Yet another Hacker News

Meta's Muse is fantastic for web scraping

33 points STRiDEX 1 hour ago 29 comments

dvt 43 minutes ago | parent

I built an AI "web harness" running on a sandboxed Chromium (using a custom side-loaded plugin that talks over websockets to a "driver") to basically do anything a normal user could do in a browser. It totally bypasses any and all bot measures and only gets the ones you yourself would get as well (and passes those successfully, e.g. Cloudflare checkbox or those annoying OCR puzzles).

Not sure if I should release it, but I'm sure more people are catching onto the power of agentic browsing.

ares623 38 minutes ago | parent

By describing it here you've already released it no?

d0vs 35 minutes ago | parent

FYI Muse smashes through those captchas natively without prompting.

frabcus 33 minutes ago | parent

Right, but what happens when everyone uses that at scale? Without agreements and standards it isn't pretty.

dvt 22 minutes ago | parent

It's sad, but this train has left the station a quarter of a century ago imo. Many people have since become billionaires scraping the web without anyone agreeing (Google, Yahoo, and now possibly Anthropic and OpenAI).

bayindirh 33 minutes ago | parent

Thanks for letting us know that we need a new layer of detection systems.

Also it’s great(!) to see that we’re going from “but ethics” to “I got mine, who cares”.

Humans are interesting creatures.

pcthrowaway 17 minutes ago | parent

There is no detection method that will prevent AI from accessing systems without also blocking humans. The only thing we can do at this point is throttling.

afro88 9 minutes ago | parent

I'm becoming more and more convinced that a big source of outrage on the internet is caused by people assuming that all other people are a homogenous blob.

It's not that "we" are going from one thing to another. It's that these are two different people, with different ethical boundaries.

bel8 27 minutes ago | parent

Interesting, how is the chromium sandboxed? profile dir cli param? or deeper like chromium engine framework embeded in the application?

dvt 25 minutes ago | parent

Just simply a separate Chromium binary (not your usual browser).

rjtc 19 minutes ago | parent

anyone can spin these kind of side projects and do easy talk, but the moment you actually try to use this on signed-in Linkedin or Amazon its going to fail

the only solution is to drive your regular browser with all your sessions/cookies via an extension

dvt 16 minutes ago | parent

> the only solution is to drive your regular browser with all your sessions/cookies via an extension

This is exactly what I'm doing, but mocking/randomizing all the sessions/cookies/params (like resolution, OS, WebGL , etc.) in a separate Chromium binary. It's popular these days, but imo using your normal browser for agenting stuff is a very bad idea. These models do dumb stuff all the time.

carsoon 13 minutes ago | parent

no it doesn't fail. Agents are very good at comparing traffic characteristics from a real browser and a headless/automation browser and getting it to behave in the same manner. It's a cat and mouse game for sites stopping unauthorized access but right now llm agents are ahead.

For testing proxies should be used to avoid IP ban issues but given enough time modern agents can figure out how to bypass most of the modern scraping/automation prevention mechanisms.

I have built and used a lot of different automations and web scraping implementations for my business and it's never got permanently stuck yet, some take a bit longer, some shorter, but all within a reasonable time with little external help they have succeeded in their tasks.

kurisufag 15 minutes ago | parent

the 4get dev did the same thing a little while ago for his metasearch engine: https://git.lolcat.ca/lolcat/4play

dvt 7 minutes ago | parent

Yep, it's super similar to this! I think his is a bit overengineered, but tbh I haven't built Firefox plugins in forever so that might be the way you have to do stuff on FF. All you need is the websocket to have "full access" to all visited webpages, and then your driver just hooks into the DOM like normal (with the extra ws layer—and even the websocket layer can be simplified away I think).

pprotas 13 minutes ago | parent

Camoufox bypasses most blocks with no problems https://camoufox.com/

onion2k 12 minutes ago | parent

(using a custom side-loaded plugin that talks over websockets to a "driver")

Is that necessary? You could start Chromium with an open debug port and use Chrome Devtools Protocol to send commands.

dvt 4 minutes ago | parent

It is, because `--remote-debugging-port` is detected via the root DOM object (and that can't be changed unless you want to recompile Chromium), so for example, if you try doing a Google search with debugging enabled, you'll get blocked (usually just by being served a blank page).

arjunchint 38 minutes ago | parent

their static ip's were initially good and didn't get flagged, but now most sites are recognizing their ip ranges and blocking.

Muse's utility has significantly dropped with the blockages.

To become truly useful again they will need to use residential proxies, but I can't see them use those due to the risks and reputational damage.

sejje 14 minutes ago | parent

they can just use the user ip. i think grok already does this.

Gareth321 10 minutes ago | parent

Most residential proxies are already far more blocked and rate limited than any Meta IP. The internet is becoming a very weird place, where individual and "trusted" personal IPs are becoming a kind of commodity. Some sites are already scoring IPs based on usage activity - like a credit score. It's only a matter of time until this data is collated and commoditised. AI analysis is turning this up to 11.

kevmo314 12 minutes ago | parent

Muse ran into a captcha and asked me if I wanted it to solve it.

So of course I clicked yes and it dutifully convinced the site that it was not a bot.

xnickb 9 minutes ago | parent

For 2(3?) decades we've been training the robots to tell traffic lights from fire hydrants. It's finally paying off.

Gareth321 7 minutes ago | parent

I think this is the end of sites where it is expected that only humans may interact with them. It's been cat and mouse for a while, and some places like Reddit sell API access, but these agents are for all intents and purposes, humans interacting with the site. They're going to need to figure out new business models.