'd actually disabled our crawler for the past week, so the problem was still on their end. Eventually, they threatened to cut off all our access to the site. We helpfully pointed out that their brand new site wasn't ADA compliant, and we had vision-impaired customers who weren't able to use it. We offered to allow our customers to run the same reports from our website, for free, at no cost to the .mil agency, so that they wouldn't have to rebuild their website from the ground up. They saw it our way and begrudgingly allowed us to keep scraping.

dwater 5y ago
I have worked with .mil customers who paid us to scrape and index their website because they didn't have a better way to access their official, public documents.
- jll29 5y ago
  This is not .mil specific: I've been told of a case where an airline first legally attacked a flight search engine (Skyscanner) for scraping, and then told them to continue when they realized that their own search engine couldn't handle all the traffic, and even if it could, it was more expensive per query than routing via Skyscanner.

bequanna 5y ago

As someone that has been on the other end, I can tell you devs don’t want to use selenium or inspect requests to reverse engineer your UI and wish there were more clean APIs. Have you tried making your UI more challenging to scrape and adding a simple API that requires free registration?

JimBlackwood 5y ago
So much this! I work in E-Commerce and (needless to say) we scrape a lot of websites. Due to our growth and the increase in scrapers we require, I’ve been writing a proposal to a higher up to talk to our biggest competitors to all set up a public API that batches the data for a smaller amount of requests. It would save everyone quite some traffic and effort.

userbinator 5y ago

That's what rate-limiting is for. Don't be so aggressive with it that you start hitting the faster visitors, however, or they may soon go somewhere else (has happened to me a few times).

loceng 5y ago
Do you know if there's a way to rate limit logged-in users differently than visitors of a site?
- minusf 5y ago
  nginx can be set up to do that using the session cookie.
- rolph 5y ago
  rate limiting can be a double edged sword, you can be better off giving a scraper highest bandwidth so they are gone sooner, otherwise somthing like making a zip or other sort of compilation of the site available may be an option. just what kind of scraper you have is a concern. does scraper just want a bunch of stock images; or does scraper have FOMO on web trinkets; or does scraper want to mirror/impersonate your site. the last option is the most concerning because then; scraper is mirroring bcz your site is cool and local UI/UX is wanted; or is scraper phishing smishing or otherwise duping your users.
  - loceng 5y ago
    Yeah, good points to consider. I think the sites that would be scrapped the most would be where the data is regularly and reliably up-to-date, and a large volume of it at that - so not just one scraper but many different parties may on a daily or weekly basis try to scrap every page. I feel that ruling should have the caveat that if a fair cost paid API version for getting publicly listed data then the scrapers must legally use that (say no more than 5% more than cost of CPU/bandwidth/etc of the scraping behaviour); ideally a rule too that at minimum there be a delay if they are republishing that data without your permission, so at least you as the platform/source/reason for the data being up-to-date aren't harmed too - which may then kill the source platform over time if regular visitors somehow start going to the competitor publishing the data.

ryan_j_naughton 5y ago

As other have said (A) there are plenty of countermeasures you can take, but also (B) you are frustrated that you are providing something free to the public and then annoyed at the "wrong" customers are using your product and costing you money. I'm sorry, but this is a failure of your business model. If we were to analogize this to a non-internet example: (1) A company throws a free concert/event and believes they will make money by alcohol sales. (2) A bunch of sober/non-drinking folks attend the concert but only drink water (3) Company blames the concert attendees for "taking advantage" of them when they really just had poor company policies and a bad business model. Put things behind authentication and authorization. Add a paywall. Implement DDOS and detection and banning approaches for scrapers. Etc etc. But don't make something public and then get mad at THE PUBLIC for using it. Behind that machine is a person, who happens to be a member of the public.

noisenotsignal 5y ago
There are certain classes of websites where the proposed solutions aren’t a great fit. For example, a shopping site hiding their catalog behind paywalls or authentication would raise barriers to entry such that a lot of genuine customers would be lost. I don’t think the business model is in general to be blamed here and it’s ok to acknowledge the unfortunate overhead and costs added by site usage patterns (e.g. scraping) that are counter to the expectation.
inlined 5y ago
Alternatively it could be seen that your juice company offers free samples. Then somebody abuses free and takes gallons home with them to bottle and sell as their own. That’s what it feels like when someone is scraping your network to bootstrap a competitor.
- ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
  Again, what you call abuse of free samples, someone else calls a savvy strategy tailored to you're poorly crafted business plan. Have ways to limit the free samples or else it's your fault...

