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Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
- newaccountman2 3mo agoodd name; shouldn't it be named after something that stealthily infiltrates fortresses?
- LoganDark 3mo agoTrojan Horse probably wouldn't make a very good name for a browser.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoSince my grade-school mascot/team was "The Trojans" and my adopted hometown is firmly rooted in pre-Christian Greek culture and mythology, I am currently studying the Trojan War, and I may observe that "Trojan" is an extremely perspicacious brand-name for condoms, more than the average guy would expect.
- abtonmoy 3mo agowhich is exactly the problem, a condom is famous for stopping things getting through and we do the literal opposite.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoActually condoms are famous for being quite unreliable and failing. People using them are often uninformed and inept, using them incorrectly and hastily. This is exactly why they are distributed with gusto by certain services that profit from “surprise pregnancy”.
- newaccountman2 3mo agololwtf, not expected a conspiracy I expected to see someone touting Doesn't even make sense; clearly they have a non-zero preventative effect, so there would be no benefit from such a service[0] handing out condoms. It would be worse for them than doing nothing. [0] I doubt a for-profit company just raking in dough from abortions exists, sounds like some dumbass Fox News bullshit, but admittedly, it is luckily not a space with which I am familiar lol
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- kfhfardin 3mo ago[dead]
- ArmanLuthra 3mo agofellow contributor on this. we thought of it the other way round: your automation is the fortress, and every bot-detector trying to fingerprint it is the siege. also most good burglar names were taken on PyPI
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- arhamshahrier 3mo agoin my defence, i did lobby hard for "GuyWhoWavesYouThroughTheGate"
- BLKNSLVR 3mo agoAlgae
- TrevorFSmith 3mo agoIs it ethical to scrape when a site has explicitly blocked bots? I know a fair number of people who run small sites who are already considering closing them down because the bots are relentlessly hammering their sites and driving up hosting costs.
- maxglute 3mo agoI suppose it's like trying to enforce no picture rule in public.
- LoganDark 3mo agoIt's most definitely unethical.
- cr125rider 3mo agoI think it really depends on how the bot is run. If the bot is replacing me navigating there manually, absolutely. If it’s sucking up content to rip off and make someone else billions of dollars, no.
- fooqux 3mo agoWhy do you feel entitled to navigate to a website you neither own nor pay for via a method the owner expressly forbids?
- theptip 3mo agoWhy do you feel entitled to dictate what user agent I use, if it’s well-behaved?
- getnormality 3mo agoWhy do your opinions about what a "well-behaved" agent is override the wishes of a site's owner?
- 3mo ago
- xena 3mo agoThings like this make me wish that we have to pass ethics courses to work in tech.
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- m12k 3mo agoReminds me of this old joke: No ethically trained software engineer would ever write a destroyBaghdad function - they’d write a destroyCity function to which you could pass Baghdad as a parameter.
- csnover 3mo agoMan, this sucks. I doubt there’s anything that I can say to get people to stop doing things like this, but the eventual outcome here isn’t going to be freedom for you to scrape sites that are trying to avoid being DDoSed by bots, but instead that we all end up in a world where device attestation is required to do practically anything online. And for what?
- xnx 3mo ago> Bot detectors flag automation by reading the browser fingerprint; Fortress corrects that fingerprint inside Chromium's C++, so the browser presents as an ordinary Chrome install. This does not seem like it would work against anything but the most basic bot protection.
- arhamshahrier 3mo ago[dead]
- ArmanLuthra 3mo ago[dead]
- dclaw 3mo agoThis is really unacceptable folks. There are those of us that have to keep these sites up, and it's seriously been a few years of nightmare scrapers and botnets, and stupid things like this that you are trying to legitimize that will make this worse. If a site doesn't want you, you should go away. There's a reason for it. Not every website is backed by a billion/trillion dollar company with the resources to absorb things.
- deckar01 3mo agoMaking a network request from a script is not abuse, consuming excess bandwidth is. Scrapers already spoof browser reputation and cycle IPs while abusing bandwidth. Recently I wanted to convert the results of an Autotrader filter into a table so I could supplement it with data they don’t track (towing capacity). It was two pages of results, but requesting it from a script was aggressively blocked by browser fingerprinting. I had to port it to JS and run it in my browser console manually to get the data out, wasting my time.
- transcriptase 3mo agoThat’s the point. For every legitimate though ultimately unimportant use case like yours there are a thousand others who would scrape the results 86,400 times a day to either try to sell or mirror and plaster with their own ads.
- dclaw 3mo agoIt's not just excess bandwidth. It's cpu cycles, poor site coding, database issues. Like I said, not everything is backed by a huge company that has the money/hardware/engineering resources to absorb the load.
- kfhfardin 3mo ago[dead]
- coldbrewed 3mo agoMaking people actually read content doesn't strike me as cruel. Tedious, sure, but not cruel. What is cruel is seeing all of our collective individuality and artistic expression jammed into an LLM, sold back to us by the token, and forced into our lives by an economy increasingly skewed towards holders of capital.
- CivBase 3mo agoUnconscionable.
- tomsop 3mo ago[flagged]
- BLKNSLVR 3mo agoDoes Anubis still work? (against this?)
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- grvtygi 3mo ago[flagged]
- RandomGerm4n 3mo agoI think that instead of trying to prevent web scraping, websites should try to make it easier so that it generates less traffic. As long as any user is allowed to view the website, there will always be a way to scrape it anyway. If there were simply a monthly updated torrent available on a standardized subpage, such as example.com/scrape, scraping would be much less harmful.
- Avery29 3mo agoFor agent/browser automation, getting blocked is only one part of the problem. The other hard part is knowing whether the page you got back is the real page, a degraded version, or some silent challenge page.
- il-b 3mo agoThe authors are proud of facilitating the theft of intellectual property. Disgusting.
- phoghed 3mo agoDid you rage equally against the machine when wget --mirror came out?
- zombot 3mo agoIs it possible to give negative stars to a GitHub repo? This one would be a prime candidate for that feature.
- tomsop 3mo ago[flagged]