Learn how to protect privacy and enhance automation by spoofing browser fingerprints. Discover tools, code snippets, & ethical considerations.
  • Hirom@beehaw.org
    10·
    2 days ago

    By spoofing the fingerprint, developers can make their automated tools impersonate real users more convincingly, thereby bypassing bot detections.

    Many OSS projects and personal web servers have bot detection because they would otherwise drown under (AI) scrappers and other bots traffic. Hosting or bandwidth cost is often unsustainable without bot protection.

    If you don’t want to kill these projects, honor robots.txt by default, use throttling, don’t try to circumvent bot blocks. Look if there’s a purpose built API available to bots. If they don’t want to offert such API, go find something else to do.

    • ghodawalaaman@programming.devOP
      41·
      2 days ago

      well if a person decide to use this attack small OSS projects server then we are failed as humanity. I shared this article to fight against big tech surveillance if people use it to damage FOSS project I highly discourage that behavior.

      • Hirom@beehaw.org
        9·
        2 days ago

        The article focuses on techniques that help bots spoof browsers, to make them impersonate a typical human visitor.

        It’s not obvious how this helps people protect themselves against surveillance while being online. Using python scripting is not a practical way to browse. But it’s handy to write scrappers.

        It’s certainly useful to misbehaving bots that try to evade anti-bots protection.

    • Lytia @lemmy.today
      31·
      2 days ago

      Most open source projects just hit everything with a PoW captcha instead of trying to guess if a user is real or not, so trying to spoof enough to look like a real user won’t change all that much anymore.

      • Hirom@beehaw.org
        6·
        2 days ago

        That’s true. The reason is there’s lots of bot traffic spoofing real users, sometimes even going through residential proxies.

        When bots spoof users well, the last option for projects is use these PoW captcha that annoy everyone. Enshitification continues.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
    4·
    1 day ago

    I removed the Firefox’ version number and half the internet broke. I replaced the whole string with Dillo 3/2.0 and this fixed most sites that “don’t work” without JS.

    Well, this was before the anti-scraping all-captcha now.