Top all-time · #6485
Antoine Vastel
Personal blog · antoinevastel.comsecuritywebprogramming
Antoine Vastel's personal blog at antoinevastel.com covers security, web and programming. Since 2018, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “Demonstration of Picasso canvas fingerprinting”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts on bot detection, browser fingerprinting, headless Chrome detection and JavaScript obfuscation, often as background reading for scraping and automation topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Demonstration of Picasso canvas fingerprinting2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-03-21
- How to detect web bots?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-09
- A Simple Homemade JavaScript Obfuscator2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-04
- The Intriguing Sneaker Bot Industry2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-08-30
What Hacker News says?
Agreed. We didn't open source this functionality on purpose, and are very very specific about what use-cases we onboard that require it. That being said, we've gotten to learn a lot more about browser fingerprinting and captcha solving and it's a really interesting space. If you're curious about it, check out this blog post: https://antoinevastel.com/bot detection/2018/01/17/detect-chrome-headless-v2.html
Comment linking /bot
on “Show HN: Skyvern – Browser automation using LLMs and computer vision”Submitted Detecting Chrome headless, the game goes on as a story · 222 points
HN discussionProbably navigator.webdriver, but there are multiple properties. https://antoinevastel.com/bot%20detection/2017/08/05/detect-... https://antoinevastel.com/bot%20detection/2018/01/17/detect-...
Comment linking /bot%20detection/2018/01/17/detect-chrome-headless-v2.html
on “Bypassing website anti-scraping protections”Submitted How to detect web bots? as a story · 115 points
HN discussionI worked on browser fingerprinting and countermeasures during my PhD. In one paper, we showed that in the case of an anti canvas fingerprinting extension (canvas defender I think) we were able to extract the seed used to randomise the canvas on each. Since by default the seed was constant, you could use it for tracking: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01820197 (the paper also talks about other anti fingerprinting technique…
Comment linking /tracking/2018/07/01/eval-canvasdef.html
on “Anti-fingerprinting extensions tend to make fingerprinting easier”Submitted Canvas fingerprinting on the web as a story · 102 points
HN discussionThese two websites used to be useful for testing bots. They may be several years old at this point. https://bot.sannysoft.com/ https://antoinevastel.com/bots/datadome The first link shows the tests and is the most educational. Does anyone know of more recent tools that show why bot detection was triggered? Versus just testing against Cloudflare bot detection and getting pass/fail.
Comment linking /bots/datadome
on “The /unblock API from Browserless: dodging bot detection as a service”Submitted Improving our homemade JavaScript obfuscator as a story · 58 points
HN discussionhttps://antoinevastel.com
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations”Submitted New headless Chrome has been released and has a near-perfect browser fingerprint as a story · 50 points
HN discussionI would guess he was or is looking to defeat obfuscation of some bots (see his previous post https://antoinevastel.com/javascript/2019/08/31/sneakers-sup... ) and then got distracted/fascinated by the techniques the obfuscators used. I'd be generous and read the post in the satirical style of "10 ways you can screw up the web". BTW I totally agree with the sentiment that obfuscation is bad - and I would include ship…
Comment linking /javascript/2019/08/31/sneakers-supreme-bots.html
on “Improving our homemade JavaScript obfuscator”Submitted Evaluating the privacy implications of a canvas fingerprinting countermeasure as a story · 36 points
HN discussion> However, with recent progress in automatic and audio recognition, [detecting bots with captchas] has evolved ...and that's from 3 years ago https://antoinevastel.com/javascript/2020/02/09/detecting-we...
Comment linking /javascript/2020/02/09/detecting-web-bots.html
on “New headless Chrome has been released and has a near-perfect browser fingerprint”Submitted Demonstration of Picasso canvas fingerprinting as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI did a demo a few years ago based on their paper: https://antoinevastel.com/browser%20fingerprinting/2019/03/2... This is used by companies like Cloudflare, Discord. Facebook also has their own picasso like canvas fingerprinting (at least the last time I checked)
Comment linking /browser%20fingerprinting/2019/03/21/picasso-canvas-fingerprinting.html
on “Picasso: Lightweight Device Class Fingerprinting Web Clients – Google Research”Submitted Creating a simple ExpressJS middleware to detect bots as a story · 4 points
HN discussion(Author here) TBH I don't think the main goal of Google was to make bots undetectable. It was more a side effect of preventing side effects while reviewing errors in the devtools: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/_/chromium/v8/v8/+/e08e... It was the same when Google released the new headless Chrome a few years ago: https://antoinevastel.com/bot%20detection/2023/02/19/new-hea... It made vanilla/naive bots more r…
Comment linking /bot%20detection/2023/02/19/new-headless-chrome.html
on “Why a classic CDP bot detection signal suddenly stopped working”Submitted The Intriguing Sneaker Bot Industry as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://antoinevastel.com/ Mostly about bot detection and browser fingerprinting.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Tuto, a Simple JavaScript Obfuscator as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Simple Homemade JavaScript Obfuscator as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Analyzing Recent's Magento 1 Credit Card Skimmer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Picasso inspired canvas fingerprinting for fraud detection as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The new headless Chrome makes fingerprint-based bot detection harder as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Node.js/JavaScript: execute at most N tasks at the same time without external as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Monitor the Execution of JavaScript Code with Puppeteer and Chrome Headless as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How a browser fingerprinting countermeasure may make you more easily trackable as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
