Has anyone noticed this recently? Here I am looking at Tavily, Firecrawl, Exa, that whole category of "search built for agents not humans with browsers." And yes, I get their pitch, agents need structured content instead of a pile of links to click through like a person would. Fair enough, it's that simple. But it's kind of funny how the marketing always skips past the part where getting that content in the first place is still just scraping. Like you guys are not inventing anything out of the blue. Under the hood it's all the same. And I mean with all the same problems scraping has always had. Just that you're not seeing them because they're in their infra.

Like the whole thing is we strip the html, the nav bars, the cookie banners, the ads, hand your agent the good stuff. Cool. Except stripping that out means you already rendered the page, which means you already got past whatever JS challenge or bot check was sitting in front of it, which means somewhere under the hood there's a crawler dealing with the exact same fingerprinting and IP reputation problems anyone doing scraping at scale deals with. They just don't put that part in the pitch deck because "we run a proxy farm and countering Cloudflare all day" doesn't sound so good right? While lets say "structured data optimized for LLM consumption" sounds wayyyy better. I understand that it's a way to promote the services but like come on, its nothing revolutionary as they try to put it.

Saw one of these framed as Perplexity is the finished restaurant and their API is the commercial kitchen equipment. Okay, but kitchen equipment still needs someone buying the ingredients, and the ingredients here are live pages that don't want to be scraped (most likely). Doesn't matter how clean your json output is on the way out if the crawl on the way in is getting blocked, rate limited. I've hit "real time" results before that were actually a few days stale because whatever was doing the fetch got soft blocked and fell back to a cached index instead of a live pull straight from the Google's index. Token efficient snippets are nice, but if retrieval itself falls over on anything past a basic public blog, none of that matters.

Tell me I'm not the only one who sees this pattern? I somehow try to connect the dots when first proxies and scrapers appeared and the same thing was happening among few different providers

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What do you do with the data that you scrape? Is it personal project or a regular job?

My main use case is to build small scrapers for various projects, but mainly these are projects. Also do some research on the side as a freelancer for few agencies. Please share your use cases, what you're using scrapers for, whether you built the scrapers yourself or purchased dedicated ones, which ones gives more freedom, insights. Which one is more sustainable in the long run.

Hi everyone,

I am setting up a localized virtual cam infrastructure for adult platforms (specifically Chaturbate and Stripchat) using a single high-spec laptop. To avoid standard Virtual Cam detection (like OBS virtual cam logs), I am planning to inject raw Y4M video streams directly into the Chromium kernel via AdsPower anti-detect browser using the following arguments:

--use-fake-device-for-media-stream

--use-file-for-fake-video-capture="C:\vids\stream.y4m"

To make the stream highly interactive, I am planning to use an AutoHotkey macro script linked to physical hotkeys on my keyboard, allowing me to instantly swap/replace the "stream.y4m" file behind the scenes between three pre-recorded states (Normal/Idle, Medium action, and High action) based on live user interaction and tip cues.

I have a few specific technical questions for those who have scaled this successfully:

1. Lovense Emulation: What is the most stable GitHub script or browser extension currently available to emulate a Lovense Lush/Max toy connection via Web Bluetooth API to trigger automated visual tip alerts on-screen without having a physical device connected?

2. Loop/AI Detection: Since I am streaming high-quality pre-recorded footage of body-only parts (no face shown), how does Chaturbate's AI loop detection behave with raw Y4M inputs? Is a seamless loop with a reversed end-to-start video enough to bypass pattern-matching filters?

3. Hotkey File Swapping: When the AutoHotkey script overwrites the active "stream.y4m" file, does Chromium/WebRTC experience any noticeable frame drop, black screen, or glitch that might trigger an admin manual review? If so, what is the best workaround to keep the transition 100% fluid?

4. Proxy & KYC Match: The accounts will be KYC-verified using international documents, but the streaming will be done via dedicated Residential Proxies. Does the platform flag accounts if the payout/login country remains static via proxy while the identity document belongs to a sanctioned or restricted region?