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gdulli 5y ago

When the original ruling in favor of HiQ came out, it still allowed for LinkedIn to block certain kinds of malicious scraping. LinkedIn had been specifically blocking HiQ, and was ordered to stop doing that.

brailsafe 5y ago

You probably can. On the protocol level with JSON-LD or other rich data packages that generate xml or standardized json endpoints. I did this for an open data portal, and this is something most G7 governments do with their federal open data portals using off the shelf packages (that are worth researching a bit obviously first), particularly in the python and flask world. We were still getting hammered by China at our Taiwanese language subdomain, but that was a different concern

YPCrumble 5y ago

Reading your comment my impression is that this is either an exaggeration or a very unique type of site if bots make up the majority of traffic to the point that scrapers are anywhere near the primary load factor. Would someone let me know if I’m just plain wrong in this assumption? I’ve run many types of sites and scrapers have never been anywhere close to the main source of traffic or even particularly noticeable compared to regular users. Even considering a very commonly scraped site like LinkedIn or Craigslist - for any site of any magnitude like this public pages are going to be cached so additional scrapers are going to have negligible impact. And a rate limit is probably one line of config. I’m not saying you are necessarily wrong, but I can’t imagine a scenario that you’re describing and would love to hear of one.

nojito 5y ago
Bandwidth isn't free.
- YPCrumble 5y ago
  I didn’t say it is free, I said that the bandwidth for bots is negligible compared to that of regular users.
  - nojito 5y ago
    Negligible isn’t free either.
VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
> a very unique type of site if bots make up the majority of traffic Pretty much Twitter and the majority of such websites.
- YPCrumble 5y ago
  Do you really believe bots make up a significant amount of Twitter’s operating cost? Like I said they’re just accessing cached tweets and are rate limited. How can the bot usage possibly be more than a small part of twitter’s operating cost?

throw10920 5y ago

Have you considered serving a proof-of-work challenge to clients accessing your website? Minimal cost on legit users, but large costs on large-scale web-scraping operations, and it doesn't matter if they split up their efforts across a bunch of IP addresses - they're still going to have to do those computations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

nyuszika7h 5y ago
No thanks, as a user I would stay far away from such websites. This is akin to crypto miners. I don't need them to drive up my electricity costs and also contribute to global warming in the process. It's not worth the cost.
- fouric 5y ago
  This is completely absurd - anti-spam PoW is not remotely comparable to crypto miners, and the electricity cost will be so far below the noise floor of owning a computer in the first place that you will literally not notice (and neither will the environment), unless website owners are completely insane and set up multi-second challenges (which, they won't). And, it's absolutely worth the cost - as a website owner, you get to impose costs on botting operations with minimal penalties for normal users and minimal environmental impact. Bots work because the costs of renting an AWS server and scraping websites (or sending spam, whatever) are extremely tiny - adding PoW challenges to everything that could be spammed suddenly massively changes the cost of running those spam operations, and would result in noticeably less spam if deployed widely. In fact, the net "environmental impact" would be negative, as botters start to shut down operations due to greatly increased operational costs.
- danamit 5y ago
  You do PoW every time you send an email.

colinmhayes 5y ago

I'm sympathetic to this. I built a search engine for my senior project and my half baked scraper ended up taking down duke law's site during their registration period. Ended up getting a not so kindly worded email from them, but honestly this wasn't an especially hard problem to solve. All of my traffic was coming from the cluster that was on my university's subnet, it wouldn't have been that hard to for them to IP address timeouts when my crawler started scraping thousands of pages a second on their site. Not to victim blame, this was totally my fault, but I was a bit surprised that they hadn't experienced this before with how much automated scraping goes on.

brightball 5y ago
I’m honestly more interested in bot detection than anything else at this point. It seems like it should be perfectly legal to detect and then hold the connection open for a long period of time without giving a useful response. Or even send highly compressed gzip responses designed to fill their drives. Legal or not, I can’t see any good reason that we can’t make it painful.
- fjabre 5y ago
  Make it painful if they abuse the site. We all benefit from open data. Polite scrapers are just fine and a natural part of the web ecosystem. Google has been scraping the web all day every day for decades now.

