Comment by xp84

Comment by xp84 10 months ago

Just because something can be used for sketchy purposes doesn't mean that's the only purpose of it. there are thousands of situations where people are forced to interact with a shitty website 100x per day and the site won't provide an api. Imagine if your job was booking plane tickets all day. United could provide you an API key to do so via an API, but in practice they won't, only some enterprisey travel software company can get that kind of access, for a steep fee. You could build a tool which automatically puts together an itinerary based on rules and books it, through a tool like this. Perhaps a slightly contrived example but I believe things like this definitely happen.

dontlikeyoueith 10 months ago

> United could provide you an API key to do so via an API, but in practice they won't, only some enterprisey travel software company can get that kind of access, for a steep fee. You could build a tool which automatically puts together an itinerary based on rules and books it, through a tool like this. Perhaps a slightly contrived example but I believe things like this definitely happen.

And you think that's NOT sketchy?

I'm almost afraid to ask where you think the bar is...

Reply View 3 replies

stickfigure 10 months ago

It's exactly as sketchy as having a hypothetical robot sit down at a console and type it out. Which, IMO, is not very sketchy at all.

Reply View | 0 replies
wruza 10 months ago

And why is it? A company provides you an API for a "fee" and a free web-based interface, as long as you are agile enough to use it, with some limitations per ip/cookie. You choose the second path and automate it. What's wrong with that? Limits of the free access are the public contract. You're not obliged to play along with someone's "monetary spirit".
And in practice, APIs are often much more PITA than the actual interface, but you can't buy unlimited web automation. Few years ago one of my projects literally OCRed data from an android phone screen because receiving it via API took a couple minutes longer and involved email-like back and forth with polling and id matching after a convoluted authentication that fails every few requests.

Reply View | 1 reply
- xp84 10 months ago
  
  I really wish I was a better programmer with more time, I would install the accursed "MyQ" garage door app on a dedicated Android, and bridge it into Home Assistant using an OCR type of strategy. (they are notorious for flipping the bird to the whole open home automation community by not integrating with anything)
  
  Reply View | 0 replies

miki123211 10 months ago

A very common and pro-consumer use for residential proxies is price scraping and price comparisons.

Most businesses don't want to compete on price and are extremely unhappy if you tell people that their competition sells the same stuff but for less, that their "best deal of the month" is actually a price raise, or that they significantly raise toilet paper prices every time there's a natural disaster.

Reply View 0 replies

suchintan 10 months ago

Agreed. Just for reference, one of our most popular use-cases is automating data entry into CRMs without APIs... No one wants to be doing this stuff manually, and automating it has some serious positive QoL impact

We get a lot of requests for bad usage (ie spinning up upvote rings on Reddit) but we don't want to support things like that

Reply View 4 replies

lmm 10 months ago

> one of our most popular use-cases is automating data entry into CRMs without APIs... No one wants to be doing this stuff manually, and automating it has some serious positive QoL impact
No-one would need captcha automation or residential proxies for a use case like that that's all on the level.

Reply View | 0 replies
Suppafly 10 months ago

>one of our most popular use-cases is automating data entry into CRMs without APIs... No one wants to be doing this stuff manually, and automating it has some serious positive QoL impact
How does a residential proxy help with that?

Reply View | 1 reply
- suchintan 10 months ago
  
  Good question! A lot of CRMs have CloudFlare enabled with location based blocking by default, so we needed a way to spoof a local location to be able to interact with the website
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
fijiaarone 10 months ago

But no one can or needs to use a residential proxy for automating CRM data entry.

Reply View | 0 replies

Suppafly 10 months ago

> Imagine if your job was booking plane tickets all day. United could provide you an API key to do so via an API, but in practice they won't, only some enterprisey travel software company can get that kind of access, for a steep fee.

Even your example sounds sketchy though. If you're not legitimate enough to use the enterprise software, why are purchasing tickets all day? And why do you need to proxy your bandwidth instead of just accessing the site directly. And why aren't you concerned about the fact that it's a crime to bypass the approved channels by hiding behind the proxy to do this?

Reply View 0 replies

rty32 10 months ago

Imagine a legitimate travel agency cannot book 100 United tickets a day via methods outlined in business contracts and need to resort to shady practice.

Dude, please provide some real solid evidence to back this up, and perhaps come up with another realistic scenario where bypassing captcha is justified.

Reply View 3 replies

xp84 10 months ago

> Imagine a legitimate travel agency cannot book 100 United tickets a day
That's the whole point, I never said travel agency, I was thinking a company with travelling consultants.
How TF is it "shady" to purchase and use airfare?
And again, bypassing captcha, say, to purchase tickets isn't evil either, if you are purchasing them for use and not for resale. It would just allow a person to book tickets for 50 people without wasting 6 hours to complete 25 CAPTCHAS and type in my information 25 times.
CAPTCHA is a blunt instrument deployed in an attempt to mitigate abuse, but it has a massive bad side effect that for every heavy user (not just evil users), it requires a human butt to be in a seat somewhere to do mindless busywork that could otherwise be automated. Working around that (sounds like OP agrees to do so on a case by case basis) is not inherently evil. It's as evil (or benign) as whatever you're using it for.

Reply View | 2 replies
- flextheruler 10 months ago
  
  You ever see that video of the women paying a thousand dollars to skip to the front of the release day line to buy one of the first generation iPhones?
  Then when she did and the employees told her they limited customers to buying one or two iPhones per person she becomes incredibly flustered. The guy who sold his spot in the line celebrates with a free phone.
  What you’re describing is analogous and there’s a reason that went viral on the internet and was reported on in the mainstream, but I won’t spell it out for you.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
- rty32 10 months ago
  
  Are you just "thinking" or do you have real life stories to back this up?
  
  Reply View | 0 replies