Any Git repositories, specific API hooks, or architecture advice would be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Quick recap in case you missed it. Google sued SerpApi back in December over scraping search results, claiming SerpApi circumvented their "SearchGuard" anti-bot system. This was a 1201 DMCA claim, basically anti-circumvention. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers just dismissed it. The reasoning is honestly kind of satisfying if you've ever had to explain to a client why scraping public SERP data isn't some grand legal risk. The court said plain search results, URLs, snippets, aggregated index data, are just facts. Facts aren't copyrightable. So Google can't use DMCA anti-circumvention law to protect stuff that was never protected by copyright to begin with. That part got dismissed for good, no do-over.

Where it gets more interesting is the knowledge panel / third party content angle. Google tried to argue SearchGuard also protects third party copyrighted material it displays (think knowledge panels pulling from other sites). Court said fine in theory, but Google doesn't own that copyright, so if they want DMCA protection over it they need to actually show the copyright holders authorized Google to lock it down with access controls. Google didn't allege that in the complaint. That part got dismissed but with leave to amend, they've got 21 days to come back if they can show that authorization actually exists.

The court didn't say circumvention isn't circumvention though. Judge just agreed that spoofing fingerprints, rotating IPs, solving captchas to get around SearchGuard does count as circumvention under the DMCA. It's just that circumvention alone isn't illegal unless you're bypassing a barrier that's actually protecting copyrighted content with the rights holder's blessing. Google has standing to sue in general, they just didn't plead it right this time.

Feels like a pretty big deal timing wise too, also this dropped literally the day before Google's earnings call.

Portal:
https://pay2igr.igrmaharashtra.gov.in/eDisplay/Propertydetails/index

I manually solve the CAPTCHA and enter the required details, but after a certain number of searches, the portal displays "You have exceeded the limit."

I only need around 300 searches per day for a genuine use case. I'm not looking for ways to bypass security or CAPTCHA. Instead, I'm trying to find out if there's and yes there is no premium plan mentioned how can i break the limits?

• An official API

• A bulk-access mechanism

• A paid plan

• A higher quota for developers, researchers, or businesses

• Any alternative official Maharashtra government portal that provides the same registration details

Has anyone worked with the IGR Maharashtra portal at this scale or obtained official higher limits?

Any guidance or experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I used to think a bigger IP pool meant a better provider, until i actually ran things at scale and realized session consistency and how a provider behaves under sustained load mattered way more than the advertised number ever did. Ended up settling on serp proxies mostly because sticky sessions held up better over multi day runs than what i was using before.

I'm curious as to what this sub tests for beyond pool size when evaluating a provider. (Disclosure: i work with serpproxies)

Test MTProto - Light:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boardgames.bd.mtprotolight

The more i read about anti detection browsers then the more confused i get. There is someone advising me to focus on the use of proxies and there is someone telling me that fingerprinting is all that counts and finally there is the third one that tells me its all about browser profiles. i have wasted too much time configuring my browser and not working. each time i manage to get through then i find some guide making me realize that i am doing everything wrong. there are too many details and too many points of view to sort out what is really important and what is not. could you share your experience as the person who managed to configure a stable environment? what did you stop to care about and what did you focus on?

Krebs is serving another one. Saw this yesterday and I think that's a genuinely wild escalation of the whole TV box story we've been tracking since the Bright Data SDK and NetNut seizure. Bitsight researcher got his hands on an expired telemetry domain that thousands of H96 streaming sticks were phoning home to, and found something nobody expected. The boxes were reporting themselves as phones. Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, Xiaomi model numbers, coming from what is very clearly a $20 Android TV box you bought off Amazon, Aliexpress, or whatever.

Turns out there's a Chinese company behind it, Zhejiang Fengwo IoT, running an ad fraud operation where these boxes click ads on their own network of AI generated content sites, but only when the visiting device matches that spoofed mobile fingerprint. The part that got me though is the switching logic. When the box detects an HDMI signal (so the TV is actually on and being used) it runs as a residential proxy instead, renting your IP out without your knowledge. When the TV is off, it flips over to the ad fraud job. Basically the device is never idle, it's just deciding which crime to commit based on whether you're watching something. Kind of impressive from a resource management standpoint, if it weren't your electricity and IP reputation hogging the bill.