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hardtke 5y ago

The problem with many sites (and LinkedIn in particular) is that they whitelist a bunch of specific websites, presumably based on the business interests, but disallow everyone else in their robots.txt. You should either allow all scrapers that respect certain load requirements or allow none. Anything that Google is allowed to see and include in their search results should be fair game. Here's the end of LinkedIn's robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: / # Notice: If you would like to crawl LinkedIn, # please email whitelist-crawl@linkedin.com to apply # for white listing.

diamondage 5y ago
And this is what the HiQ case hinged on. LinkedIn were essentially selectively applying the computer fraud and abuse act based on their business interests - that was never going to sit well with judges.
JimBlackwood 5y ago
Btw, LinkedIn does have an API for things like Sales Navigator. It used some weird partnership program (SNAP) to get into it and it starts at (I think) 1500$/year per user. Still pretty cheap though, I think you’d get the value out of that quite quickly for a >300 people company.

car_analogy 5y ago

> Even when it's not as big as a DOS, it doesn't seem right to me that I can't tell people they're not welcome to cause this additional system load. You can tell them. You just can't prosecute them if they don't obey.

voxic11 5y ago

The court just ruled that scraping on its own isn't a violation of the CFAA. Meaning it doesn't count as the crime of "accessing a protected computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access and obtaining information". However presumably all the other provisions of the CFAA still apply, so if your scraping damages the functioning of a internet service then you still would have committed the crime of "Damaging a protected computer by intentional access". Negligently damaging a protected computer is punishable by 1 year in prison on the first offence. Recklessly damaging a protected computer is punishable by 1-5 years on the first offense. And intentionally damaging a protected computer is punishable by 1-10 years for the first offense. These penalties can go up to 20 years for repeated offenses.

davidhyde 5y ago

I don't know what kind of data you serve up but perhaps you could serve low quality or inaccurate content from addresses that are guessed from your api. I.e. endpoints not normally reachable in the normal functioning of your web app should return reasonable junk. A mixture of accurate and inaccurate data becomes worthless for bots and worthless data is not worth scraping. Just an idea!

bastardoperator 5y ago

Have you considered using a cache service like cloudflare?

KennyBlanken 5y ago

> While I have sympathy for what the scrapers are trying to do in many cases, it bothers me that this doesn't seem to address what happens when badly-behaved scrapers cause, in effect, a DOS on the site. Like when Aaron Swartz spent months hammering JSTOR causing it to become so slow it was almost unusuable, and despite knowing that he was causing widespread problems (including the eventual banning of MIT's entire IP range) actually worked to add additional laptops and improve his scraping speed...all the while going out of his way to subvert MIT's netops group trying to figure out where he was on the network. JSTOR, by the way, is a non-profit that provides aggregate access to their cataloged archive of journals, for schools and libraries to access journals they would otherwise never be able to afford. In many cases, free access.

uncletammy 5y ago
The effect on Jstore's revenue would have been negligible. I'm surprised to see someone so cold and unfeeling about Aaron Swartz. Especially considering the massive injustice with regards to application of the law and sentencing. > Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.

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asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

Seems like you could sue the scraper for that, then? If they cause you damages by their unapproved actions, you have a tort claim.

FrenchDevRemote 5y ago

What have you done to protect the site? Most automation libraries are detectable(puppeteer, even with extra-stealth, selenium, playwright...) The only library that I know that is more or less undetectable is used by a just a few hundred people...

JimBlackwood 5y ago
Colour me interested in this library! :)
collegeburner 5y ago
Curious, what library is that?