Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked

newaccountman2

odd name; shouldn't it be named after something that stealthily infiltrates fortresses?

TrevorFSmith

Is 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.

xena

Things like this make me wish that we have to pass ethics courses to work in tech.

csnover

Man, 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

> 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.

dclaw

This 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.

CivBase

Unconscionable.

BLKNSLVR

Does Anubis still work? (against this?)