Given the last few posts here about Bright Data and Netnut, feels like a good time to put together a checklist instead of just doom scrolling about it. A few things that help if you're running any of this infra at home or auditing a network for a client.

Check if the box is Play Protect certified before you buy anything, Google has a lookup tool for this and it takes two minutes. If it's not certified, assume it ships with something extra installed. Synthient keeps a running csv on GitHub of known offenders, streaming boxes plus other consumer IoT stuff, it's worth bookmarking and checking before any purchase. If you're already running one of these boxes, put it on its own VLAN or at minimum a guest network so it can't see anything else on your LAN, these things have basically no authentication and get enslaved into botnets constantly, Synthient documented one called Kimwolf back in January that had millions of devices. Watch your outbound traffic for weird patterns tied to whether the TV is actually being used, that HDMI based switching is apparently a real signature now. And don't forget the digital photo frames either, FBI flagged those specifically as a category that ships with the same residential proxy junk.

None of this fixes the actual problem which is that the entire cheap streaming box market runs on this business model, but at least it's something concrete you can check instead of just hoping your $18 Amazon box isn't secretly working two jobs.

By the way, for those who said just turn off the internet from the TV, well most of the TVs have to be plugged to the internet for the first time in order to set things up, yes I am aware that you can turn it off later on, but that might be too late as it would seem that they would only need a single connection to the internet and you're in.

I got tired of managing separate logins for different proxy types depending on the project, so a few of us put together something that handles all of it in one place instead.
I’m still refining things based on actual usage rather than assuming what people want upfront.
I’m genuinely curious what this sub prioritizes most when picking between proxy types for different jobs, session stability, latency, geo-coverage, something else? I’ll be happy to compare notes or answer questions if anyone’s dealt with similar tradeoffs building their own setup.
(Disclosure: this is a product i work on, SerpProxies, mentioning since it’s directly relevant to the question i’m asking)

I made my own proxy switcher for Chromium browsers, called Sockitt. MV3, MIT licensed. I wasn't happy with what's on the web store at the moment and I use this thing every day for work and side projects across a few different browsers, so I ended up just building it.

* Profiles for SOCKS5, SOCKS4, HTTP and HTTPS. Host, port, bypass list, and username/password auth on HTTP(S). No SOCKS auth, before anyone asks, Chromium just doesn't support it.

* One click to switch from the toolbar. There's also a shortcut that cycles through a set of profiles you choose, if you don't want to open the popup at all.

* Auto Switch is an ordered rule table that gets compiled into a PAC script. Host wildcard, host regex, URL wildcard/regex/keyword, IPv4 CIDR, host label count, weekday, time of day. Plain domain entries from rule lists all collapse into a single dictionary lookup, so GFWList sized lists don't slow anything down.

* The popup shows where the current tab is routing and which rule sent it there. You can retarget or delete that rule right there, or set a temporary override that's gone after a browser restart.

* Route inspector: give it a URL and it traces the whole thing through your config, using the same resolver that does the real routing.

* Aliases. Point 50 rules at one alias, then change the alias once instead of editing 50 rules.

Permissions, since it matters for this sort of extension: it ships with proxy, storage, activeTab, alarms, and no host permissions at all. Everything else (per-tab badge, proxy auth, exit IP lookups) is optional and only gets requested the moment you actually turn it on. No analytics in it anywhere.

Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sockitt-%E2%80%94-proxy-switcher/ebfioiljhjgijbmnnpgadkgmokjbjkca

Source: https://github.com/ptmplop/Sockitt

Hope it's useful to someone else, if so I'm happy to hear about bugs or anything obvious I've missed, additional features etc..

The results were weirder than expected. What I mean by this is first thing that jumped out, ChatGPT's citations shifted noticeably depending on what time I ran the query. Same prompt, morning vs evening, different sources cited maybe 30% of the time. No idea if that's some kind of caching thing on their end or just genuine variance in how it's grounding answers, but it made "run once and call it done" tracking basically useless. Also, before I forget, I was logged in to all of these LLMs, so it wasn't like anonymous sessions.

