Category: Development

Node.js & Privacy Pass application for Cloudflare scrape solution

Over 7.59 million of websites use Cloudflare protection, 26% of
them are among the top 100K website worldwide. As Cloudflare
establishes itself as the norm regarding service protection, chances are, the site you want to scrape is more likely to use it than not.

When it comes to scrapping websites, captchas and other type of
protections were always the main obstacle in providing reliable data collection solutions. And most often this would lead to consider bypass services which aren’t always free.

Post author By Igor Savinkin
Post date May 2, 2023

Development

MobaXterm, better Putty alternative

No Comments on MobaXterm, better Putty alternative

MobaXterm is a server connectivity software (Windows) and it’s much better than Putty. It’s branded as “Enhanced terminal for Windows with X11 server, tabbed SSH client, network tools and much more”.

Post author By Igor Savinkin
Post date April 21, 2023

Challenge Development

Undetected ChromeDriver in Python Selenium

Selenium comes with a default WebDriver that often fails to bypass scraping anti-bots. Yet you can complement it with Undetected ChromeDriver, a third-party WebDriver tool that will do a better job.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Undetected ChromeDriver with Selenium in Python and solve the most common errors.

Post author By Igor Savinkin
Post date April 11, 2023

Challenge Development

How to bypass PerimeterX

You’ve found the website you need to scrape, set up your scraper and fired it, just to sadly realize PerimeterX has blocked you.

PerimeterX’s dynamically complex bot detection system relies on server-side and client-side checks to distinguish humans from bots. It deploys several layers of protection and, for the most part, manages to do its job without interrupting the user experience.

But don’t fall into despair! There are a couple of things you can try to bypass PerimeterX (called HUMAN now) before giving up on your goal of scraping that delicious data.

Post author By Igor Savinkin
Post date April 11, 2023

Challenge Development

Python, Selenium for custom browser automation scraper

Recently we’ve got the tricky website, its data being of dynamic nature. Yet we’ve applied the modern day scraping tools to fetch data. We’ve develop an effective Python scraper using Selenium library for browser automation.

About the project

We were asked to have a look at a retailer website.

And our task was to gather data on 210 products’ availability in 945 shops. The scrape resulted in about 200K data entries in a CSV format. Moreover, every line contained information about name, link, brand, store and the availability of a product. Below you can familiarise yourself with a small data sample we were able to gather.

Post author By Denis Soloviev
Post date April 10, 2023

Challenge Development

Discord Bot to detect on-site anti-scrape & scrape-proof tools

Today, I’ll share of a Dicord server that accomodates a bot able to detect multiple modern scrape-protection and scrape-detection means. The server name is Scraping Enthusiasts, channel with the bot being #antibot-test

Post author By Igor Savinkin
Post date March 22, 2023

Challenge Development

TLS (SSL) Fingerprinting

In the post we share about web fingerprinting and particularly TLS fingerprinting. First let’s categorize the fingerprinting.

Post author By Igor Savinkin
Post date March 15, 2023

Challenge Development

Node.js, Python & Ruby Bots Zoo repo

Today, I got in touch with the Node.js [and Python] bots garden/zoo providing modern bots with different kinds of browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Headless/not headless) using different automation frameworks (Puppeteer, Selenium, Playwright) in several programming languages.

Post author By Igor Savinkin
Post date March 8, 2023

Development

Service for getting real SMS on virtual online numbers + API

With 365SMS service you can receive SMS to a virtual number and verify your accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, Airbnb, etc.

Buying virtual numbers and receiving SMS in automatic mode.
A virtual phone number is issued for 20 minutes. During this time, you can receive an unlimited number of SMS absolutely free.
You pay only for the received SMS, prices are as low as 0.3 EUR per number. If the number did not accept SMS, the money will be returned to the balance.
Large selection of services (incl. Linkedin) and countries for SMS activation.
Convenient API for comfortable work with external software.
User-friendly interface. Search by country and service makes it easy to buy a virtual phone number.
Dicounts for numbers in bulk.

Note

Since the virtual number is not in the country it represents, so a created 3d party account might be blocked. Therefore it’s better to:

1. Use mobile proxies that match the geolocation of the region of the purchased virtual number;
2. Use a mobile user agent.

Often the problem is not in the number, but in the wrong registration method.

Free numbers

Another vistual number SMS service, incl. free numbers.

Post author By Igor Savinkin
Post date March 8, 2023

Data Mining Development

AI code-writing assistant that understands data content and generates code

Recently I’ve encountred a client that predicts “in 6 month AI will be able to do much coding instead of man”.

…in years you’ll be able to on the fly, ask the AI to purchase a server, or create a website with X website builder… and basically, I bet it will write code on the fly on your demand where it connects to these tool’s APIs to really make things happen. It could do this now for some easy stuff but it’s unreliable and will mess up.

Now we’ve ancountered a interesing public repo, called Sketch. It’s AI code-writing assistant for Pandas (Python) users.

Post author By Igor Savinkin
Post date March 6, 2023