Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage (obscrd.dev)

Same result: screen readers and assistive software is rendered useless. Basically is a sign of "I hate disabled people, and AI too"

I'm not a fan of all the documentation and marketing content for this project evidently being AI-generated because I don't know which parts of it are the things you believe and designed for, and which are just LLM verbal diarrhea. For example, your GitHub threat model says this stops "AI training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, etc.)" - is this something you've actually confirmed, or just something that AI thinks is true? I don't know how their scrapers work; I'd assume they use headless browsers.

- today you don't have to be a dedicated/motivated reverse engineer- you just need Sonnet 4.6 and let it do the work.

- you need to throw constant/new gotchas to LLMs to keep them on their tows while they try to reverse engineer your website.

It breaks copy/paste and screen readers, but so does your idea.

    function decodeObscrd(htmlOrElement) {
      let root;
      if (typeof htmlOrElement === 'string') {
        root = new DOMParser().parseFromString(htmlOrElement, 'text/html').body;
      } else {
        root = htmlOrElement || document;
      }
    
      const container = root.querySelector('[class*="obscrd-"]');
      if (!container) { return; }
    
      const words = [...container.children].filter(el => el.hasAttribute('data-o'));
      words.sort((a, b) => +a.dataset.o - +b.dataset.o);
    
      const result = words.map(word => {
        const chars = [...word.querySelectorAll('[data-o]')]
          .filter(el => el.querySelector('[data-o]') === null);
        chars.sort((a, b) => +a.dataset.o - +b.dataset.o);
        return chars.map(c => c.textContent).join('');
      }).join('');
    
      console.log(result);
      return result;
    }

Is that supposed to be a good thing?

It is better for a million AI crawlers to get through than for even one search index crawler, that might expose the knowledge on your site to someone who needs it, to be denied.

it's white text and the shader background is also mostly white

At this point, bots are better at getting data out of web pages than people are. (And have been so for at least a few years: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentat...)

All we're doing now is making it easier to get data from a web scraper than to browse to the web page ourselves.

Do you have a source for this claim?

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