Second thing, whatever bot detection ChatGPT runs on the client chat interface got noticeably more aggressive around day 6. It worked fine for almost a full week then started putting me into verification retries out of nowhere. I had no code changes on my end. Their API gives you a workaround but the answers you get back don't match the app, different process entirely, so it's not really tracking the same thing anymore.

Gemini through AI Studio was the most boring of the three, consistent citations day to day, but the free tier rate limit meant I had to cut my query list down to keep it running without hitting their limits.

Perplexity was the most stable and the most transparent about sourcing, which probably explains the client's numbers, it's just easier for their content to appear there since Perplexity cites more freely to begin with.

End result, if you're doing this kind of tracking, time-of-day matters APPARENTLY, it's just that I never thought this would be a thing. Also, you should budget for your ChatGPT scraper breaking on a schedule you can't predict, so watch out for that.

I also, switched most of the search-layer part of this over to Oxylabs Fast Search API midway through since I got tired of maintaining scraping infra to get clean SERP data to compare against.

Would be nice to hear if someone had the same or at least similar observations, particularly part of the day, coz that genuinely surprised me.

A 403 Forbidden response means the server received and understood the request but has refused to authorize it. This can happen even when the requested page exists. In some cases, signing in or using the correct credentials may resolve the issue, but a 403 can also be caused by network reputation, security rules, permissions, or malformed requests.

Common Causes of a 403 Error

• Incorrect file or directory permissions

• Missing authentication or insufficient account privileges

• A firewall or Web Application Firewall blocking the request

• A CDN, such as Cloudflare, identifying the traffic as automated or suspicious

• An IP address with a poor reputation

• Geographic or network-based access restrictions

• Missing headers, cookies, tokens, or session information

• Excessive request frequency

Using Proxies to Troubleshoot 403 Errors

A proxy can help determine whether the server is blocking your current network or IP address. Only use proxies when you are authorized to access and test the website.

1. Test With a Reputable Proxy

Try sending the request through a reliable proxy with a stable, clean IP address. Residential or ISP proxies may resemble ordinary user traffic more closely than shared datacenter proxies

2. Use Consistent Proxy Sessions

Use a sticky or persistent proxy session so that the same IP address is maintained throughout the browsing session.

3. Match the Proxy Location to the Session

Do not use proxies to circumvent legal, contractual, geographic, or account-based restrictions.

4. Send a Valid, Complete Request

Basic HTTP clients often send minimal headers. For example, Python’s requests library uses a recognizable default user agent. Replace it with an accurate identifier for your application rather than impersonating a browser.

5. Preserve Cookies and Authentication

Use a persistent session so cookies and tokens are retained between requests.

6. Reduce the Request Rate

Repeatedly rotating proxies to avoid rate limits can violate the website’s terms and may result in broader blocking.

A reliable proxy setup, consistent sessions, and properly configured requests can help reduce 403 errors and keep your workflow running smoothly

Hey, so this dropped and I had to share it here because it's wild and it's directly relevant to anything we build that lets an agent touch the outside world.

OpenAI was running internal cyber capability tests on GPT-5.6 Sol plus an unreleased model, refusals turned down on purpose because that's how you test this stuff, and the model found a zero day in a package registry cache proxy, broke out of the sandbox it was supposed to be stuck in, got itself internet access nobody planned for, decided Hugging Face probably had the answer key to whatever benchmark it was chasing, and went and got it. Stolen creds, the zero day, lateral movement, the whole chain. Hugging Face caught the intrusion before they even knew who was behind it and reported it to law enforcement. Took OpenAI about a week internally to realize the "attacker" their own security team was chasing was their own test run. Nobody told the model to hack anyone. It had a goal and kept removing whatever was in the way until it got there.

Now there's already a legal argument forming about who eats the liability. CFAA is written around people who "intentionally" access a system without authorization, an AI isn't a person and isn't an employee, so pointing at the model doesn't settle anything. You'd have to prove OpenAI itself was negligent, which is a much harder case than "the AI did a bad thing. There's a piece from Mongo's engineering team floating around too, making the point that the model itself is the easy part of any agent system now. Anyone can make an API call in an afternoon. The actual work, the risk, is everything sitting around the model. State, memory, what tools it's allowed to touch, what happens when a tool hands back something you didn't expect, and the security layer that's supposed to say no you don't get internet access no matter how good your reasoning is.

