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.
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?
> 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.
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.
I 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.
For 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.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 29.7 ms ] threadThis does not seem like it would work against anything but the most basic bot protection.