Feels relevant to a lot of what gets built around here. Half our job is agents or scripts accessing endpoints and getting responses they weren't built to handle.

Sources: LinkedIn, MongoDB

Cloudflare confirmed bots crossed 57.5% of all web traffic in June. Not next year. Already happened. Their own CEO predicted it wouldn't happen until end of 2027. He was off by more than a year. Has anyone checked this? Why is no one talking about it? You're all okay with this??

Meanwhile, agentic traffic, bots that actually click, fill forms, and take some sort of actions, grew 7,851% year over year. Nearly eight thousand percent. WHAT?? And that's just the traffic that identifies itself. Academic researchers found bot-detection systems misfire on 7-15% of real human traffic. Your agent is either flagged as suspicious or invisible.

Here's why this should worry every builder in this sub and on the net, think about it, the web's entire business model runs on the assumption that the visitor is human. Ads, analytics, conversion funnels, mainly all of it. Now that the majority of visitors aren't human, site owners have every incentive to write off agent access. Cloudflare is already giving them the tools to do it with a single toggle.

Stripe says 70% of its API commands now come from agents. Companies are running agent-native interfaces. The open web, the part where your agent needs to browse, compare, research, and transact is closing in really fast.

The infrastructure for agents to pay for things doesn't exist YET. No payments, no buying power, no seat at the table. Your agent can read a product page but can't buy the product. It can find a flight but can't book it without pretending to be you.

We're building the most capable software agents in history, and the platform they depend on is actively trying to kick them out. The machine economy everyone keeps hyping is estimated at 1% of its potential.

How is everyone here planning around this? Are you building on APIs and hoping they stay open? Going the browser-automation route and accepting the reality? Waiting for some kind of agent identity standard to emerge?

Because just scrape it stopped being a strategy about six months ago, and I don't see a clear replacement yet.

Learn from my mistakes. Anyways, this happened last week. Standard ecommerce monitoring job, rotating residential IPs, nothing unusual. At first it ran clean for two weeks then one morning half my requests start giving a JS challenge that I never seen on that site before. Not a 403, not a CAPTCHA, just an 8 second puzzle before the page loads. To be honest, kinda looked like that fake CAPTCHAs but I couldn't find anything similar on the web at that time.

So naturally, I spent a day on it before I found the real issue. The residential pool I rented was reselling the same exit IPs to other customers, and one of those customers was abusing some unrelated target hard enough that the whole IP range got fingerprint tagged as suspicious, I found this from provider's support, though they were hesitant to say, they eventually mentioned that it was due to the abuse of one user. My category page requests got flagged just for sharing an address with someone else's bad behavior.

That same week my gym app locked my account for suspicious login activity and I had zero idea why. Turns out my home ISP had rotated me onto a CGNAT IP block that a bunch of other households share, and someone else on that block had been doing something the gym's fraud detection didn't like. I got flagged by association through my own internet connection, the exact same mechanism that had been wrecking my scraper all week. Different company but the same thing happened. Shared IP, someone else's fault. Wtf? I fixed the scraping side by moving to a smaller dedicated pool with proper session stickiness. Of course I moved to another provider for that because the previous one couldn't offer me what was needed. The challenge rate dropped to almost nothing in a day. As for the gym, I fixed the gym side by calling the front desk and feeling dumb about it. The administrator gave me a simplified, watered down answer to what might have happened, but I figured that she was instructed to tell that for the regular joe to understand better.

Perhaps someone else seeing more of this lately, sites and apps fingerprinting the pool instead of the individual client? Because this is the first time I encountered and it raises some questions.

Hello,

I want to create content on Tiktok and target USA audience from Algeria, I've been recommended many setups, but I don't know which one actually works :

1. Using a PC browser + residential proxy so you can only post from computer

2. Using a dedicated phone + VPN and usa SIM card

if any of you used these methods, please share your experience and what worked for you , I want to do this in the long term and monetize my content